Moby Dick, or, The Whale (1851/This edition 2001) by Herman Melville

Moby Dick... blasting off into space...

Moby Dick, or, The Whale (1851/This edition 2001) by Herman Melville; introduction by Nathaniel Philbrick: Moby Dick destroyed Herman Melville's ability to make a living as a writer when he was in his early 30's. Such was the power of the novel's mostly hostile literary reception. Over the decades, though, it would be rehabilitated canonically, first as a boy's adventure novel (the mind boggles!) and then as The Great American Novel.

Even without knowing which American novels were critically acclaimed in 1851, one can see why Moby Dick bombed: it's one of the two or three weirdest, most forward-thinking canonical English-language novels ever written. Calling it a workplace tragicomedy covers some of it. It's also an encyclopedia of whaling knowledge shot through with conspicuously Shakespearean stretches of dialogue. And musical stretches. And lengthy cosmic speculations. And the first novel to combine cosmic horror with detailed visceral horror.

Ah, horror. Stretches of Moby Dick anticipate H.P. Lovecraft and later horror writers in their alternating concerns with the vast and threatening cosmos and with the nuts and bolts of the rendering down of a physical body. Here, the men are the Conqueror Worms. One can see why generations of genre writers in horror have come back to Melville.

So too science-fiction writers, for Moby Dick's doomed quest narrative and for its pages upon pages of exposition on How Things Work. The whaling ship is an alien world to most people; Melville explains how everything works. There are a thousand thousand science-fiction novels that balance in some way a hurtling plot and reams of explanations of science and technology. 

Fantasy writers? Sure, in much the same way as science fiction. Moby Dick is an epic of world-building.

It's also probably the most supernatural novel in the American canon. Signs, portents, and the arcane workings of nemesis and fate. A prophecy of Captain Ahab's death that riffs on all those prophecies misinterpreted in Greek and Roman myth. Pip, the boy who haunted the house of his own mad body. The feeling that the whale may be leading the Pequod on to its fate, an echo of the Creature and Frankenstein in the North.

And generations of youngish readers have been paralyzed by all the references to 'sperm' in the novel. Moby Dick is a Sperm Whale, the wandering oil well of the 19th century. And he's got 'Dick' in his name! And there's even a section of the novel in which Ishmael rhapsodizes about being elbow-deep in sperm! OK, that is objectively hilarious.

Ah, our philosophical, ruminative narrator Ishmael, telling the story from some point decades after the main events of the story, with all his potential unreliability as to certain speeches and conversations he was not present for (and the electronic bug still a century away from invention). He seems to digress into philosophy and exposition, but he really does not. Everything feeds the main line of the plot, informs it.

There is of course Ahab, whose sin may be that he treats a brute beast as if it were a person, or may be that he takes up arms against a Sublime reality that cannot be beaten. Maybe it's hubris. He's the Shakespearean monologist, the doomed speechifier.

And Tashtego and Stubb and Flask and Starbuck, Queequeg and mad Pip. Very few female characters once we leave port. And Moby Dick doesn't leave port until about 20% of the way through its considerable length.

Melville, seemingly aware of the readerly challenge of that length, divvies things up into about 130 chapters, one ever five pages or so on average. I found the whole enterprise a lot less ponderous than reading Faulkner, Henry James, or David Foster Wallace, to name three other American literary luminaries. That may be because Melville writes in paragraphs that are generally less than several pages long. I've really grown to hate endless pages of paragraphs. That's just me.

Is it the Great American Novel? No, because there is no such beast. It's a great novel, containing multitudes, maybe weirder and more idiosyncratic now than when it first appeared nearly 170 years ago. Long may Moby Dick run. Highly recommended.

Herzog & Kinski X 2

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972): written and directed by Werner Herzog; starring Klaus Kinski (Aguirre) and Del Negro (Brother Gaspar/Narrator): As the IMDB tells us, "A few decades after the destruction of the Inca empire, a Spanish expedition leaves the mountains of Peru and goes down the Amazon river in search of gold and wealth." The time is about 1560. And the Spaniards have brought their heart of darkness with them.

Werner Herzog is in peak form here with this story of human evil and the sublime and haunting jungle which swallows anything it wants to swallow. Klaus Kinski's greedy, murderous, deluded soldier dreams of claiming all of the land around him for himself. In a way, he does. Well, him and a bunch of cheeky monkeys.

