CLASSIC READ
FERDINAND MOUNT wrestles with Moby-dick. Who will win?
Moby-dick Herman Melville — Ferdinand Mount
The Great White Whale had been dodging me for years, decades even. Many a time had I launched an expedition against the heaving monster only to see my puny harpoon ping off its rugged flanks. The pages of my Folio Society edition, forty years old now, have gone yellow with neglect.
Time for one last voyage. I would equal Captain Ahab in my determination not to be bested by the denizen of the pitiless deeps. And I did it gritting my teeth, keeping my head to the wind and lashing myself to the creaking mast. I got to the end and staggered back on to dry land, resolved never to take ship again.
What an awful book it is, and I don’t mean awe-inspiring. To start with, nothing prepares you for the huge amount of unwanted information about the whaling industry it contains. It’s like an Economist supplement folded in with the Book of Jonah. Some readers love being drenched by the spray of Herman Melville’s Biblical-shake speareanHomeric prose. But to me it all smells of cod: cod Bible, cod Shakespeare, cod Homer. There is more cod in the book than there ever was in the North Sea. As for the characters: all those one-legged pirates and Red Indians speaking in stilted pidgin are about as believable as the supporting cast in Tin-tin’s adventures, Captain Ahab’s quest rather less plausible than Captain Haddock’s.
Most off-putting of all is the arch, high-flown tone of the would-be epic. It is this, I fear, which has secured Moby-dick squatting rights on the title of the Great American Novel, and it accounts, in large measure, for the hollow-bombastic sound of so much male American fiction that aspires to the same eminence: Steinbeck, Bellow, Mailer, Hemingway — oh almost any of them preoccupied with masculinity, their chest hair blowing in the breeze and their style done up to the nines.
There may be women who are bowled over by Moby-dick, but I haven’t met any. Which may be why all my favourite North American writers happen to be women. All in all, I want to echo Starbuck’s lament: ‘Oh God! To sail with such a heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them!’