Moby Dick

Moby Dick, the book by Herman Melville, occupies a hallowed place as "the great American novel", a title bestowed upon it lovingly by those, one suspects, who have never read it. Having just ploughed through it, my verdict is that the veneration accorded to a mishmash that is part novel, part treatise on whaling, part attempt to write a play, would appear to owe more to the fact that the British critics panned it when it was published there in 1851 – the year of the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, which was probably a lot more exciting.

One of them described it as:

"an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed."

a criticism that has stood the test of time better than its target.

Melville, who had worked briefly on a couple of whalers in his twenties, was emboldened to write what he intended to be his magnum opus by the success of two shorter books, Typee and Omoo, that were based on his maritime adventures in the south seas. While I haven't read these, it is instructive that Moby Dick works better in the early chapters, set in Massachusetts, in which we are introduced to the cannibalistic harpooner Queequeg and some of the other main characters, than in the bulk of the book, where author, reader and whale are frequently all in the same boat, that is, all at sea.

Other books that attempt a kaleidoscopic, digressive approach (one thinks of Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Les Misérables - with its extraordinary Parisian sewerage section – and even Montaigne's Essays) work so well because of their overarching unity of style and the broad sweep of their canvas. By contrast, Melville (a minor writer if ever there was one) is little more than a one-trick pony with a little Shakespeare and a lot of Bible thrown in.

If it strikes you as odd that a book about the merciless killing of one of the most majestic beasts on the planet, the sperm whale, should have been so romanticised during the last 150 years, this is as much a testimony to our incorrigible irrationality (recall Karl Popper's dictum that "rationality is not a property of men, nor a fact about men. It is a task for men to achieve") as it is a function of the sordid grab for Californian gold that was taking place at the time Melville was writing and served to encourage the human tendency to hark bark to a Golden Age.

Verdict: watch the film, which, for all Gregory Peck being as wooden as Ahab's peg-leg and the White Whale being even phonier than Jaws, is mercifully free of the prolixity of a tome which, to paraphrase the author, "expands to its own bulk".