MixedThe London Review of Books (UK)Are you a Moby-Dickhead? If so, are you enough of a Moby-Dickhead to have visited the Phallological Museum in Iceland to inspect a sperm whale’s penis? This is one of the many intrepid expeditions undertaken by Richard King in the course of researching Ahab’s Rolling Sea. His book, like Moby-Dick itself, tells you everything you ever wanted to know about whales but were too ashamed to ask ... [King\'s] curiosity about nature co-exists with and derives from a ruthless desire to work out how best to exploit it ... So quite a lot of fishful thinking is required to support King’s claim that Moby-Dick is an ecological fable. And when he moves from whales to humans his perspective seems askew ... Moby-Dick is such an extraordinary and impossible success not because it’s a fable about man’s environmental overreach but because it is several distinct things at once, things that at a radical level don’t add up ... Certainly one can see in Melville’s heirs...a premonitory recognition of the damage done by human beings to marine ecology, but Melville’s gaze is always that squinting vision of the mid-19th-century adventurer-cum-naturalist-cum-money-maker, for whom a whale is a fascinating creature partly because of what you can get for its blubber, and partly for the beauty you can see inside when you chop off its head.
