Surprisingly, I found myself enjoying this chunk much more than I did the previous two.  I think this can largely be attributed to the fact that stuff has finally happened!  There were whales!  They chased the whales!  They caught the whales!  They killed the whales!  They butchered the whales!  All very exciting in a book in which, up till this point, the most action packed scene has been the one in which Queequeg got into bed with an unsuspecting Ishmael.  In fact, I’m coming to accept that this book is structured in a way that (for me) sort of reflects the struture of a four year whaling voyage: there’s a long of long, tedious, monotonous crusing around waiting for something to happen, interspersed with very brief, intense, exciting bursts of action.  Then we return to the monotony.

Speaking of monotony, I’m three quarters of the way through this book and still no Moby Dick.  When is the eponymous poxy white whale actually going to show up?  I think I’m more impatient about this than Ahab is now.  He can’t hide for much longer; there’s only 125 pages left!

Bizarrely, it’s been Melville’s meticulous marine biology (which I’m finding much more interesting than his meticulous rope describing) that have given me the greatest sense of history so far.  As their first whale caracass is being butchered, Ishmael describes the body of the whale and what each part does, with a chapter devoted to the impenetrable forehead which houses the precious sperm oil.  At this point, it finally dawned on me due to the gaping omission in Melville’s unrelentingly thorough description that he (and indeed his contemporaries) had no idea what this massive forehead was for.  A quick search of Wikipedia confirms that it wasn’t until the 1950′s that scientists discovered and properly described echolocation in toothed whales, and so Melville clearly thought that the sperm whale navigated using its tiny eyes and tiny ears, not knowing that the whale’s blunt forehead and the spermaceti contained within were provided one of the most complex and effective natural sonar systems in the world.  Even the concept of sonar would have been completely alien to him.  It feels a bit odd to know something about Melville’s specialist subject that he didn’t, but this, more than anything else for me, has rooted the novel back in the 1800′s where it belongs.

Onwards to the east to find the white whale in part four!

In my post on part one of Moby Dick I commented that it didn’t seem to be particularly big on plot but that I hoped things might pick up a bit once the Pequod set sail.  All I can say is that it’s a good thing I didn’t hold my breath, as there’s still not a lot been happening.  My hopes were raised when the mysterious Ahab finally came up on deck and gave a rousing speech to the crew, promising gold and glory for the death of Moby Dick, the great white whale, but that has so far proven to be all talk and no action.  There’s been one brief, abortive whale hunt but apart from that, these chapters are what I’m coming to consider Melville’s usual mixture of reported anecdotes, digressions and essays and I’m starting to find all it a bit tedious.  Still, he says that ‘As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature.  Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life‘ and I still have faith that Melville will eventually deliver this.  He’s just going to do it in his own sweet time.

What I do like are the brief glimpses of character that Melville has provided; I find Ahab particularly fascinating. The way he keeps himself hidden below decks until the Pequod is in open waters was guaranteed to intrigue me, and he doesn’t disappoint when he finally appears.  With his peg leg made from whale ivory and his sudden temper he cuts a forbidding figure, but he is somehow also magnetic.  When he talks to the crew of Moby Dick and they respond with such fervour, they aren’t merely enthusiastic in reaction to Ahab’s promise of gold but to the charisma of the man himself.  Ahab’s character is compelling and repelling and I’m looking forward to reading more about him (particularly now that Queequeg seems to have faded into the background and Ishmael become less a character than a narrative voice).

Unfortunately, I do think that Melville has made one huge mistake with Ahab, and that was allowing him a chapter of inner monologue in ‘Sunset‘.  Apart from the fact that it really irritates me when authors decide to write a narrative in first person and then breaks out of it the first moment that it becomes inconvenient, I think it weakens the portrayal of the character to allow the reader into his head.  Part of Ahab’s mystique is that he is aloof and unknown, so to see him thinking to himself ‘I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened!’ rather spoils the effect.  That it is followed by a similar insight into Starbuck’s thoughts and Stubb’s in turn, then a bizarre playscript style interaction between various unnamed sailors of different nationalities means that it isn’t even special; the reader doesn’t see only into Ahab’s thoughts but also those of other, less important characters, and I found this very off-putting.

Another area where I disagree with what Melville does is in the presentation of his various treatises.  I understand why he has Ishmael go into such minute detail about whales and whaling – it provides a reading audience who would probably be unfamiliar with the practice with the information needed to fully immerse themselves in the setting (although whether anyone needs to know exactly how thick the rope attached to a harpoon is in order to truly appreciate the novel is debatable).  The problem that I have with this approach is that, by providing the reader with such a level of knowledge, Melville ends up distancing the reader from the story as it happens.  The minutiae of whaling is provided by an older and wiser Ishmael, speaking with the benefit of hindsight and experience.  However, this happens at the expense of the Ishmael in the present tense of the narrative who is on his first whaling voyage, completely inexperienced and almost as ignorant as the reader was before they had reams of information thrust at them.  He is discovering all this for the first time too, presumably, but instead of allowing the reader to discover this information along with Ishmael, Melville has future Ishmael deliver it in dry lectures which are often devoid of any immediate connection to the plot.  I appreciate the need for a certain level of background information, but I’m not convinced about his method of conveying it.

