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Just thought I'd pop in before work to with rougemacabre a happy birthday ^_^

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So I finally finished Moby-Dick, and I have to say it was 120 pages of the best novel 19th-Century America produced. Too bad it was 620 pages long.

Some thoughts:

• He's really good at creating characters and painting scenes. He's terrible at dialogue, editing, and plotting. The initial scenes of the inn, the church, and Ishmael's first night with Queequeeg are quirky, bizarre, and wonderful -- and the final battle is cool.
  
  
• Unfortunately, between these is 500 pages of dross. This novel could have been greatly improved if they'd encountered Moby-Dick just as they pulled away from the harbour.
  
  
• I'm sure there is someone out there who's said, "What I want is a novel that reads like a highly inaccurate cetology manual, and which spares no detail however excruciating." People are strange creatures, and for every desire conceivable there is at least person who's experienced it. I, however, am not that person.
  
  
• The guy who wrote the introduction noted that while writing the second half of the book, Herman Melville had been reintroduced to Shakespeare. This is likely the inspiration of the atrocious soliloquys that plague the second half. Reading Shakespearean speeches written by Melville is a little like watching Pauly Shore do Hamlet.
  
  
• The book is terribly edited. I mean, at one point, Ahab has both feet. He's frequently running. The ship's architecture changes. And why the hell didn't the editor catch the fact that Ishmael is frequently narrating Ahab's internal monologues? If Ishamel's meant to be an unreliable narrator, it's very clumsily handled.
  
  
• The book manages to both be vague and yet heavyhanded -- all that allegorical imagery gives the impression that you're being browbeaten with some hamfisted point of view, but it's impossible to say what that point of view actually is. Reading Moby-Dick is a little like being beaten by an angry mob who've rallied behind an illegible or blank banner, so you can't even tell why they're beating you up.
  
  
• On that note, Moby-Dick is not so much a whale as a floating Rorshach inkblot. He's been described by literary critics as everything from God to Satan to Nature to Fate to America to Democracy to Racism to Non-white Races to Monarchy to whatever-else-is-being-written-about-him-at-this-moment. The novel is confused enough to support this and any other point.
  
  
• Somewhere out there, there has to be Ishmael/Queequeeg slash, and it is a safe bet that it is better than the novel.

In short, I recommend anything past the first 100 pages only to my enemies. I now move on Place d'Armes, by Scott Symons.