Human perversity ends up dwarfed by the jungle, never more threatening than when everything goes silent and a barrage of arrows kills off members of Aguirre's party. Again and again. 

The Catholic monk who serves as the film's narrator dreams of conquest as well -- spiritual conquest. Well, and maybe a gold cross for himself. Aguirre searches for El Dorado, the legendary Lost City of Gold of the Americas. He's going down the Amazon to find it. Silly rabbit -- as we learned from Nick Cage's National Treasure movies, El Dorado is located beneath Mt. Rushmore!

Klaus Kinski is superb -- craven and menacing and delusional. The rest of the performances are solid. Shots of the party on their makeshift raft built to hold 20 people and a horse repeatedly surprise as the raft drifts in and out of encounters with the dangers of the river and the shore. An influence on pretty much every horrifying journey in movies ever after -- most notably Apocalypse Now -- Aguirre, The Wrath of God moves towards a climax that sums itself up with its final scene. Highly recommended.

Burden of Dreams (1989): directed by Les Blank: Documentarian Les Blank managed to make a great documentary about the filming of a great movie -- Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. One can enjoy this without having watched Herzog and Klaus Kinski's second journey into the Amazon jungles, but you probably should if you haven't already. 

Herzog's often loopy monologues are the highlight of the movie, which also sometimes offers surprising moments of humour. I'm not sure there's any better example of why one should never go to the movies for history than this documentary. The 'real' story of Fitzcarraldo involved the titular character moving a 30-ton steamship in 19 pieces overland from one bend of a river to another. Herzog inflated that to 300 tons, moved the whole steamship at once, and constantly imperiled everyone on the film pretty much all the time with increasingly arcane and difficult business. 

But for all his faults,  Herzog let this documentary show him in all his Faustian strangeness. Fascinating, involving stuff. Highly recommended.

Railsea (2012) by China Mieville

Railsea (2012) by China Mieville. "On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt." So reads one of the publishers' blurbs for this Young Adult science-fantasy novel. Never let it be said that Mieville would dumb things down for a younger audience!

A 'moldywarpe' is a term for a whale-sized mole, by the way.

Set on a future Earth separated from ours by an unknown but Sublimely vast Time Abyss, Railsea follows the young Sham's voyage from doubtful surgeon's apprentice to a mostly confident explorer over the course of what seems to be about a year. 

All his adventures occur on and around the Railsea, the vast and interconnected web of rail lines upon which the engines of many countries and organizations 'sail.' Mysterious machines dubbed 'Angels' maintain the Railsea. Gigantic versions of many of our smaller land fauna -- moles, ants, carnivorous rabbits, spiders -- hunt humans and are hunted in turn.

The Railsea is a great and intricate thought-experiment that seems perfectly believable. Mieville has invested this world with his terrific imagination, making it a startling yet weirdly familiar place. There's a quest, but it's for knowledge. There is our nominal hero, but he's joined by many others, all of whom serve a purpose (and all of whom serve Mieville's socialistic bent as a collective hero when taken in total). 

It's really a marvelous book in terms of imagination, characterization, and style. One of the narrative conceits is that this tale is being told at some later date by a narrator who occasionally stops, starts again, explains some arcane bit of Railsea lore or language, or even apologizes for leaving one or another strand of the narrative for a lengthy stretch of pages until something important happens.

There's a long tradition of such novels as Railsea, set on a future Earth so distantly future that it hardly seems like Earth, from William Hope Hodgson's early 20th-century quest The Night Land through the works of writers that include Clark Ashton Smith, Jack Vance, and Gene Wolfe. Railsea is a worthy addition to their ranks, for young adults or anyone else. Highly recommended.

Real-life Adventures on Land and Sea

The Last Waltz (1978): directed by Martin Scorsese; starring The Band (Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, and Robbie Robertson), Martin Scorsese (The Interviewer), and many other musicians and writers that include Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Neil Diamond, Eric Clapton, Ronnie Hawkins, Muddy Waters, and others: Martin Scorsese's brilliant, occasionally problematic concert movie combines live footage of The Band's last performance with a whole lotta guests (including the jarring appearance of Neil Diamond) with interview sessions with the five members of The Band.

