And the Ocean Was Our Sky

And the Ocean Was Our Sky is Patrick Ness’s 2018 illustrated novel, a striking inversion of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick that flips the story around to follow the whales rather than the human hunters. Bathsheba is a young whale, third apprentice to the legendary captain Alexandra of her pod, hunting through the dark waters that the whales have always known. The whales have built a civilization underwater, complete with weapons, ships, and the long oral histories that shape their hunting tradition. The men they hunt are the strange creatures of the surface, monstrous beings who occasionally fall into the whales’ waters and have to be killed before they can rise back into their alien sky.

When Bathsheba’s pod captures a man who tells them the legendary monster Toby Wick is real and that he has the means to lead them to the creature, Captain Alexandra ignores all warnings and gives chase. The man’s prophecy turns out to be both true and terrible, and the slow building horror of what happens to the pod, to Bathsheba, and to the wider whale civilization plays out across the rest of the novel. Ness writes the inverted ocean and sky imagery with the kind of careful poetic precision that makes the conceit work rather than feeling gimmicky. The whales’ world is fully realized, with its own theology, its own warfare, and its own strange beauty.

The Rovina Cai illustrations throughout the book are integral to the experience. Painted in gray and gold tones with the kind of mythic visual weight that the prose calls for, the illustrations transform the novel into something closer to an illuminated manuscript than a conventional book. Reading without the illustrations would be losing half of what the book is doing.

Patrick Ness writes the kind of literary young adult fiction that takes serious risks. And the Ocean Was Our Sky is one of his most formally experimental books, and it rewards readers willing to commit to its strange premises. The themes about hunters and prey, about the stories we tell ourselves to justify violence, and about the moment when a system of justification finally fails are handled with the weight they deserve.

For longtime Patrick Ness fans, this is essential. For new readers, it is one of his most accessible books in terms of length but one of his most demanding in terms of imaginative reach.