"Moby Dick" by Herman Melville

Review by Madeline Salmon

Be honest: If you’ve ever read this book, it was for a 19^th century literature course in college and you actually read chapters one and 135, skimming everything in between. Moby Dick had been on a list somewhere in the back of my head of books I should read but probably never will. That was until my criminally attractive environmental studies professor recommended it to me my junior year of college. I had such a crush on him he probably could have told me to eat birch bark and cricket legs and I would have listened. So at his recommendation I hastily added Moby Dick to my list of books I actually intend to read, and a few years later I finally got to it.
 

Eating birch bark might have been more pleasant. At least it would have been over faster. In defense of Herman Melville, the narrative parts of the book are quite riveting, and I love his characters—narrating Ishmael, kind islander Queequeg, pious Starbuck, and, of course, Captain Ahab, the stormy soul with the peg leg. If only Melville spent more time developing these characters and letting his readers watch them in action.

What we are instead subjected to is chapter after chapter describing, for example, the harpoon used to kill the whales, the various parts of the ship, the different kinds of oil that are harvested from the whales, not to mention painfully bad marine science. It is within the realm of possibility that 19^th century audiences, not having ready access to information regarding the exciting and prosperous whaling industry, found all this fascinating. I did not.

I may not have the world’s longest attention span, but I regularly read Victorian literature for pleasure, so I like to think I have the patience to read dense and dated material and find the value in it. And there is value in Moby Dick. I have always thought abridged novels were for lazy people, but an abridged version of Moby Dick that takes out the dated science and longwinded descriptive passages might not be a bad idea. The chases are exciting, one can certainly gain some historical knowledge, and Captain Ahab is one of the most famous characters in all of literature with good reason. But I could not get over the distraction and boredom of slogging through two chapters of unnecessary material for every one chapter of narrative.

If you have the patience of a saint or an inordinate fascination with the 19^th century whaling industry, read Moby Dick. If not, look for a well-reviewed abridged version and read that instead.