Scorsese clearly had a man-crush on guitarist Robbie Robertson, who dominates the interviews and seems to be in almost every shot of the concert, an impressive feat for someone who never sings lead vocals. The four non-Robertson members of The Band seem fed up with Robbie at times -- and they'd reunite as a foursome sans Robertson several years after The Last Waltz. Hmm. 

You can see why Scorsese fixated on Robertson -- he's the most conventionally handsome of the group, and he's also the most loquacious. In any case, the film itself is essential viewing because of the performances of The Band, the anecdotes, and the astonishing array of guest players and vocalists. And even Neil Diamond is fine and, in the context of the movie, a reasonable choice to represent a particular type of music (Tin Pan Alley and its songwriters) on the movie's journey through an almost comprehensive list of musical influences on The Band. 

Garth Hudson and Rick Danko don't speak much. Richard Manuel and Levon Helm do get some interview time, and both -- especially the charismatic, soft-spoken Helm (aka The Only American In The Band) -- are fascinating. Highly recommended.

In the Heart of the Sea (2015): based on the non-fiction book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick; written by Charles Leavitt, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver; directed by Ron Howard; starring Chris hemsworth (Owen Chase), Benjamin Walker (Captain Pollard), Cillian Murphy (Matthew Joy), Brendan Gleason and Tom Holland (Old/Young Thomas Nickerson), Ben Whishaw (Herman Melville), and Michelle Fairley (Mrs. Nickerson): Ron Howard turns the astonishing true story of the early 19th-century Nantucket whaleship Essex's losing confrontation with a pissed-off male sperm whale into an intermittently faithful, intermittently ridiculous movie. The performances are all solid but unspectacular, hampered by the often stilted and/or dogmatic dialogue that often seems shot through with jarring linguistic anachronisms.

A frame narrative set 30 years after the Essex lost a TKO to the whale is historically ridiculous. And the movie creates a false dramatic narrative in which the Nantucket powers-that-be want to hush up the whaley cause of the Essex's sinking (in reality, they didn't) and the cannibalism in the lifeboats necessitated by being adrift at sea without food for weeks (again, no cover-up -- cannibalism was pragmatically acknowledged by sailors as something that could very well happen because of the realities of life at sea). Oh, well. History sucks! 

This is the sort of movie in which a cargo hold that should be filled with empty barrels to carry home all the whale oil is instead shown as empty throughout the movie so as to visually demonstrate how unsuccessful the whaling expedition has been. I guess in the universe of the movie, the whales bring their own barrels.

The portion of the film stretching from the Essex's departure from Nantucket to its first encounter with the angry whale is really pretty good. Unfortunately, Howard and the screenwriter veer sharply away from history after the sinking of the Essex to turn the movie into a high-toned version of Jaws: The Revenge with a bit of Castaway thrown in. Oh, well. 

The filmmakers also conflate the whale that sunk the Essex with another story about a partially white sperm whale from about the same time period dubbed Mocha Dick by whalers. Ace reporter (well, information-starved novelist) Herman Melville eats this stuff up in the completely fictional frame narrative. We also get some anachronistic environmentalist discussions. In the world of the movie, oil is discovered in Pennsylvania nine years earlier than it was in our universe. Hey, it's an alternate history movie! Lightly recommended.

Invictus (2009): adapted by Anthony Peckham from the non-fiction book by John Carlin; directed by Clint Eastwood; starring Morgan Freeman (Nelson Mandela) and Matt Damon (Francois Peinaar): Engaging sports movie about newly elected South African President Nelson Mandela's attempts to forge unity in his country with the nation's Springboks national rugby team and South Africa's 1995 hosting of the Rugby World Cup. Morgan Freeman as Mandela is excellent and convincing, and Matt Damon is Matt Damon with an Afrikaaners accent as Springboks captain Francois Peinaar. 

The movie is quite faithful to actual events. Clint Eastwood's direction is unobtrusive, and the whole thing goes down pretty smoothly as the earnest Stanley Kramer movie it would have been if it had been made in 1955. A cast of mostly unknowns does solid work in the supporting roles. Traditional and traditionalistic South African songs war with goopy, gloppy, awful Western-muzak-sounding songs on the soundtrack, to an occasionally jarring comic effect. Mandela's favoured 1875 English poem which gave the movie its title was by William Ernest Henly, by the way, though most of us think it was by Rudyard Kipling. The more you know! Recommended.

