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Moby Dick: In Half the Time (Compact Editions)

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Herman Melville's 1851 novel defies pat description. As myth, it explores the human condition through odd, larger-than-life characters and a consistent, rip-roaring sense of parody. As poetry, Melville ties disparate objects --rigging, an ivory leg, whale blubber, a diverse representation of humanity--into a unified whole, then smashes it to pieces through the great leviathan, Moby Dick, a parable of a complex, wonderful and infinitely dangerous God.

In a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville called his book wicked, and I think Melville carried a genuine sense of guilt and reserve about his book through the remainder of his life. The book was provocative in its day, and the fun he pokes at Christendom bewildered his contemporaries. But this novel is Christian to the core, preaching the Golden Rule, lambasting hypocritical barbarism, and valuing of all God's creation. This includes the whale, whom as a man sensitive to animal suffering, Melville defends with great pathos and sympathy without succumbing to an unchristian-like condemnation of the whaler who is, after all, behaving as the Almighty made him, if not as intended. Melville leaves final judgment to God alone.

The novel is dark comedy, and it's often ferociously funny. A memorable set piece is the early and sensational encounter between white Christian Ishmael, the omniscient narrator, and Queequeg, a heathen from the remote island of Kokovoko who, paradoxically to the American, "seemed taken of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils." Ishmael sees the humanity in the stranger, "Savage though he was"--and despite the tattoos--for as Ishmael the Christian can't help observing, "You cannot hide the soul." After fending off an axe attack, this white, 19th century whaler settles down for a night in bed with a brown islander, concluding its better to "sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." This is said with a great deal of affection and tolerance. "I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but a hollow courtesy," notes the protagonist. The following morning, Ishmael finds the island native's "arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife," then proceeds to describe a tomahawk "sleeping by the savage's side, as if it were a hatchet-faced baby." They are a "cosy, living pair" now. After paying tribute to Queequeg's wooden idol with a Presbyterian's respect for a Christian God's will that is, after all, "to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do me," the unlikely newlyweds trot into society "with heart's honeymoon," as "bosom friends," attracting stares and tisks galore. It's very funny stuff, especially coming from a Victorian writer, who clearly is telling his fellow citizens just where to go--and where they're likely going.

Later Melville dives into deeper satire, painting a gorgeous and tragic portrait of the whale and its pathetic plight: one not unlike our own, as Melville reminds us. As mankind butchered these majestic beasts, "thousands of sharks, swarming round the dear Leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness ... scooping out huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human head." The crew can't resist feasting on these "fritters" themselves, although this "great prize ox of the sea" is "too fat to be deliciously good." The enterprise of extracting oil for lamplights, Melville says, is often unprofitable for its investors - a loose coalition of managers, widows and orphans - but the slaughter goes on nonetheless.

At the end of the novel, Melville launches his greatest ridicule, where white Christendom is exposed as its own worst enemy, and where the practice of Christianity, per se, stands in the way of Judeo-Christian benefits. "Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and civilized; what while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing, generally speaking, a sick savage is almost half-well within a day." Christians, when visiting Pacific islands, will drink from a ceremonial bowl as an uncouth guest drinks from a finger bowl, while pagans earn great value as harpooners and saviors in the West, and when the proverbial ship goes down, swirling into the infinite blackness of sea and death, Westerners cry out for their terminal lives, not believing, while pagans honorably accept their lot with a sense of fate, wisdom and courage.

This is because we Western folk don't practice our own beliefs, Melville is saying. This was blistering commentary then, as it is now, and because of the ironic and sarcastic packaging of his message, Melville can be easily misunderstood today. He is both politically incorrect and politically correct at the same time, and this books remains misunderstood and underappreciated to this day: as Jesus flipped over tables in the temple, Melville sets out to please no master except God, truth and justice. This book is a masterpiece, ending with passages of stunning and poetic complexity.

A few words on this abridged edition. Great Britain's Orion Books Ltd. has done a superb job of boiling the novel down to this page-turning, witty and lively narrative. I flew through the book for my third time in record time, a validation of the publisher's "In Half the Time" pitch. Important elements are missing, however, including the famous "whiteness of the whale" chapter. And some of the most beautiful passages in the novel, where Melville unleashes glorious defenses of the stricken whale, are given short shrift, leaving this edition a tad cold and ruthless--not Melville's intention. But the story shines through on the strength of Melville's prose, nonetheless, and Orion does a good job of preserving the novel's Shakespearean elements.

I would say this edition is ideal for the layman, harried reader or repeat reader--anyone who doesn't have the time or patience to plod through the unabridged version--but for the serious reader, I recommend the complete novel. One complete edition that I highly recommend is Bantam's Moby-Dick (Bantam Classics), which includes hilariously clueless reviews from Melville's contemporaries. These texts add an important and relevant context for the story. Would critics receive the novel with comparable naivety today, and would Moby-Dick even find a publisher in today's world of corporation-dominated publishing? Bantam includes D. H. Lawrence's breakout review, as well, wherein the English writer opines that Moby-Dick "commands a stillness in the soul, as awe.... [It is] one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world." And it is.

Although Moby-Dick may be the scourge of school age reading lists, it's great fun, and this edition is eminently readable. I recommend it.

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