Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean. By Morten Stroksnes. Translated by Tiina Nunnally. Knopf; 320 pages; $26.95. Jonathan Cape; £12.99.

GREENLAND sharks cannot help but capture the imagination. These primeval inhabitants of the deep, icy waters of the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans can live to 400, possibly even 500 years old, are cigar shaped, and often have worm-like parasites on their luminous eyes that are said to hypnotise their prey. Their bodies are covered with razor-like “skin teeth” and their meat contains a toxin; people who eat it start to hallucinate, become incoherent and stagger around, becoming “shark drunk”.

In his book of the same name Morten Stroksnes, a Norwegian writer, recalls how he and his friend Hugo Aasjord attempted to catch one of these, the largest species of flesh-eating shark, from a small rubber dinghy in the Lofoten archipelago. The book was a huge success in his home country when it was published in 2015.

The men use the island of Skrova, one of Norway’s “small, weather-beaten communities that cling like barnacles to the rocky coast” as their base for the hunt, which takes place intermittently over four seasons. Mr Stroksnes beautifully describes the midnight sun, majestic fjords and moody stretches of sea, the changing light and the peaks that rise up out of the water, as well as the Moskstraumen, a system of whirlpools long feared by sailors. Days pass while they wait for their shark, some when the sun burns the “magnesium-white clouds”, and the world seems “cleansed and filled with mirrors”, and others when the sea is “black as ink and possessed of restless agitation”.

Following the fishing line with its bait of intestines, kidneys, fly larvae and maggots down into the deep where daylight cannot reach, Mr Stroksnes brings a little-known world to life. He notes that humans are more familiar with the surface of the Moon than with the ocean’s depths, which can be reached only with rare, specialist submersibles. The pitch-black water sparkles and glows with extraordinary creatures like the Dana octopus squid, which has lights on each arm, often flashing simultaneously when it attacks. He imagines that its prey feels as if it is being assaulted by “huge Christmas ornaments”.

The most interesting aspect of the book is Mr Stroksnes’s questioning of the whole shark-catching enterprise. He cannot tell if his increasing obsession is an “idiotic, murderous” mission intended to satisfy curiosity or confront fear. In broader terms, he wonders if men need to pit themselves against the “myth of the monster slumbering in the deep” in order to make themselves feel like predators instead of prey. Perhaps only then do they feel truly in control. He is alive to the strangeness of this urge: sharks kill just 10-20 people worldwide each year while humans kill around 73m sharks—and yet “we consider the shark to be the dangerous predator.”

Putting “shark-drunk” man into perspective as the real threat to the ocean is one of the many threads Mr Stroksnes has pulled together in a narrative that takes in history and philosophy, mythology and folklore, from Norway’s fishing past to science and the cosmos. Rather than an account of two men trying to catch a shark, it is really a homage to the sea and a call to arms to protect the ecosystem that humans treat so abysmally yet rely on so much. He wants people to understand that they did not just come from the sea. They are still part of it—just drops in the ocean.