Moby Dick

By: Herman Melville

Narrated by: Duncan Carse

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville is a classic of American and world literature.

Written in 1851, this is the incredible story of the crazed captain Ahab who, consumed by his desire for revenge, drives his crew to scour the oceans of the world for the fearsome white whale, Moby Dick. It soon becomes clear that Ahab will stop at nothing and is prepared to risk everything, his ship, his crew members, and his own life.

Herman Melville (1819 - 1891) was an American novelist short story writer, essayist and poet.

Please note: This is a vintage recording. The audio quality may not be up to modern day standards.

Public Domain (P)2009 RNIB

Critic reviews

"You will learn more about life, your own and other people's, from Middlemarch, Madame Bovary or Moby-Dick than you are likely to from yards and yards of memoir."( The Times)

Excellent version

This is an excellent version of Moby Dick. I had to read the book for a book club and decided to go with an audio version. It was an excellent choice. The narrator's voice is perfect for Ishmael, calm and introspective. The sermon chanter is exceptionally powerful.

A well done recording of a book I probably would not have enjoyed had it not been for this fine recording.

Loooooooooong

It isn't the book or the reader, it is the length of the reading. Normally I enjoy the Unabridged versions but this was a very tough one. This is the only audio book I couldn't finish. As mentioned, usually I am a stickler for the Unabridged, but in this case I would highly recommend the Abridged version!

Just like I imagined

As an English Major I've read Moby Dick twice in my lifetime (one by choice, the other for class). Saw the original movie. Decided to download the book. I read the reviews of this recording, and although I agree with some of Carse's criticisms about some of the character's interpretations, I am completely impressed with his voice and narration. I've listened to some other samples of other narrations of this great novel, but his voice is exactly what this book needs--old fashioned, salty and sophisticated. Some other criticisms I've seen are about the novel itself...how it's ungodly long and light on action. Word to future readers or listeners--this is an epic American novel. This tells you everything you thought you ever wanted to know about whaling, whaling life, ships, sailors and all sorts of mythology mixed in. This book is a journey. Once you've started, you must hold on for the long haul. This isn't a day kayaking getaway. Remember, this book was written when people patience to read (and to listen) and weren't addicted to social media. This is an enjoyably long, poetic trip with great characters and very impressive writing (should you be brave enough to read it). Ahoy.

Good American classic, but a difficult listen for a commute.

Good American classic, but a difficult listen for a commute. Much of this book is devoted to painting a picture of sea life and whaling. The narrative storyline is spread out such that you might actually feel like you are on the voyage. With the exception of a couple minor character voices that are difficult to understand, the narrator of the audiobook delivers a strong performance and is especially believable as the story's educated narrator, Ishmael.

Exhausting

More detail about whales than anyone could possibly absorb or remember. Adds nothing to the story.

Uneven

The book could use major editing. It's an odd thing to have someone with a sort of Scottish accent reading this book, but I did get used to it. There were a dozen or more misspeaking events that went uncorrected. And a couple times a clunking sound came thru from the studio.

A brilliant performance worthy of so great a work.

About Melville’s story this review will remain silent. The novel’s vastness and power as a tale of adventure are well known to all who read, and all who love the sea. The tortured self-analysis revealed in Captain Ahab’s speeches enshrine this book in the canon of Western literature and need no further praise from me.

What made this reading of the text unique was the spare intensity of Duncan Carse’s performance. Like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, Mr. Carse captured this listener’s attention completely, making it difficult to interrupt his tale and return to the necessities of daily life.

