A Whale of a Venture

Title: Moby Dick
Author: Herman Melville
Year of Publication: 1851
Genre: Classic Adventure
Rating: 3.5/5
Available at the IBA Library? Yes
Available Online? Yes

Summer still had a few weeks to go and internship was going to be over in a week. To kill the many days I had ahead of me, I couldn’t have done better than pick up Moby Dick to read. Little did I know that this book about a whale would turn out to be a whale of a book, gargantuan – both in size and scope. It took me a month to read this 500 odd page novel, and the task was surely momentous. I challenge anybody brave enough to try finishing this book in less than 30 days. The winner gets a special mention on our blog, and a salute from me every time s/he passes by!

The reason reading this book seems such an uphill task is not just its length (which isn’t something out-of-this-world, especially compared to Tolstoy’s and other such classics), it is the tone and the descriptions that leave you with little motivation to continue with your perusal. However, you still cannot let go of the whale for very long, and the book you had put down swearing never to lift again would once more be in your hands, providing more joy and annoyance.

Moby Dick covers a wide range of themes, the principal theme being obsession. The narrator of the story is Ishmael, a merchant sailor out on his first whaling cruise on the ship the Pequod, the captain of which is on a cruise of retribution. Having had his leg eaten away by a ferocious white sperm whale on an earlier cruise, Captain Ahab is now hell-bent to chasing the whale, dubbed Moby Dick, all around the world to have his ultimate vendetta by killing it.

His obsession is not only unhealthy (keeping him up at nights) but also dangerous. He puts his entire crew and ship in peril and despite realizes the futility of his mania, he does not have the will power to forget. The solitary musings of the captain make for interesting reading and so do his dialogues with his chief mate, Starbuck. These show the inner conflict within the captain.

The human parts in the book are, however, sandwiched between lengthy descriptions of whales and the profession of whale-hunting. These dominate the story in dimension, and however much were necessary to familiarize the nineteenth century audience to the then only heard-of phenomena, they only end up making the book a drag for modern readers. The one good thing about these descriptive passages is the humour and ‘epic’ nature of Melville’s prose. Indeed, his philosophical musings are what will have the most impact with the readers.

"There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar."

- Moby Dick, Herman Melville

Melville can render even the most boring of descriptions amusing, for example, while noting that the whale does not have a nose, he writes:

“Sure it is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper olfactories. But what does he want of them? No roses, no violets, no Cologne-water in the sea.”

- Moby Dick, Herman Melville

The story is deep, the characters involving, the descriptions tedious (Ishmael spends countless chapters lamenting the lack of good whale depictions in art), and the prose melodic and heavy. However much you may hate the book, you cannot dare to hate the author. People just cannot write like that anymore.

Word of Caution – To be read only if you have lots of spare time and nothing else to do, otherwise you would never get to the end.

Azma Humayun

Source of Image:http://www.penguinclassics.co.uk/