Blackfish City

Blackfish City is a book of two halves that don’t merge very well: it wants to discuss the problems of an ultraliberal society and the rise of a rebellion in a cruel city, all within a story where a family finally reunites after many years of being kept apart. That sounds great, but the novel fails to merge these two themes into a cohesive story, basically abandoning one theme to focus on the other.

The setting is the floating city of Qaanaaq, built north of Iceland in the shape of an asterisk. Early on, the city is painted with oppressive colors: one character refers to it as a “tangled labyrinth,” and it is said to have “camps, factions, and subcults.” Like most real places, the city is haunted by the past:  “Qaanaaq was not a blank slate. People brought their ghosts with them. Soil and stories and stones from homelands swallowed up by the sea.”  Immigration, as it happens, is a big issue in Qaanaaq, which receives people fleeing from the United States and other countries in the American continents that were destroyed by climate change and war.

Qaanaaq is ruled by invisible shareholders, being a place where landlords, big merchants, and corporations have free rein. In other words, the city functions just like ours, being just a bit more honest about it. But when the story starts, Qaanaaq is already at a tipping point when a bizarre rumor starts to spread: a woman who travels with a polar bear and a killer whale has just arrived in the city, and what she intends to do is anyone’s guess.

The woman appears to be rage incarnate: when journalists try to talk to her, they answer with a “single inarticulate roar.” Not nice, but why is she angry? Well, just because she’s an outsider, people think that she must be “demonic, Antichrist-derived, the work of evil foreigners bent on undermining Caucasian hegemony.” So, we can have a safe guess. The killer whale probably didn’t help, though.

The narrative is structured around chapters that follow a single point of view. The first character to be presented is Fill, a young man on the brink of despair. When we first meet him, he has just given up on committing suicide after having discovered that he has contracted an STD called “the Breaks” from his ex-boyfriend: a disease that makes the person start being haunted by the memories of the one that passed it to them, and the person that passed it to that one, and so forth until their mind can’t take it anymore and break. He’s dying, but the city’s “relentless, dependable cold” makes him a bit calmer: pain soothes Fill (We’ve all been there, don’t judge). And although rich, Fill feels lost: he must hide his sexual habits from his own family, having to carry the burden of his newfound disease alone.

We then move to a woman named Ankit, who goes to pay a visit to an immigrant family that filed a complaint against their landlord. But Ankit is not there to help; she’s there just to be seen as a representative of her boss: it’s election year. And she couldn’t help anyway, as they live in a society with no regulation, where landlords can do whatever they please.

The social clash bothers her: she’s angry at the wealthy people who come to these parts of town to take pictures with the poor so they can feel good about themselves – poverty tourism in all its glory. So, her own inaction and powerlessness frustrate her. Ankit, for example, doesn’t know what to do when she discovers that a child managed to get the breaks without any sex involved: “Less than a foot between the beds. One night the woman besides my daughter started vomiting, spraying it everywhere, and…” the father explains. She’s more than glad when he drops the subject, as upsetting as it was, but she then proceeds to take pictures of them. For her boss. It’s election year, after all. In other words, deep down, Ankit may care, but she’s part of the problem nonetheless: “Still afraid. Still obeying the rules.”

The third point of view is of a man named Kaev. He’s a fighter who earns money by losing fights in rigged games. He’s fierce and, like Fill, welcomes pain, but in a more intense way: “He loved the fights, loved the way his opponents helped him step outside himself, and something about the fall into freezing water provided an almost orgasmic release.” Kaev is a bitter man who sees no pride in what he does, but also no alternative if he’s to keep putting food on the table.

What links all these points of view, then, is the element of despair: they are all characters adrift in life, being crushed by how their society operates. Kaev loses fights to make a living, but even that has a prescription date. Now, he’s told, he must become a street thug if he wants to keep on living. It’s not enough for Qaanaaq to remove Kaev’s dignity during the fights; it has to keep pushing him further down the drain.

It’s no surprise, then, when we arrive at our final main point of view and discover another character consumed by rage. Soq is a young messenger who likes to be called by the right pronouns – and is tired to request that – and dreams of revolution – and a bloody one at that: “Soq fell asleep like that, in the fetal position, knowing their knees would ache in the morning, smiling to the imaginary sound of a million people screaming for help as they drowned.” Much like Kaev, they’re pushed to a life of crime by their own city, which couldn’t care less for them. While Qaanaaq makes them feel insignificant, crime gives them purpose. Meanwhile, shareholders and landlords rule unopposed, living ostentatious lives.

Blackfish City is not a subtle book. During one scene, for example, one shareholder confesses, “We set this city up. Everything’s stacked in our favor,” and it wouldn’t be out of character if he had followed this comment with an evil laugh. Much like real-life billionaires, he’s a one-dimensional character that serves only to give a human face to the novel’s real villain: the city’s ultraliberal mentality.

However, if Blackfish City starts out strong, it doesn’t take long to lose most of its momentum. Midway through, for example, the characters are basically at the same place that they started. Fill feels lost, Ankit and Kaev are frustrated, and Soq is angry. Little has happened, and we don’t know the characters much better, since the book’s small chapters – which are usually just six pages long – refuse to leave them any room to breathe.

To make matters worse, the third act is more about family bonds than civil unrest, with the twists revealing basically the same thing about the characters’ identities. The twists quickly become repetitive, yes, but the main problem is that they don’t fit well with everything that came before: the whole story was building up to a revolution in Qaanaaq, but then it suddenly becomes about discovering who your relatives are. If the center of the narrative was the whole city at first, now it’s just one family. The Skywalkers would’ve been proud.

The animals, such as the killer whale, also help make the narrative feel even more disjointed, as the story opens by putting social problems under the spotlight, focusing on the injustices committed against immigrants and the poor, and then it suddenly has everyone bonding with animals as if they have just come from the world of His Dark Materials. One could argue that it enriches the book’s discussion on family bonds – and there are parallels in the climax between the actions of an orca and Soq’s, for example – but that is a discussion that was already born out of place in a novel that was so keen on painting a troubled city ready for civil unrest.

It’s not that family and revolution can never form a cohesive narrative together, but that Blackfish City is not a successful example of that. The city of Qaaanaq makes the characters feel like they don’t belong and don’t matter. The answer that the novel offers to this problem is not to change how society operates, but to find solace in one’s own family, where they can finally belong and matter. And what about everyone else who doesn’t have a family to rely on? Someone like Fill? Well, at least he likes pain.

Blackfish City excels when it’s dealing with how a society can alienate its people, but it gets lost while searching for a solution to the problem. It’s a book of two halves, then, that communicate with each other as gracefully as landlords communicate with their tenants.

February 03, 2026.