The Voice of Antiquity and Experience

When I decided to get Moby Dick I took some time listening to the many samples and reading the reviews.
In the end I opted for this version (at the time there weren’t many good reviews) and I am so glad that I did. I enjoyed every minute of it and encourage you to get this one too. Why?
Some reviewers have criticised Duncan Carse’s delivery from various angles - being dated, questionable accents, poor editing etc.
I am not sure when this recording dates from, but I guess from 1940’s or 50’s.
While the received pronunciation might seem to be from a different age, Carse’s voice and delivery is perfectly suited to the story. I also thought his accents were great. They are not perfect renditions, but they do not lack character and Ahab in particular inspires dread and foreboding. The often archaic terms and expressions do not trouble Carse in the slightest and seem completely natural to him. As for the recording. It isn’t perfect, but I found the sighs, sounds of pages turning or of corrected mispronunciations to be charming - they lend a warmth from which you can imagine the reader sitting by a roaring fire on a cold night.
It turns out that Carse was an explorer himself who surveyed the antarctic and South Georgia for the Royal Geographical Society either side of WW2, during which he served in the Royal Navy. His bio is full of adventures not unlike that undertaken by our hero Ishmael and he would have been familiar with many of the sights that Ishmael describes as well as the nautical terms.
Some reviewers have advised getting an abridged version.
Please don't!
I think these reviewers are missing the point. The plot is a vehicle for all the tangents and asides about whaling, philosophy, religion, culture, relationships, the human condition. On it’s own, the plot doesn’t amount to much. If you want an abridged version how about (Spoiler Alert): Man joins whaling boat. Man describes whaling boat. Man discovers captain has unhealthy obsession with Big Whale. Search for Big Whale. Find Big Whale.
The joy of the book is in the wandering narrative and detailed descriptions.

Great listen

Read beautifully and clearly. It is easy to get lost in the story and characters with this reader. Audiobook is an easy way to dive into the classics while exercising, working or traveling. Moby Dick is an incredible adventure with lovely and formidable characters challenging "evil" in the mysterious, primordial ocean.

The Appalling Beauty of this Whaling World

What a strange classic is Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851)! Scientific, philosophical, comical, beautiful, terrible, and exciting, the novel is written with what Ishmael (Melville's narrator and alter-ego) calls "a careful disorderliness," featuring motley modes, like adventure, natural history, drama, and allegory, and an exuberantly encyclopedic approach fit for his "mighty theme." The novel is Biblical, Shakespearean, Hawthornian, Cetacean, and American.

Ishmael begins his narrative by telling us that some years ago, feeling grim and drizzly, he decided to go to sea on a whaling ship to purge his spleen. He and his bosom buddy, the harpooner Queequeg, a cannibal prince with a profile like George Washington's and a body tattooed with illegible hieroglyphs that might hold the key to the truth of the universe, join the Pequod, captained by the soul-scorched and charismatic Ahab. Captain Ahab soon seduces the crew into swearing an unholy oath to help him hunt and kill the famed White Whale, Moby Dick, who by biting off his leg drove him into a monomaniacal quest for revenge.

Throughout that narrative Ishmael interweaves passages about the physical, behavioral, and symbolic aspects of sperm whales and about the history, tools, strategies, dangers, and noble nature of whaling. He relates such passages with vivid descriptions, humorous metaphors, and interesting allusions to myriad eras, cultures, religions, and artifacts. A reader sympathetic to whales may recoil from Ishmael's depiction of their callous butchery or assertion that they will never be in danger from over-hunting. Nevertheless, he also respects and empathizes with the sublime leviathans.

Ishmael, a "subterranean miner," attempts to "pierce the profundity" lurking beneath the surface of the world to attain the Truth about life and its dark realities--and so to appall rather than please his readers--and ambitiously attempts to compass his vast subject, the whale and all it signifies throughout human history. He speculates on fate and free will, belief and unbelief, civilization and savagery, community and alienation, and our brief lives in a dangerous world in which "all men live enveloped in whale-lines."

The reader Duncan Carse speaks with an austere and educated tone for Ishmael's base narration, from which he deviates to amplify the different personalities of the various characters. He handles Melville's many long and complex sentences with agility and clarity. His reading enhances the meaning and interest of the monologues and asides of characters like earnest Starbuck, jocund Stubb, grim Ahab, and divinely insane Pip.

Carse, however, more than a few times misspeaks a word and then quickly catches himself and reads it correctly (e.g., "a wissing--missing boat"). It's nearly unnoticeable, but such moments should have been edited out of the audiobook. Worse, the whale etymologies and literary extracts collected by Melville's "consumptive grammarian" and "grub-worm librarian" that preface the novel are absent.

In closing, I'd like to share some great lines from Moby-Dick:

"Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian."

"Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright."

"There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own."

"One serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea."

"Let us all squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness."

"In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the shadows that the three boats sent down beneath the surface, must have been long enough and broad enough to shade half Xerxes' army. Who can tell how appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over his head!"

"Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal?"

"The rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monmaniac commander's soul."

"Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man!"

"I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look."

"Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand!"