Book info

• Title Moby Dick
• Author Herman Melville
• Year 1851
• Genre Classic

In part, Moby-Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopaedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its author's lifelong meditation on America. Written with wonderfully redemptive humour, Moby-Dick is also a profound inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.

Thoughts

This was a bit of a weird one. It’s clearly got a great underlying story, the Jaws-style drama of man versus beast versus the sea. A Captain with a personal vendetta against a huge and unassailable whale gives our narrator a journey and adventure to go on, and that side of things is good.

This will sound odd but I wasn’t expecting the book to be quite so much about whales. Of course that is the whole point of the story, but there are so many additional bits and pieces that I didn’t find very interesting - the classification of whales, what their skeletons are like, and the recent research findings into why they spout water from their blowholes. I imagine this was groundbreaking stuff at the time it was published, but I felt it detracted a lot from the story.

Was this an encyclopaedia hanging on an adventure, or a story of the sea with bonus encyclopaedia sections written in?

Rating: 3 / 5