Book review: Deep, by James Nestor

by James Nestor
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
4.5 stars
Michael Young

James Nestor's journey begins in Greece, on assignment for Outside magazine to cover the 2011 Individual Depth World Championship, the largest gathering of competitive freedivers in the history of this little-known and incredibly dangerous sport.

But freediving opens the way to exploring the top layer of a different world, and Nestor begins to appreciate how life can thrive even in the deepest crevices of the sea.

In Honduras, he boards a homemade submarine for a descent that puts them 770 metres down. "The view outside is lunar," he writes in Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves. "Boulders, shallow craters and broad, open planes, all glowing as white as if the place has just been dusted with snow."

The powdery stuff is calcium and silicon from billions of microscopic skeletons, building up by about 2.5cm every 2,000 years. Life seems impossible here, but as the submarine's lights show, life is everywhere - just not in a form Nestor has ever seen before.

A reddish, eel-like fish staggers along on two stumpy legs. Another, the size of a small dog, is covered with brown blotches, like tree bark. "Failed experiments from God's test kitchen," he writes. And this is less than 10 per cent of the way down to the ocean's deepest depths.

In the waters off Sri Lanka, the author has a close encounter with a female sperm whale and her calf, which approach "hissing and blowing steam - two locomotives". They pass and seem to disappear before returning to a point about 50 metres away.