Leviathan or The Whale

which was contained an entire nation and men who believed themselves to be dead, years after they were first engulfed. The beast that attacked Andromeda, and which was slain by Perseus, was believed to be a whale. Cetus was sent by Poseidon to consume the young of Ethiopia, only to be turned into a huge rock when it looked at the Medusa–a celestial myth re-enacted each autumn as the whale constellation rears over the southern horizon.
    Although D.H. Lawrence would declare that ‘Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes’, to the Christian era, the whale was the very shape of the Beast of Revelation. In the sixteenth century the metaphysical poet John Donne wrote of a monstrous animal,
    His ribs are pillars, and his high arch’d roofe
Of barke that blunts best steele, is thunder-proofe

    while a continent away in the New World, North-Western American Indians believed that the giant waves that carried away their villages were the backwash of battles between thunderbirds and whales. In the Hindu version of the flood, Vishnu assumes his first avatar in the shape of a great fish with a horn and tows Manu and his ark to safety, and followers of Islam contend that of the ten animals that will enter paradise, one is the whale that swallowed Jonah. Overwhelmingly, however, the modern whale exists in one great image, the looming shape of its most famous incarnation: Moby Dick.
    And the angel of the LORD said to her, ‘Behold, you are with child, and shall bear a son; you shall call his name Ishmael; because the LORD has given heed to your affliction. He shall be a wild ass of a man, his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.’
    Genesis 16:11-12

    Like many people, I found the densely written chapters of Herman Melville’s book difficult to read. I was defeated by its size and scale, by its ambition. It was as incomprehensible as the whale itself. Over the years I’d pick up the book, become engrossed, only for my attention to wander. But after my first visit to New England, I looked at it again; just as I was ready to see whales, I was ready to read
Moby-Dick
.
    Perhaps it was the solace I’d found in reading
Billy Budd, Sailor, & Other Stories
during the endless hours of a transatlantic flight when, despite the darkened cabin and everyone else around me cocooned like larvæ in thin airline blankets, my own eyes resolutely refused to remain shut. The yellowing pages of a 1970s Penguin edition–bought when I was at college in London, studying English literature–seemed somehow consoling with their tales of travel in less constrained times, especially the elegiac story of the Handsome Sailor, a boy fated to die for sins not his own. Or perhaps it was the enigma of the author himself that intrigued me, a man who lived through an American century which he foretold, yet who died forgotten at its end.
    Published in the middle of that century, in 1851–four years after
Wuthering Heights
, the only novel to rival its mysterious narrative power–
Moby-Dick
drew on Melville’s own experiences of a whaling voyage ten years before. The book begins with a startling, modern abruptness, launching itself on the reader like a rushing wave with the most evocative opening line of any work of fiction:
    Call me Ishmael
.

    From this deliberately equivocal declaration–is this our hero’s real name, or merely a convenient disguise?–and its biblical overtones, we follow the rootless young man from Manhattan, where he has become so tired of life that he feels murderous, even suicidal, to his chosen refuge, the sea. From New Bedford, Ishmael sails around the world in pursuit of whales. His intentions are both poetic and prosaic: ‘I always go to sea as a sailor,’ he says wryly, ‘because they made a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay a passenger a single penny that I ever heard of.’
    For his half-demented, peg-legged captain, Ahab, however, the voyage of the
Pequod
is an extended act of vengeance against a monstrous sperm whale: a terrifying, toothed creature of the deep ocean, rather than the placid baleen whale of coastal waters. This is the beast that dismasted Ahab, and which will in time take the rest of him, too. Even in this new industrial century, man still feared the elements of nature; and as the wild Yorkshire heath is itself a character in Emily Brontë’s book, so for Melville