Although I’m not a fan of Melville’s essay chapters on the whole, I was amused at times by his chapter entitled ‘Cetology’, where the tedium (he actually feels the need to define what a whale is; surely in the 19th century people would have known this?) was lightened by the occasional touch of humour.  I like his division of whales into ‘folio’, ‘octavo’ and ‘duodecimo’ as though they were books rather than living things.  I was also tickled by his description of the ‘Huzza Porpoise’, as he terms it:

This is the common porpoise found almost all over the globe.  The name is of my own bestowal; for there are more than one sort of porpoises, and something must be done to distinguish them.  I call him thus, because he always swims in hilarious shoals, which upon the broad sea keep tossing themselves to heaven like caps in a Fourth-0f-July crowd.

This cheery image is only slightly marred by his later observation that ‘A well-fed, plump huzza porpoise will yield you one good gallon of good oil‘.  I wish there had been more humour among the otherwise ponderous observations.

On a couple of occasions, the crew sing snatches of sea shanties and whaling songs.  As I dyed in the wool folkie, I actually know a fair few of these songs which are still sung today, so I thought I’d leave you with two of my favourite whaling songs to get you in the mood for the second half of the book.  It’s all downhill from here and there’s got to be some whaling action soon!

I’m sure I’m not alone in assuming that Moby Dick was going to be some sort of Boys’ Own Adventure Story of whaling boats, deadly peril and adventure on the high seas (in much the same way that the uninitiated think that Robinson Crusoe is some sort of novelised,  jolly 18th century version of a Bear Grylls television show, in blissful ignorance of the tedious pot making, goat rearing, navel gazing and inexplicable bear hunting which actually comprise most of the novel).  However, a quarter of the way through the novel and, while the Pequod has finally put to sea, it’s only five pages ago that we’ve so much as set eyes on Captain Ahab, the central character in my imagined version of the story, and although there’s been frequent references to them, there’s been nary a whale to be seen.  I’m swiftly approaching the conclusion that Moby Dick is not a plotty book.

If it lacks some of the elements that I expected, it compensates for this by having a surprising number of things that I did not anticipate.  I had expected it to have a similar sort of style to English novels that I have read from around the same period, but in fact Robinson Crusoe seems a reasonably accurate comparison: in spite of its having been written 130 years earlier than Melville’s work, these two novels have far more in common than Moby Dick does with many other Victorian novels.  Like Crusoe, Moby Dick takes a story which you might expect to be all about plot and instead makes it discursive and rambling.  Melville doesn’t summarise something when he can explain it in full, and he doesn’t limit himself to just explaining something in full when he can also philosophise about that.  Nothing that Ishmael waxes lyrical about should be particularly relevant or important, but somehow everything is made to seem so.  I’m not saying it’s a narrative style that I’m particularly enjoying, but I can see what he’s doing and it’s interesting to watch.

Although we have yet to go to sea, whaling has been a constant presence throughout the first quarter, and, while it will (I assume) drive the action later in the book, we are first introduced to it as a theoretical, philosophical thing.  Ishmael provides a passionate defence of whaling, and Melville uses it to illustrate many of his religious points:

Yes, there is death in this business of whaling — a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of man into Eternity.  But what then?  Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death.  Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance.  Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.  Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.  In fact, take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.  And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and a stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

I found the rather long-winded sermon about Jonah interesting because it put me in mind of all the medieval associations with Jonah and the whale.  In the middle ages (I know this is broad, but it’s difficult to pin down beliefs like this) Christian scholarship liked to find foreshadowing of the coming of Christ and his death and resurrection hidden in earlier Bible stories.  The whale was a widely used representation not only of the devil but of hell, and so they saw Jonah as a type of Christ.  Both were taken from the world (either by crucifixion or being swallowed by a giant fish), both spent three days in hell and both emerged triumphant to proclaim the good news and spread God’s word.  While I think it’s going to be a bit of a stretch to see the whalers as Christ-figures, this does make me assume that the period spent whaling is going to be, effectively, time spent in hell, after which the sailors will either be saved by the grace of God or condemned to death and eternal damnation.  I think there’s an outside chance that Ishmael will be in the former category and the mysterious Ahab will be in the latter.  I may be making links which the author didn’t intend, but these associations lend a mythological and religious weight of significance to the story of which I’m sure Melville would have approved.

However, Moby Dick isn’t all gravitas and religious metaphors; for me, Melville saves himself by touches of surprising humour, many of which come from Queequeg, the tattooed heathen from distant lands whom Ishmael befriends.  He was another surprise (see how little I knew about this book?) but a welcome one.  The unlikely scenes of Queequeg and Ishmael sitting in bed together in their fur jackets and sharing puffs of his peace pipe are bizarre, but they made me warm to Ishmael in a way that none of his moralising and philosophising has done so far.  It’s good to have a more human element in among all of the lofty thinking, and Queequeg (or Quohog or Hedgehog as Captain Peleg mistakenly calls him) provides that.  I look forward to seeing what Melville does with him as the story develops.

Once I’ve started a book, I don’t abandon it, so Moby Dick would have been finished even if I hadn’t found the first quarter intriguing.   However, Moby Dick isn’t a book which has ever particularly called to me before, so even if I wouldn’t have given up on it, it would have remained unread on my shelves for much longer if it weren’t for The Blue Bookcase’s read along, so thanks very much for the encouragement!

Moby Dick by Herman Melville.  Published by The Readers’ Digest Association, 1996, pp. 495.  Originally published in 1851.