Moby-Dick: or, The Whale

In the words of Ed Hillary, returning to base camp from summiting Everest, “We knocked the bastard off,” and fairly quickly too.

So, what is there to say about this book that has had so much already written about it?
Did I enjoy reading it? I am unsure... I enjoyed some parts a lot, and in equal measure, there were parts I detested. But I have probably jumped ahead...

I am pretty sure I made an attempt at reading this before, but that memory is so vague I have not marked it so on GR. I know I never finished it, and I can't be sure if I even read enough pages to depart from Nantucket... but that is already quite an investment.

I recently read Nathanial Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea, and Moby Dick is obviously referenced fairly heavily. That book was a five star read, cramming in so much whaling and nautical history into a comparatively short book, and it reminded me that Moby Dick was not a book I had successfully completed... so I thought I better tackle it. This book is similar, in that it includes far, far more than the narrative of the whale hunt.

Having recently injured my Achilles tendon, I have had the pleasure, without too much guilt, of lounging about on the couch reading. This allowed me to wallow in Moby Dick more than I would normally have been able to justify...

So to the parts I liked:
- This isn't ‘just' a novel. In fact large tracts if it don't fit into a fiction category at all. It is part scientific treatise, part history of whaling, part history of other random things, part choreographed stage play, part an exploration of mythology and of course part epic nautical adventure. Not only that, but it was all chopped in together.
- So I enjoyed significantly more the scientific and whaling history aspects that the others, but I found the hard transitions between various aspects were far less successful than those in Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea.
- Ishmael's narration - I have put this as a part I like, but it isn't without it's challenges. For the most part I enjoyed the narration of the story, but there were aspects told that he could not have had knowledge of. It is also ironic that Ishmael is such a minor character in the story itself, and for those who have read it the only one to survive!
- Queequeg, as a character was great, a South-Seas Polynesian, from fictional Kokovoko, via New Zealand as described by Ishmael. His bromance with Ishmael was hilarious. P45, “Better [to] sleep with sober cannibal than a drunken Christian”... ha.

And the parts I struggled with:
- Chapter 9, The Sermon. This just about curtailed my reading of this novel. If for some unknown reason, you are reading my review and considering the novel... do yourself a favour and feel free to skip over this chapter of pain.
- The regular changes in style left me, at times, baffled as to what I had just read. It was in places such dense stream-of-consciousness writing that it was practically unmanageable.
- There were whole tracks of text that I couldn't reconcile as being relevant to the narrative. Baffling and almost unintelligible pages... the denser they became the more my eyeballs turned back in their sockets...
- The convoluted repetition got to me too - describing a single event two or three times with different words - just move on already, Melville, you are using up pages!
- Bulkington - I mean, why? Near the start we are given a whole explanation of him and how he will be Ishmael's companion on the Pequod, yet other than one (very) brief mention, he doesn't feature again in the entire novel!
- Anyone who has read my reviews already knows my analysis is always pretty simple. I am not good with analogies; I despise psychological assessments; I don't identify with spiritual aspects. There was too much of this for me.

On balance I have given four stars, as the parts I enjoyed have outweighed the aspects I didn't enjoy. The encyclopedic examination of whaling and whales was fantastic and added another layer on what I learned from Philbrick.