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such an outcome for this eccentric work, least of all its author.
Moby-Dick
failed to sell out its first edition, and was almost entirely ignored in Melville’s lifetime. It took a new century for its qualities to be appreciated. In 1921 Viola Meynell declared that ‘to read it and absorb it is the crown of one’s reading life’, and wrote of its author, ‘His fame may still be restricted, but it is intense, for to know him is to be partly made of him for ever.’ (She also noted that J.M. Barrie invented Captain Hook out of Ahab, and his pursuant, time-ticking crocodile from the White Whale.) Two years later, in his extraordinary collection of rhetorical essays, D.H. Lawrence wrote: ‘He was a futurist long before futurism found paint…a mystic and an idealist’, author of ‘one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world, closing up its mystery and its tortured symbolism’.
    Moby-Dick
became the great American novel retrospectively. It also became a kind of bible, a book to be read two pages at a time, a transcendental text. Each time I read it, it is as if I am reading it for the first time. I study my tiny edition as I ride on the Tube, as intently as the veiled woman next to me reads her Koran. Every day I am reminded that it is part of our collective imagination: from newspaper leaders that evoke Ahab in the pursuit of the war on terror, to the ubiquitous chain of coffee-shops named after the
Pequod’s
first mate, Starbuck, where customers sip to a soundtrack generated by a great-nephew of the author, Richard Melville Hall, better known as Moby.
    Melville’s White Whale is far from the comforting anthropomorphism of the smiling dolphin and the performing orca, from
Flipper
to
Free Willy
, or the singing humpback and the ‘Save the Whale’ campaign–all carriers, in their own way, of our own guilt. Rather, Moby Dick’s ominous shape and uncanny pallor, as seen through Ahab’s eyes, represents the Leviathan of the Apocalypse, an avenging angel with a crooked jaw, hung with harpoons from the futile attempts of other hunters. This whale might as well be a dragon as a real animal, with Ahab as his would-be slayer.
    The age of whaling brought man into close contact with these animals–never closer, before or since. The whale represented money, food, livelihood, trade. But it also meant something darker, more metaphysical, by virtue of the fact that men risked their lives to hunt it. The whale was the future, the present and the past, all in one; the destiny of man as much as the destiny of another species. It offered dominion, wealth and power, even as it represented death and disaster, as men met the monster eye to eye, flimsy boat to sinewy flukes, and often died in the process. More than anyone has realized, perhaps, the modern world was built upon the whale. What was at stake was the future of civilization, in the most brutal meeting of man and nature since history began. And as the animals paid for the encounter in their near extinction, so we must ask what price we paid in our souls. How have we moved so far from one notion of the whale to the other, in such a short space of time?
    When I close my eyes, I see those massive animals swimming in and out of my vision, into the blue-black below; the same creatures that came to obsess Melville’s ambiguous narrator, ‘and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale’. On my own uncertain journey, I sought to discover why I too felt haunted by the whale, by the forlorn expression on the beluga’s face, by the orca’s impotent fin, by the insistent images in my head. Like Ishmael, I was drawn back to the sea; wary of what lay below, yet forever intrigued by it, too.

II
The Passage Out

    There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs–commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets