Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick reviewed as if by Jules Verne.
(It's only fair to allow JV a reciprocal response to HM!)
“Mr Melville himself manned a whaler; supposedly advantageous (purporting authenticity), actually this renders him regrettably biased and preoccupied. He parrots much hoary lore regarding whales, casting his net undiscerningly wide.
His novel’s bizarrely obsessive focus obstructs methodical cataloguing and weighing of interesting observations alleged by mariners.
Consider the St Elmo’s Fire that seemingly invests Captain Ahab’s upraised harpoon with mystic power. Melville missed his opportunity to discourse educationally upon electricity’s properties; uses; hazards; and experimenters (Franklin, Volta, Ampère…) who afforded humanity its benefits.
He also devotes insufficient space to oceanography; savants whose interest in cetaceans is scientific rather than exploitative commercially; and technical details of the vessel Pequod’s construction.
Raw emotions run rife (vengefulness; authoritarianism; blasphemy) with fatalistic paganism shown practised and vindicated!
Some anatomical allusions are distasteful, even ribald. Numerous deaths occur, futilely.
Philosophical readers would shudder to encounter this feverish, unedifying volume in drawing-room or public library.”
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