Strange Animals

Fierce Creatures: written by John Cleese, Iain Johnstone, and William Goldman; directed by Fred Schepisi and Robert Young; starring John Cleese (Rollo Lee), Jamie Lee Curtis (Willa Weston), Kevin Kline (Vince McCain/ Rod McCain), Michael Palin (Bugsy Malone), and Carey Lowell (Cub Felines) (1997): Much of the cast and crew of A Fish Called Wanda reunited nearly a decade later to make Fierce Creatures. It's not a sequel -- they play new characters. It's also quite uneven, with several slow stretches and a few too many scenes in which Kevin Kline flails around frenetically to little comic effect. However, things shape up in the final third, becoming quite funny by the time the credits roll. Lightly recommended.

Abraxas and the Earthman: written and illustrated by Rick Veitch (1981-83; collected 2006): Writer-artist Rick Veitch's love letter to Moby Dick and space opera packs quite an illustrative wallop, with dazzling visuals and some pretty peculiar interstellar shenanigans.  Also giant space whales, a villainous Alien Ahab named Rottwang, giant astronauts who look like Al Capp's Schmoos, a six-breasted alien catwoman, a talking head, some musings on the bicameral mind, and a lot of other interesting stuff. Really a lot of fun from Veitch's early career. Recommended.

The Great White Space by Basil Copper (1974)

The Great White Space by Basil Copper (1974): The recently deceased Basil Copper gives us a splendid homage to H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, with perhaps a smidgen of Moby Dick, in this tale of an expedition into a mysterious cave system located beneath mountains somewhere in Asia. The exact location is never given because the narrator doesn't want anyone to follow in his expedition's footsteps for reasons that become abundantly clear as the narrative progresses. He only is escaped alone to tell thee.

Narrated decades after the (thankfully fictional) attempt of the 1932 Great Northern Expedition to penetrate the mysteries of that cave system, The Great White Space goes not into the southern polar regions (as Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, Jules Verne's The Sphinx of the Ice, and Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym did) but beneath the Earth.

Copper devotes a lot of space and detail early in the text to explaining the technical and logistical preparations for the descent and then the long voyage to 'The Black Mountains', where the entry to the cave system exists. Along the way, two different and somewhat odd Asian tribes are met, and possible taboos about entering the caves encountered. The natives do not go in there, through an artificial cave mouth that stands several hundred feet high.

Once inside the system -- which is, to use a favourite Lovecraftian adjective, cyclopean, as in monstrously huge -- the expedition soon discovers that the entire cave system is artificial, carved or somehow otherwise scooped out of the rock through unknown technological means. Something lurks, of course, though much of the terror of the novel lies in what comes before the Big Reveal.

Unnerving details and an attention to both the squeamish and the Sublime build to the revelation of what waits in the region of The Great White Space, a region paradoxically located miles beneath the Earth. There are things in bottles, a library, and great forms glimpsed in the distance, coming closer. And there comes occasionally from far off the sound of enormous wings.

Some may find this brief novel a tad slow -- the horrors come on-stage fairly late in the game, and explanations are abandoned in favour of mystery and dread. I quite liked the modulation of this novel -- it's quiet and it demands concentration, but it's a page-turner nonetheless. Highly recommended.

Literary Geography

The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2009-2010); The Unwritten: Inside Man: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2010):; The Unwritten: Dead Man's Knock: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2010); The Unwritten: Leviathan: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2010-2011); The Unwritten: On to Genesis: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2011); The Unwritten: Tommy Taylor and the War of Words: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by Peter Gross, Yukio Shimizu, and others (2011-2012):

Carey and Gross's epic metafantasy pulls out a lead character modelled upon Christopher Milne and Harry Potter and throws the whole of fiction, poetry, myth, legend, and religion at him. Tom Taylor starts the narrative as the bored, drifting son of mysteriously vanished children's literary titan Wilson Taylor. Wilson seemingly modelled the hero of his incredibly popular series of children's books upon his own son, much as A.A. Milne did with Christopher Robin in Winnie the Pooh.

Well, at least his own son's name and general appearance. And then Wilson vanished, leaving Tom Taylor to make his own way in the world by attending various literary and fantasy conventions as the "real" Tommy Taylor. He signs memorabilia. Sometimes he gets lucky. Mostly he's bored.

