In an interview on The Sea

Philip, we’re talking about the sea and I notice that your list includes lots of different sorts of book. You’ve got a grand sweeping history of the British navy. You’ve got memoirs. You’ve got Moby Dick on the one hand and on the other a polemic against over fishing. Which would you like to start with?

 Let’s start with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s an extraordinary novel in all sorts of ways, and the scale of it reflects the scale of the sea. Melville had this great wealth of experience from his own whaling days and he wanted to express that in some way, but came up against the same problem every writer who tackles the sea faces. You have this huge subject, but not a lot of contours; not a lot to differentiate it all, with which to forge a narrative. The sprawl of Moby Dick reflects that, the apparent randomness of the chapters, the jumble of fiction and non-fiction. Like all writers on the sea, he’s intrigued by the practical problems, seamanship, fishing techniques. But underlying it all is this great, undifferentiated mass. One of the interesting things about the sea as a subject is that it doesn’t hold history. As soon as a ship passes through the water the water closes up and that’s it, whereas the land, whether its urban or rural, has great layers of history visible to the eye…

Moby Dick is obviously a psychological drama too, isn’t it? The pursuit by Ahab of a white whale – a terrifying sort of ghost whale. Ahab is a very proud man and in a sense he seems to be attempting to destroy his own death. But is this a theme you see running through other books about the sea? A sense that man simply shouldn’t be there at all? That he’s out of his element?

Yes, Ahab pits himself against this infinite element which will never be conquered or changed by man. That’s what the story’s all about. I wrote a novel about the sea some years ago and watched it form itself into a shape similar in some ways to Moby Dick. I realised then that it was perhaps the only story you could write about the sea. A man is drawn toit, is seduced by it – gets a living by it but is eventually destroyed by it. That’s the basic plot structure of Moby Dick. It’s also that which Peter Benchley chose when he wrote Jaws – he famously took Moby Dick as a template. That’s part of the novel’s power – it established a great myth and that’s why it endures.

In an interview on Evil

Let’s move on to Moby-Dick by Herman Melville.

Paul Kahn’s book suggests that evil derives from the violent avoidance of the realisation of our own mortality and there could be few better examples of this in literature than Melville’s portrait of Ahab in Moby-Dick. On first appearance the evil Ahab represents would seem to be that of obsession and delusion: he’s unable to let go of his need for revenge against the great white whale that took his leg from him and he’s willing to risk the lives of his men to taste that revenge. But the wound, of course, is about more than a missing limb. The whale has robbed him of his own sense of deathlessness and mastery over his world and he would sooner die trying to avoid that recognition than accept it. Others will be caught up by and killed in that very avoidance. The blindness of the powerful is always more dangerous than the blindness of the powerless. 

What sets Moby-Dick apart and makes it a great work of literature is that, like Milton in Paradise Lost, Melville paints his villain with such a richness of language that the portrait becomes a kind of celebration of the figure despite his actions. The entire adventure is bathed in reverence for the natural world through which Ahab, Ishmael and the rest of the sailors move. Ishmael’s descriptions sing with awe for the ocean and the whales. And in this light Ahab’s fixation, however distorting it is of life, comes to be seen as a kind of respect for the majesty of the creature he’s pursuing. And so there is nothing simple about his avoidance. It has its own dark dignity. Again, as Kahn points out, evil and love are deeply intertwined.

In an interview on Saving the World

Moby-Dick.

This is probably a bit of a long shot, as I read this long before I became a fully paid-up greenie. I first read it at university, and have re-read it many times. What I love about it and what makes it so utterly compelling is the strength of the characters. Through the whale, as I see it now (and this is something that has changed in me over the years), we feel the power of the relationship between man and nature, exposing man’s urge to control the natural world – all reflected in the whaling fleets and their prey. It’s an extraordinarily intense book: the descriptive writing is particularly powerful, the account of the Eastern seaboard and the oceans, and how they can change so dramatically. Nobody would say Melville was an ‘environmental writer’. but Moby-Dick is primarily about how we are going to have to re-think our relationship with the natural world.

Why can’t we? Why does it remain so abstract? I don’t want the world to end, but I do leave the computer on because it takes a minute to start up and I hate those new light bulbs.

A lot of people don’t think that doing small things differently would make a big enough difference. They are not sure that those little things they do add up to enough. People think: ‘Surely if it was that serious, then governments would be involved?’ Unilever has a great strapline – ‘Small Actions, Big Difference’. The fact that governments seem ambivalent is part of the reason why people’s doubts are constantly reinforced. So the little things do matter.