The Swarm!

Our book today is Frank Schatzing’s 2004 doorstop eco-thriller Der Schwarm, which was translated into English (by Sally-Ann Spencer) in 2006 as The Swarm, and it just naturally calls up a line from Cooper’s Creek by that literary household name, Alan Moorehead: “Nothing in this strange country seemed to bear the slightest resemblance to the outside world: It was so primitive, so lacking in greenness, so silent, so old.”

Only imagine, instead of the vast expanses of the Australian interior, the incalculably vaster expanses of the Earth’s oceans – the ultimate alien world, despite the fact that some amiable scientists early on in Schatzing’s immense novel are thinking more about the other kind of aliens:

“ … Plenty of folk would rather we didn’t draw attention to ourselves. If other civilzations knew we were here, they might rob us of our planet. God help us, they might even eat us for breakfast.”

“But that’s ridiculous.”

“Is it? If they’re clever enough to manage interstellar travel, they’re probably not interested in fisticuffs. On the other hand, it’s not something we can rule out. In my view, we’d be better off thinking about how we could be drawing attention to ourselves unintentionally, otherwise we could make the wrong impression.”

It turns out the wrong impressions have been made alright, but not upon space aliens – rather, it’s the disastrous damage humanity has done to Earth itself that has long since acted as a calling card to the yrr, an ancient ocean-dwelling species that has up till now been content to ignore the surface world. When that happy equilibrium begins to fritter away, opportunistic Vancouver whale-watch guide Leon Anawak is among the first to notice the outlying initial signs – and among the many, many characters in Schatzing’s book who think in blocks of exposition:

Although Anawak had turned his back on his homeland for the bets part of two decades, he was well aware that industrial chemicals, like DDT and highly toxic PCBs, were transported by the wind and the currents from Asia, North America and Europe to the Arctic Ocean. They accumulated in the fatty tissue of whales, seals, and walruses, which were eaten by polar bears and humans, who fell ill. Breast milk from Inuit women contained high levels of PCBs that were twenty times higher than the amount listed as harmful by the World Health Organisation. Inuit children suffered from neurological impairments, and IQ levels were falling. The wilderness was being poisoned because the qallunaat still couldn’t, or wouldn’t, grasp the way in which the world worked: sooner or later, everything was distributed everywhere, through the winds and the water.

Was it any surprise that something at the bottom of the ocean had decided to put a stop to it?

Not surprising at all when you put it like that, and sure enough, mysterious attacks start happening to ocean-going humans all over the planet, from marauding fungi to ship-battering whales:

The Lady Wexham was seventy-two metres long, far longer than any humpback whale. She had a permit from the Ministry of Transport and conformed to the Canadian Coast Guard’s safety standards, which required passenger vessels to be able to withstand rough seas, metre-high breakers and the occasional collision with a lethargic whale. The Lady Wexham had been designed to cope with all such misfortunes. But she hadn’t been designed to contend with an attack.

In fact, very little of what Schatzing’s large cast of characters have handy is much use in contending against a coordinated attack by a species capable of militarizing the denizens of the deep. Schatzing uses his book’s great heft like a Sumo wrestler, spreading his pivotal scenes all around the planet in order to provide his standard-issue humans-versus-Bug-Eyed (or Tentacled)-Monsters plot with some real feelings of breadth. As with most 800-page novels, it’s really a 300-page novel on black-market Tour de France steroids: the result is gaudy and impressive but essentially fraudulent. An entire sizeable novel could have been excised from these pages and still left this novel completely intact, mainly because every single character just talks and talks:

I don’t know about noble. It’s pretty reprehensible to go around polluting the atmosphere with exhaust fumes, like we do – but what about breeding and manipulating other life-forms to suit your own needs? Is that any better? Anyway, what interests me is how they might perceive our threat to their habitat. We’re always talking about the destruction of the rainforests, Some people militate against it, others keep chopping. What if metaphorically speaking, the yrr are the rainforests? I’d say there’s evidence for that in the way they deal with biology, which brings me to my second point. With the exception of the whales, the organisms they’re using are almost exclusively creatures that live in shoals or swarms. Millions of creatures are being sacrificed for the yrr to achieve their goals. The individual doesn’t matter to them. Would humans think like that? Sure, we breed viruses and bacteria, but for the most part we use man-made armaments in manageable quantities. Mass biological weaponry isn’t really our thing. But the yrr seem fairly expert at it. Why? Well, maybe shoals and swarms are what they know best.”

“Do you mean …?”

(Oh yes, that’s just what we want – more elaboration)

Still, Schatzing’s done quite a bit of research into the state of environmental affairs from a decade ago, and even in purely historical terms, that ends up being interesting more often than it’s not (although sometimes from a bittersweet nostalgic perspective, since things are so very much worse environmentally in 2013 than they were in 2004; I think I remember that the yrr were recently found dead and shriveled at the bottom of an illegal Japanese line-net). And even in a somewhat tone-deaf translation, he’s got a very good sense of dialogue and pacing. Just as you might experience with other such quasi-nature thrillers (Michael Crichton’s Timeline and Steve Alten’s The Loch both come to mind), you’ll deplore the pedantic excesses of The Swarm – but the smart money is that you’ll keep reading anyway.