I've been listening to Moby Dick, read by Phoebe Judge, during my long drives to the city and back. Judge also works the podcast Criminal and she's always blown me away with her quiet and polite laying out of an outlandish story. I'm not one to fall asleep to true crime podcasts and I still avoid Criminal as a go-to-sleep option - but I absolutely love her work.
Reading Moby Dick was a wade (sorry) for me. I tried it as a kid and then even as a groan up I could never get past the bit where Ahab held up St Elmo's fire and declared to all onboard that he was after the white whale and that was all there was for it. From there, on reading, the book seemed to descend into intricacies. Ishmael's voice was lost and even Queequeg's harpoon lost all its bearings.
What I discovered on listening to the reading recently was that this is one of the best books ever written on 1800s sea whaling. Melville's diversions into manila rope, the roles of seamen, of Pip offering up his very bones to Ahab, of boys black and white moved from ship to ship, of how to dismantle a whale at sea, of how to boil them down into barrels, of the cooper and carpenter, speak to a whaleman's experience in a time when they were three years at sea.
It sounds macabre and it was so. Ahab's obsession with the white whale is but a sideline hustle in this book. It's like an instruction manual, a pretty accurate oral history and a call of warning to landlubbers before the great wars.
I was thinking like you in the first paragraph, rather have it read to me than read it. I gave up as a teenager and then again in my 20s and recently picked it up again and this time I was brave enough to be ready to skip some and not feel guilty. I went to the whaling museum in the Azores and got caught up with the whalers a few years ago and that fired me up about it from the boys on the cliff tops spotting the passing whales in the Atlantic to the shouts to the men, to the boats, the spears, the factories, the British made equipment, the whole works of whaling on the island. As for the book, Melville wove a good adventure which takes some wading (sorry) through.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's a lovely book to have read to you. The language and rhythm is poetic.
DeleteI have recently listened to a Librivox recording of Moby Dick read by Stewart Mills. I knew as much of the story as most people but had never actually read the book. I really enjoyed it and found the details of whaling life quite fascinating.
ReplyDeleteSo did I! I've read a fair bit about 19th century whaling and this is one of the best.
DeleteThe film terrified me as a kid. The thought of sharing a bunk with a huge tattooed sailor was what did it.
ReplyDeleteQueequeg is actually pretty cool. Was that the movie with Mr Peck as the preacher? His rendition of Jonah and the whale is great.
DeleteYes, I ended up thinking Queequeg was the only sane one on board. And yes, I think it was Gregory Peck. He was good at super-serious parts, like Atticus.
DeleteI hated Moby Dick as a student reading it in middle school honors English class. I had to grow up and read it again to realize how good it actually is, and also how much there is to learn about whaling in it. For more interesting whaling stories, you should go to Youtube and look up "Ask a Mortician" and then look for her episode entitled "The Real Moby Dick Was So Much Worse".
ReplyDeleteThanks Jennifer for that reccie. I'll check it out.
DeleteI've neither read nor had read to me this mighty whale of a story. Did you see that, in the serendipitous way of such things, the Archibald Prize winner this year is entitled "Moby Dickens"?
ReplyDeleteOh yes, I've just read about it!
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