The Reader Travels

It was an adventurous but exhausting nine months at sea. I sailed with Muslim and Christian soldiers and slave traders in an incredible, epic novel called Ironfire by David Ball. I sailed with some nasty pirates in Barry Burg’s non-fiction work called Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition (Believe me, Johnny Depp was way too nelly for these guys).

I even got myself shipwrecked with Robinson Crusoe, who happened to have been on a voyage from South America, bound for the West coast of Africa where he intended to pick himself up some slaves, and probably deserved to be shipwrecked.

But of all my seafaring voyages, my favorites are the travels with Sindbad, the merchant sailor, in Arabian Nights, as translated by Sir Richard Burton. Now, Burton was a little too fond of breaking into song, and he didn’t include a single paragraph break in any of the tales. But it’s really cool that he thought to share these stories with the western world.

So how many times does it take for a man to get shipwrecked and carried away by giant birds or almost eaten by monkey men or buried alive or abducted by devil worshipers before he figures out he ought to stay at home? I think the lucky number is 7.

Several years ago, my sister recommended Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund, but I never got around to reading it until I found myself on an ocean voyage. I was actually glad I’d read Moby Dick because it helped me to appreciate some of the references.

Ahab’s Wife has all the fun and action and suspense that appeals to our lust for instant gratification. There’s sex and cross dressing and cannibalism and suicide and madness. What more could you want? You get to find out everything that happens in Melville’s book, without actually reading it, and you get to have fun along the way.

When you read an old book like Moby Dick, you should try not judge it on modern day standards. For instance, there’s a lot of detailed description, and you have to realize these people had no television. And Ishmael was a total racist in Melville’s book, but he was a product of his times. And Melville was seemingly into guys, so he didn’t have a whole lot of women in his book, even if he couldn’t talk about being into guys.

Naslund gave Melville no mercy. She answered all his flaws by doing the exact opposite. No women? We’ll focus on the women. Racism? We’ll help runaway slaves. No action? We’ll be all action. Can’t talk about the man sex? Well, we’re gonna talk about it.

I don’t know — it was fun. It just seemed a little judgmental to me. But who am I to judge?

I love to read adventure novels that include maps. The paths are twisting and turning and you have to reference them from time to time so you can see where you are in relation to the rest of the world. Maps really make me feel like I’m on a journey.

So, when I read Moby Dick, I followed the course of my whaling trip with the map included in the back of the book. The problem with Melville’s map, though, was that it totally gave away the ending. Not that I didn’t know what was going to happen anyway, especially with the not-so-subtle foreshadowing with bad omens every 50 or so pages, but they didn’t have to draw the whole thing on the map.

You can follow the course of the ship by tracing a dotted line from New England, down through the Carribbean, somehow ending up in the South Pacific, where the dotted line ends with a little line drawing of the ship sinking into the water.

So, what I’m saying is that Melville had no concept of suspense. He drags on and on, spending whole chapters describing a whale’s head.

Here’s a helpful tip, if you ever feel compelled to read about Ahab and Ishmael and that crazy white whale, scan each chapter for names of people before you start it. Unless you’re really wrapped up in the whole thing, you can just skip the chapter and go to the next one that mentions people. You won’t be missing any of the “action,” and it’ll be much more bearable.

More later on why I felt thus compelled.