Moby Dick! Moby Dick! Moby Dick....forget about Moby Dick! It's a magnum opus. Thank you John Huston/Gregory Peck for the iconic movie. Thank you John Bonham for the drum solo. But if you really want to peer inside the mind of Herman Melville, read Redburn instead.

Why? For starters, you will see that magnum opus in its beta format. Redburn is a first person fictional account of Melville's first sea voyage...a round trip from New York to Liverpool. The narrator, Redburn Wellingborough, even refers to himself as Ishmael. There are two prototypes of Ahab. Captain Riga, a man with a split personality - deceptively charming to recruits, at port, and aloof as a Chinese emperor, at sea. And there's a crew member, Jackson, who bullies and dominates his crew mates by the sheer force of his irascible personality. Despite his terminal illness and average size, he is intimidation personified.

But Redburn is more than just a Two Years Before the Mast (Richard Dana's classic), replete though it is with sea lore. It is a glimpse inside young Melville's mind, revealing his analytic intelligence, his attention to detail, his compassion for the unfortunate, his sensitivity to social undercurrents, his wide ranging curiosity, and his wry humor.

A good percentage of the novel concerns Redburn's explorations, while on leave, of Liverpool. Melville writes with the clarity of journalist, and probes like an investigative reporter. In one section, he is heartrending in his description of Redburn's unsuccessful attempts to get aid for a starving, dying woman and her three children. In another section, he is compelling in his argument for changing shipping safety laws to protect immigrant steerage passengers on trans-Atlantic voyages. And in a chapter revealing his naivete - in relying on a fifty year old guidebook - he is charming with self deprecating humor.

I picked this book off a store shelf on a whim, partly intrigued by the Edward Gorey cover illustration, and partly because I recalled a quote from the movie Adventureland, to the effect that Melville died in obscurity and the New York Times misreported his first name. Having finished Redburn, I am inspired to read the rest of Melville's oeuvre. His personality, his halo, his soul flashes in Redburn, like - well OK then - St Elmo's fire in Moby Dick! ( )

A deep look at Melville's heart: There are those who read Moby-Dick and say they love it because they're supposed to, because it's marked as a classic American novel; and then there are those who love Moby-Dick because its miraculous prose, its Shakespearean characters and its spirit truly get inside them. Redburn is for the second group: any real fan of Melville's unique philosophy and thorough mastery of style will love this book. Redburn is, to be sure, no Moby-Dick -- it has none of the epic quality of that crowning jewel. But all of Melville's trademarks are here, in a plot which transcends its simple outline -- a boy from a formerly rich, now bankrupt family joins the crew of a merchant ship sailing to Liverpool and comes of age -- to reach the realm of genius. The poetically beautiful imagery and sparkling wit juxtaposed with profound melancholy jump out at the reader. But even more importantly, Redburn opens up a unique window on Herman Melville's soul. Elizabeth Hardwick, in her recent biography of Melville (which I also highly recommend), calls this his most personal work, and she's right -- where later works like Moby-Dick and Billy Budd hid Melville's real experiences behind an obscuring (if brilliant) curtain of fiction and the earliest novels like Typee and Omoo lacked depth in their rollickingly faithful accounts of Melville's sojourns among the Polynesians, Redburn has just the right balance of fact and fiction. It is in many ways a meditation on the author's once-illustrious father -- Allan Melville, who, just like Walter Redburn (the narrator's father) lost all his money and respect -- but it is equally a series of revelations about his youthful mind as he mulls over issues of time, the generational gap and social change. Read Redburn for a real glimpse of the man who would be the greatest American novelist.