You think you know the story – Captain Ahab
and the great white whale – but unless you have completed the full 650 page
voyage you probably don’t.
While the hunt for Moby Dick drives the story,
on its harpoon spike is hung a treatise on all things to do with whales and
whaling: history, mythology and literature; boats, tools and techniques for
chasing, catching and killing; the anatomy and economics of dismemberment; and
the make-up of the men who do it all - as individuals and as a crew.
Narrated by an old hand (the iconic “call
me” Ishmael) the level of detail is obsessive and fascinating. After 100 pages
the Pequod hasn’t yet left the port of Nantucket; it is 600 pages before the
eponymous fish (sorry, mammal) is sighted. In the meantime, as other whales are
chased, caught and slaughtered, we get to know the crew like old shipmates,
best summed up in Melville’s own unsurpassable words:
On Ahab – “intent on an audacious,
immitigable, and supernatural revenge” (Moby Dick of course having previously
snapped his leg off); on his officers’ qualities – “mere unaided virtue or
right-mindedness in Starbuck, invulnerable jollity of indifference and
recklessness in Stubb, and pervading mediocrity in Flask; on the crew –
“chiefly made up of mongrel renegades and castaways and cannibals.”
The above gives a flavour of the language:
almost biblical, at least Homeric, in its epic moments; Shakespearian in its
soliloquies; and always darkly compelling.
Many themes can be read into the tale, and
may theories have been expounded on it, but I just read it, and enjoyed it, at
face value - an engrossing seafaring epic, a tale of obsession and revenge, and
a manual on hunting the biggest game of all.
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