It’s a novel I’ve always strenuously avoided for personal reasons. I am ichthyophobic in general and galeophobic in particular. (I also own a good dictionary). In short I don’t like – really don’t like – anything alive bigger than my thumb moving darkly in water. I have no idea where this fear came from but it means, for example, that I couldn’t go into an aquarium or on a whale watching trip. I have to be careful about TV nature programmes too. Therefore, knowing that the titular Moby Dick is a white sperm whale has aways kept me well away from Herman Melville’s 1851 novel.
Then, earlier this month, I was invited to review a dramatisation of Moby Dick (the jury seems to be out on whether he needs a hyphen so I’m omitting it) at Tower Theatre in Stoke Newington. Surely, I reasoned, they can’t do anything to distress me in a small triangular, fairly low-tech space? So, I took courage in both hands and went. And it was a very pleasant, educative surprise. A richly imaginative piece of physical theatre, the adaptation by Paul Graves and director Angharad Ormond taught me that Moby Dick is not “about” whales. Rather it is a study of one man’s obsession and what we would now call “mental health issues”.
I enjoyed it as theatre, wasn’t remotely freaked out and, on the bus home, ordered a copy of the novel to read. Never let it be said that reading isn’t a lifelong journey or that my reading range isn’t eclectic.
Reading Moby Dick, though, is a pretty mixed experience. “Call me Ishmael” is one of those famous opening lines which everyone knows (cf Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice and Nineteen Eighty Four). I wonder why the narrator says it at all. Is it not his real name?
The opening chapters are quite promising as Ishmael meets the charismatic Queequeg who becomes his close friend and they sign up as crew on a Nantucket whaling ship. It’s owned by an entertaining pair of businessmen, captained by one Ahab and managed on a daily basis by a trio of “Mates” each of them nicely characterised. The tone is quite wittily sardonic in a Dickensian kind of way and once or twice I could feel the young Mark Twain reading this and, maybe, soaking up some of its wit.
Then, sadly, the rot sets in and it becomes ever more self-indulgently prolix. Melville finds literary name dropping irresistible and far too often wanders off into verbose backwaters. We really do not need, for example, a whole waffly chapter about the taxonomy of whales or a lengthy essay about the symbolism of whiteness in religion, culture, nature. Then there’s a digression into whales in art, a separate one on whales in literature, a whole chapter about rope making and so it goes on – and on. It runs for 684 pages. One waggish friend, a former university teacher of literature, said – when I told him what I was reading – that it’s a novel which works (a bit) only if you read alternate chapters. No wonder it achieved very little success in Melville’s lifetime.
At one third in, I was on the point of giving up but then I had a long train journey to occupy so I ploughed determinedly on because it has plugged a gap in my literary experience and, as such, is quirkily interesting.
The casually “racist” language is jarring for a 21st century reader although Melville is simply using the standard vocabulary of his day when he has Ishmael refer to the diverse crew members as, for example “negro”, “savage”, “pagan”, “cannibal” and such like. In fact Ishmael shows a lot of respect for the skills of his fellow crew members and the sentiments are pretty even handed. And that’s noteworthy considering that this book was published the year before Harriet Beech Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (a novel I’m now minded to reread) and over a decade before Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation of Emancipation.
Moby Dick is a colourful travelogue. Ishmael and the Pequod sail all over the world. Moreover, Melville had experience of whaling boats so the depiction of life aboard such a ship feels very authentic. And he’s good on what it would actually have been like to be lowered in a small rowing boat in hostile seas. Then, at about the half-way point, there’s an utterly revolting, and presumably accurate, description of the killing of a sperm whale which made me deeply thankful that we no longer rely on these noble beasts for lamp oil, corsets, animal food and all the rest of it.
I remain puzzled though about why Melville’s 19th century sailors speak to each other in Elizabethan English saying things like: “thou wilt hold thy peace” and “if thou hast none of thine own”. And why, in a novel, does he give us stage directions in some chapters as if he were writing a play? It creaks as much as the Pequod does when there’s a storm in the offing.
Moby Dick is a quest story in the time-honoured tradition. In the end, Captain Ahab does find the white sperm whale he blames for the loss of his leg and there’s a dramatic confrontation.
My conclusion is that, unusually, this made a far better stage play than it is a novel because the dramatisation I enjoyed was able to evoke atmosphere, tell a story and (almost literally) cut to the chase without all that digressive verbiage.
In short, it’s not a novel I would actually recommend, other than as a curiosity, although I’m quite glad I have read it.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Liza of Lambeth by W.Somerset Maugham
