Tag Archives: American literature

Book review

Moby Dick, or the Whale, by Herman Melville, 1851

I now understand Moby Dick’s reputation for being unreadable. The core of the novel is the well-known whale-hunting adventure, with the obsessive Ahab pursuing the white whale to the ends of the farthest ocean, with the “from hell’s heart I stab at thee”, and all that.  This material would have made an excellent longer short story, a novella perhaps, with the excitement of the pursuit and the psychological portrait of the captain at its heart.zzmoby-dick

However, Melville chose to pad this story out to four or five times its length with an interminable, extraordinary amount of additional information about whales and whaling. It read very much as if he did a lot of background research to his subject and included it all in the novel. Can you imagine ‘Heart of Darkness’ with four hundred additional pages on the ivory trade? Or ‘The Great Gatsby’ with a detailed history of the prohibition movement? I found wading through the chapters on the different types of whale, how they are caught, processed, defined and anatomised really difficult, not least because of the brutality and callousness of the process, and the narrator’s wilful ignorance of the impact of nineteenth century whaling on the whale population.

If you can muscle your way past this issue, or perhaps find an expurgated version, there is plenty of interest elsewhere in the novel. Whaling was a dangerous occupation, and the thought of the small sailing boats setting off to harpoon mighty sperm whales has become an iconic image. I am sure I was not the only reader who at times was cheering on the whales. The opening chapters of the novel, when Ishmael meets Queequeg the cannibal harpooner, are very different in tone from those towards the end, and are surprisingly funny. Their relationship is openly homosexual and comically and euphemistically described. Ishmael advises the reader that it is ““Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.” On their first night together sharing a bed, Ishmael catches sight of the “bald purplish head” of the “purple rascal,” and “shrieks” when Queequeg springs under the covers with his tomahawk. After some “kicking about”, Queequeg begins “feeling” Ishmael; next morning they awake with “Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner…You had almost thought I had been his wife.” That Melville was able to get this past his publisher, and the reading public, probably says more about their racism towards the strange habits of the South Sea islander than it does their tolerance of alternative sexual lifestyles!

Ostensibly the narrator of the novel is Ishmael, but we are told very little of his back story, and even less about him as a character. Increasingly as time passes he fades into the background, to be replaced with a traditional omniscient narrator who can see multiple separate and simultaneous events, is able to tell us what characters are thinking and feeling, and is indistinguishable from Melville himself. Call me Ishmael if you like, but Herman would be more polite.

The climax of the novel, a reward for those who make it that far, is stunning. It shows what a good adventure novel has been struggling to emerge all that time. The white whale is sighted, pursued, harpooned, and – well for once I won’t spoil the ending. Suffice to say it was not the one I was expecting. I am conscious I am being quite philistine here – I really should be exploring the novel’s heavy symbolism, its complex literary allusions, and the multiple literary styles employed. Certainly that’s all there for the reader who wants to explore in more detail and read the text with more care – I was simply glad to make it to the other side. Incidentally, this novel ends the nineteenth century section of my read through of the Guardian’s top 100 novels written in English.

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Book review

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, 1957

“What’ll we do? What’ll we do? Let’s move”.

“I just won’t sleep,” I decided. There were so many other interesting things to do.”

If you had to summarise this novel in two quotes, there you are!on-the-road

‘On the Road’ tells the breathless story of the adventures of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, “two broken down heroes of the Western night”. Set in the years immediately after the Second World War, Sal and Dean, young men of no known occupation or visible means of support, criss-cross America restlessly by car, train and plane:

“Sal, we gotta go and never stop going ’till we get there.’

‘Where we going, man?’

‘I don’t know but we gotta go.” Continue reading →

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American literature, Book review, science fiction'

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, 1953

“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door…Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”

Bradbury’s seminal dystopian novel is one of the key texts of the McCarthyite era in post-war America. Bradbury describes a world in many ways very much like his own, but where firemen burn books, where the population are distracted from an understanding of their lack of freedom and the threat of nuclear war by the bread and circuses of wall-sized flat screen televisions, and in-ear “sea-shell thimbles”, and where suspects are hunted down by helicopter and summarily executed on live television. Continue reading →

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Book review

Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, 1868 & 1869

The Guardian top 100 novels in English has led me to some strange reading experiences, but there are few novels I would have been less likely to read than this, Alcott’s semi-autobiographical tale of growing up in a strangely unreal nineteenth century America.

‘Little Women’ was originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. Alcott wrote the books rapidly over several months at the request of her publisher, and follows the lives of four sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March— from childhood to womanhood. The novel is extraordinarily saccharine – the girls/women rarely err, and if they do so it is only for the mother – ‘Marmee’ – to intervene with a moralising lecture on the Christian thing to do, which immediately puts things to right – for example.

“My child, the troubles and temptations of your life are beginning, and may be many; but you can overcome and outlive them all if you learn to feel the strength and tenderness of your Heavenly Father as you do that of your earthly one. The more you love and trust Him, the nearer you will feel to Him, and the less you will depend on human power and wisdom. His love and care never tire or change, can never be taken from you, but may become the source of lifelong peace, happiness, and strength. Believe this heartily, and go to God with all your little cares, and hopes, and sins, and sorrows, as freely and confidingly as you come to your mother.”

There is a really vast amount of this improving stuff.

The first half of the novel, published as a separate book but now considered the first half of the wider work, is set during the American Civil War. The family’s father is away serving in the Union army as a chaplain, and even though he re-joins the family at the end of the first novel, he remains a vaguely defined character with barely half a dozen lines of his own across the whole novel. The absent father is of course one of the most dominant tropes in children’s stories, but this lack of definition pervades the whole novel – the setting is Concord, Massachusetts, but the town and environment is so weakly explored that it could really be anywhere. The war is distant and has no impact on the lives of the characters other than the men who slip away to fight and reappear in passing a few chapters later – their stories are not allowed to intrude. While the March family is portrayed as poor, the golden rule of Victorian literature – that no family is too poor not to have servants – still applies, and the family are also able to patronise with charitable endeavours the local dirt-poor German and Irish immigrants of the town.

As what is effectively an updated version of ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ (there are lots of references to Bunyan throughout ‘Little Women’) this novel formed the template for generations of children’s, and specifically girls stories. To give her credit, Alcott does have the guts to kill of one of her main characters, but the dying is done so gracefully and with such patience that it seems more like a blessing than a tragedy.

What possible reason could any 21st century reader have for revisiting this novel? Are there any redeeming features or points of interest? Frankly, I struggled to find any. Some critics have claimed it as a feminist tract – the March family are mostly strong independent women, but they all find fulfilment in marriage (apart from the sister that dies, of course). The gender constraints they face are accepted as a fact of life, and even the feisty Jo, the character closest to Alcott, who herself did not marry, succumbs to a proposal from a father figure in the end.

But I will just have to accept that I am not and never was the target audience for this novel, and that my inability to appreciate it should take nothing away from those who enjoy it as younger readers, and continue to return to it for its comforting familiarity.

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