002: How do you eat a whale?

I've finally finished Moby Dick.  After getting the book as a 21st birthday gift from a friend in 2013, I jumped into it as a final year undergraduate student in 2014 and spent a fair few months trying to get through it. My copy is 599 pages long and when we only saw a whale – not even THE Whale – by page 250, I gave it up as a bad job and preached to everyone who would listen (and some who wouldn’t) that Moby is the greatest waste of paper I’ve ever read.

I recently started using Audible and it’s been a game changer in getting through difficult books. I’m probably not going to be scoring stellar marks on comprehension tests for the books I’ve listened to, but it does help to get through the really slow sections of literature behemoths like Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and Middlemarch by George Eliot when someone else provides the momentum. I’ve also found a newfound joy in getting used to a writer’s character-specific cadences by listening to them rather than trying to decipher Victorian English (and other dialects) with my English Second Language background.

With this in mind, I decided to take to the seas once more with Ishmael, the intrepid young whaler who is out to pursue a life of adventure. After a mere two weeks of listening at 1.6x speed, I completed a journey that set off from Nantucket, around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean and into the vast expanse of the South Seas aboard the Pequod while being guided by the moody, broody, recently peglegged and revenge seeking Captain Ahab (If that sentence felt verbose, you’ll be amazed by some of the sentences cum paragraphs that Melville produced. The poor narrator sounded breathless after some marathon sentences).

Melville builds suspense with every time that the Pequod meets another ship on the seas and Ahab shouts to its captain: “Hast seen the White Whale?!” You hope that the time will finally come that we meet Moby and Ahab can exact his revenge on the leviathan that took his leg. However, every time you are left disappointed and led on a journey that covers all things whale and whaling related. All this occurs while Ahab is supposed to be running a professional whaling outfit, a mere trifle which seems to have fallen by the wayside.

In the whaling journey, you are treated to lush and descriptive prose of the exhilarating feeling of standing atop the masthead:

"There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at Old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls, the trade winds blow, everything resolves you into languor. For the most part in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you: you hear no news, read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions, bankrupt securities fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner - for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable."

Sign me up for the first whaling expedition, if this is what it is going to be like.

From there, the "story" turns to all things relating to whales and it all gets a bit much when Melville starts talking about whales in art and “oh, look, there’s a a whale in the stars". Peak awkwardness is reached when the whalers get a delirious high from squelching their hands in thick, fat whale blubber:

"Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze! All the morning long I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-labourers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as much to say: Oh! My dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities or know the slightest ill humour or envy! Come, let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness."

Yikes...

(*Spoiler alert*)

Ultimately, all the detours lead to an epic final showdown. Suffice it to say that Ahab’s demise will not be out of place in a modern Quentin Tarantino film. The Epilogue also ends with one of the most poignant last lines I’ve ever encountered. The book is known for its punchy opening line – “Call me Ishmael” – but I reckon the last line is even better.

I’m not going to share it here, because as Brendon Leonard writes, Moby Dick is a literary ultramarathon. As an ultramarathon veteran myself I can tell you that the weight of the medal, and the reward of the post-run beer is only truly understood if you’ve done the work, and explored the ends of your most colourful vocabulary on the way to completing the full course.

With all that said, did my opinion that "Moby Dick is a waste of paper" change? After some reflection it turns out to be a surprisingly nuanced answer. I can say a resounding YES, for the following reasons:

1. You will encounter some of the most beautiful prose to ever fall out of a pen. The aforementioned section atop the mast speaks for itself. There is also a sermon from the Book of Jonah at the start of the book that springs to mind as another beautiful example.

2. I will never write anything of this magnitude. By its sheer depth of knowledge and breadth of adventure, it is a peerless novel.

3. Ahab’s brooding demeanour and the cannibal Queequeg’s harpooning heroics make for iconic characters whose actions pop up as buoys when you find yourself floundering in the immense Pacific Ocean-like sea of words.

However, there are a few reasons why I answer NO and still only rate this as a two-star book:

1. Leaving off on the number of words, even though Moby is much shorter than a book like Anna Karenina, the verbosity of prose and density of imagery makes it feel so much longer and drawn out. Due to no fault of its own, this is not a book for a time where people have ever-decreasing attention spans – present company included.

2. The arbitrary pacing is difficult to grasp and if Audible didn’t provide the momentum, I would’ve been defeated. I have newfound respect for anyone who finds this an “easy read”.

3. I am a Generalist. I know many things about many things, but I am not an expert in any one topic. However, if an expert has a way to get people excited about a topic, I will happily follow them in pursuit of adventure (much like Ishmael was swayed by Ahab). However, this books scares me. Melville was notoriously obsessive and when he goes DEEP on some topics, you get a sense of what Forrest Gump must’ve felt like when Benjamin Buford Blue, aka Bubba, went on his “Shrimp and potatoes, shrimp and fries, boiled shrimp, fried shrimp…” monologue. How can anyone be this excited about any single topic? A snippet of this brilliant 1-star review on Goodreads probably puts it better than I can:

I write the conclusion of this blog post at a Starbucks, while sipping an iced coffee scribbled with the name “Ahab”. I do this because Starbuck is the name of Ahab’s first mate and it is to this character I turn in my final verdict about this book that has occupied my literary mind for more than a decade. Starbuck was the most vocal voice against Ahab’s obsessive whale hunt and beseeched his Captain to turn the Pequod around and sail all the way back to Nantucket and forget about the White Whale - right to the very end. And I desperately want to provide the same advice: don’t even start if you aren’t interested in a tough read/listen. It is a very, very long walk for an extremely short drink of water. Perhaps even consider an abridged version of the book if you just want to get the highlights.

However, it isn’t a recommendation I can make with a sound conscience. I do know that I am being wooed in a sirens’ song-like fashion by the satisfaction of the poignant Epilogue after more than 10 years of anticipation. And I know that it will not land in the same way if you don't (again quoting Brendan Leonard) take the "slog to the summit". Thus, despite Starbuck’s advice, I invite you take to the seas with Ahab, knowing that it will be a journey fraught with a lot of “why the heck am I doing this?!”. The only advice I can give that will help to answer the question "How do you eat a whale?" is: listen to it. Don't try and read it. You can thank me later.