A cautionary warning, perhaps, of our inability to be at peace, or find a balance, with the world around around us: “It is about what happens between the appearance of humankind and its passing away,” he says.
Of course, a whale does not have an eyelash. It’s an old folk tale, a scientific misnomer. “It’s that idea of the jarring of the macrocosm and the microcosm, little and large,” he says. The book’s prologue features the titular eyelash, along with a skin of an onion, which needs to be peeled back, a human tongue, on which we are so reliant, an achilles heel, and an image of a Chinese theatre taken during the first opium war. It’s not difficult to read a sense of human vulnerability
With it’s inherently secular foundations, Prus has used The Whale’s Eyelash to critique the stories we tell, religious and otherwise, to bolster our sense of self. In one act, we see, in scientific terms, the telling of the Garden of Eden, the creation of temptation and the first sins of man. This might not be modern conflict, but conflict is here, on every page. In the Archive of Modern Conflict, this new creation fits perfectly; a true paean to a sense of paradise lost, and what happens after.
