This year, finally, I read Moby-Dick. It’s been on my list for … well, forever. Along with Finnegan’s Wake and King Lear and all those other works you are supposed to have read, to demonstrate your English Literature chops.
It’s a big ol’ book, is Moby-Dick. For size, it’s right up there with Bleak House, Middlemarch and Ulysses. I personally don’t think it’s an absolute requirement for a classic to double as a door stop but I suppose it lends gravitas to a book if you have to be able to bench press 20kg just to pick it up.
But its very size is off-putting if, like me, you have reached that time of life where your daily dose of fiction is now 15 minutes before lights out. In bed, it’s easy to drop a weighty tome on your nose. And such large books are often hardbacks, which doesn’t help. Mine was last year’s Christmas gift from someone whose primary requirement from a book is that it looks lovely. As indeed it does. But a well-worn paperback would have been easier to read.
I thought I knew what to expect from the story. Its themes of monomania and revenge, of a fight-to-the-death between two unstoppable forces, are hardly a secret.
But it is far more than that. For a start, the book is 135 chapters long (like I said a big ol’ book) and Ahab doesn’t even appear until chapter 28. Almost unbelievably, our first physical sighting of Moby Dick himself does not come until chapter 133.
That’s right. 133 chapters before the title character shows up. No author today could get away with it.
Sparkle like diamonds
Despite my grumbling, it’s an easy book to read. The chapters are short (perfect for bedtime consumption), the language is old-fashioned but not impenetrable. But the pictures … oh, the pictures that Melville weaves with his words. They sparkle and shift like diamonds in candlelight. Queequeg in his fateful coffin, Ishmael sleepily balanced at the top of his mast, hypnotised by the blue shimmer of the Pacific, the little Pequod herself, bristling with whale teeth and perfectly adapted to suit her limping captain.
I learnt more than I expected about both whales and whaling. Not just the killing – although there is a goodly amount of that – but the disposal. How a small ship, at sea for three years, manages and stores the enormous creatures that it kills.
Ahab is, of course, monstrous – secretive, violent and manipulative – while the deeply-religious Starbuck provides the ethical counterpoint to his pagan captain. It is intriguing that nearly two centuries after the book was written, our moral compass has swung round to favour Ahab’s point of view, if not his methods. Today, as we learn more and more about animal sentience, we might align more closely with his conviction that Moby Dick is an autonomous – if malignant – creature and less with Starbuck’s pious belief that dumb animals are made by God and it is a sin to project on to them human emotions and motives.
I will undoubtedly have to read it again. But not just yet.
