The Whale Began It All

I picked up this book solely for its cover. It's beautifully illustrated and it said 'whale'. I don't know anything else about it- 'Not Forgetting The Whale' (2015) by John Ironmonger. Oddly there aren't any big name reviews online. (Reviews here and here.)

As it is with books, and when I borrow books from the library, I'm less discerning. I was prepared for it to be a spectacular waste of time. It wasn't too bad! Set in the fictional remote village of St Piran in Cornwall (where there's Saint Piran's Day, but not a village by this name), a naked Joe Haak washed up on the beach, bore by a fin whale. He's trained as a mathematician and worked as a quantitative analyst in a big bank in London.

There's another story about the whale, since it was the reason Joe bonded so fast with the villagers. The fin whale beached shortly after Joe Haak was rescued. Joe spotted it, and called for up. He led the entire rescue effort whereby the whole village worked to save it and push it back to the sea. The small village welcomed this stranger into their midst; Joe took up residence and leased a room from local retired village doctor Mallory Books.

It's a near post-apocalyptic world where Joe had written a computer program, CASSIE, that could tabulate, count, analyze and predict the rise and fall of the stock markets, and eventually, events that will lead to the world's demise. Almost choked on my coffee when I realized that said apocalyptic event was a flu epidemic that wiped out thousands of lives in London, and that it originated from Singapore, borne by travelers and bankers back home. And many of Joe's ex-colleagues all succumbed to it too.

'It may not seem like it here at the very tip of the country, but it's true. The lights are going on again. They've been on in London for two weeks. The crisis in the Gulf is over. They've started shipping oil again. The first shipment should be at the refineries within days.' Kaufmann leaned back in his chair and gave Joe a wide smile. 'New vaccines are going into production immediately; we're confident they'll hold back the flu epidemic.' 

'But thousands must have died?' 

'Millions, I expect. We won't know the full extent for some time. But it hasn't come anywhere near the worst of Cassie's projections. Do you remember the forecasts you showed me back in my office all those weeks ago?' 

Joe nodded. 

'According to that original projection, the collapse should have been irreversible. Those were the predictions I shared with the COBRA team. We were expecting this to be a one-way process, like the tower of wooden blocks collapsing onto the floor. We thought there was no way back.' 

'But there was?' 

'One of the clever things about Cassie, Joe, was the way you built it to allow us to test different scenarios. That was very useful. I remember the first time you showed it to me, you varied the temperature of the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran. That was clever. It meant that we could take Cassie's predictions and vary some of our assumptions. Sometimes when we did, it didn't make much difference. We could see what might happen, for instance, if we were to alter the price of oil; but it was already so hight that nothing we do could make a difference. But one day, soon after the crisis started, when Cassandra's Dream was halfway to the Azores, I took a call from Toby Matings. What would happen, he asked me, if we changed our assumptions on human nature?'