Read Leviathan or The Whale for Free Online

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 the whale was the unholy instrument of fate. Not for nothing is Ahab warned by the mad prophet Gabriel of the passing ship,
Jeroboam
, that the White Whale is ‘the Shaker God incarnate’. Jonah was saved by the whale for God’s work; Ahab is destroyed by the devil’s. Only Ishmael survives as ‘another orphan’, an emblem of martyrdom and rebirth, for a man must lose his life to save it.
    Moby-Dick
surpasses all other books because it is utterly unlike any other. It stands outside itself from the start, with its introductory list of historical quotations pertaining to the whale, as gathered by Ishmael’s ‘sub-sub-librarian’; and from there it moves through eccentric taxonomical descriptions as Melville attempts to capture his subject even as his hunters sought to harpoon it. Sidestepping his own narrative even as he delivers it, Ishmael almost wilfully and continually interrupts the reader with diversions and digressions, pulling him aside to address him with hell-fire sermons or musical interludes, with anatomical allegories or sensual dissertations on spermaceti oil.
    In chapter after chapter, Melville teases out new legends to encircle the world and the whale. He creates a new family of men bent in pursuit of the whale, and a new kind of existence, culled from the lives he himself witnessed. Out of the oily, grimy labour of whaling, he forges a sterling heroism. In doing so, he melds his experience at sea with his dark view of the world and the nature of good and evil itself, seeing the future of his nation through his immaculate yet blasphemous creation, as if the whale were an American Sibyl of the new age.
    Now, as I came to it again, I saw that
Moby-Dick
is a book made mythic by the whale, as much as it made a myth of the whale in turn. It is the literary mechanism by which we see the whale, the default evocation of anything whalish–from newspaper cartoons and children’s books to fish and chip shops and porn stars. Few could have predicted