But why did Wilson make Tommy memorize an encyclopedic array of knowledge related to "literary geography" -- both the places where works were written and the places where works took place? When Tommy gets kidnapped by an obsessed fan who seems to be an actual vampire modelled upon the literary Tommy Taylor's vampiric nemesis Count Ambrosio, things start to get weird. Especially when he's saved by a young woman named Lizzie Hexam, who knows more about the real Tom Taylor than he does, though less about herself than she's aware of. And all this is just in the first issue of the ongoing series.

The Unwritten is a lot of fun as a narrative, as a metanarrative, and as a fictional meditation on the nature and meaning not just of stories, but of Story itself. And as conspiracies are revealed, the nature of Story assumes geopolitical significance: control a society's narratives about itself and one controls the society.

A complex, funny, and scary piece of work, with lovely art on the stories themselves by Peter Gross and the occasional helper, and by Yuko Shimizu on the gorgeous covers. Highly recommended -- I'd guess there are maybe 20 issues to go before the whole thing wraps up.

From Hell's Heart

Books:

Hunger for Horror ed. Robert & Pamela Crippen Adams & Martin H. Greenberg: The 1970's and 1980's were the Golden Age of genre reprint anthologies, before the bottom starting dropping out on a lot of things in the publishing business (most of them related to short stories). Thanks to his work with Isaac Asimov and others, Martin H. Greenberg has his name on an awful lot of those genre anthologies, primarily in the realms of science fiction, fantasy and horror. This theme anthology collects horror stories that feature food and eating, and it's an enjoyable jaunt from the always acidic Ambrose Bierce to the 1980's. I'm not sure that Michael Bishop's bizarre bit of metafiction about a man who turns into a planet-sized tomato qualifies as horror, but it is pretty funny. Recommended.


Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber (1977): Leiber was a restless giant of genre writing, producing major work in science fiction, fantasy and horror from the 1930's until his death in the early 1990's. His mature prose style managed to be allusive without being overwhelmingly dense, with a narrative tone that foreshadows Neil Gaiman, only tougher minded. He wrote one of the seminal "bridge" works in American fantasy fiction, 1940's "Smoke Ghost", which suggested that an industrial age would spawn its own peculiar new horrors rather than simply regurgitating the ghosts and vampires of the past. Much of his horror fiction worked within that vein which he helped to create, positing modern incarnations of vampires ("The Girl with the Hungry Eyes") and witches (Conjure Wife) that were no longer tired, anachronistic tropes.

This novel manages to gently satirize cosmic Lovecraftian horrors while at the same time seriously investing in the possibility of new horrors that far outstrip the old in malevolence and power. Two books purchased at a used book store in San Francisco turn out to be a seemingly loopy explanation of how cities breed new supernatural horrors called "paramentals" and a lost diary of real-world fantasy writer Clark Ashton Smith. And then things start to get strange for the protagonist, a fantasy writer and recovering alcoholic in his late 40's. My only complaint about this novel is that one wants it to be longer -- it clocks in at under 200 pages, leaving one wishing for more but also impressed at Leiber's brevity in a world dominated by 500-page horror novels. Highest recommendation.


Comic:


Marvel Illustrated Presents Moby Dick, adapted by Roy Thomas and Pascal Alixe: Herman Melville's Moby Dick resists adaptation in movies and comics, partially because of its great length and partially because of its idiosyncratic content -- a number of lengthy chapters explain at great length the nuts and bolts of things like whaling, rope-making and what-have-you, making it one of the most expository novels ever written.

Writer Roy Thomas has been the king of comics adaptation for decades now, beginning with his lengthy run on Conan the Barbarian, so he's a pretty good choice for any literary adaptation that one doesn't want to see diverge too much from the source. He does a nice job here of boiling down the narrative to fit into a 130-page comic, partially (as he notes in the foreword) by throwing out most of the exposition and expanding the length of the final battle with the Great White Whale in relation to the rest of the text. Thomas mainly resticts his writing to selections culled from the novel to supply both dialogue and Ishmael's narration, foregrounding the neo-Shakespearean Gothic of Melville's prose.

Pascal Alixe's art is a bit too cartoony and large-eyed to be wholly successful -- there are times when the characters are way too cute for what's happening to them. However, he effectively renders Moby Dick himself as a sinister, almost impressionistic force seen mainly as a series of inhuman body parts: the sublime and terrifying head, the tail, the harpoon-studded back with a dead man accidentally lashed to it. Recommended.