Omoo (1847)

Herman Melville's “Omoo” is no “Moby Dick.” Instead, it is a boring and repetitive narrative about a malcontent and undisciplined crew on a whaling ship in the South Seas. My Kindle says I persevered for 32% of this plodding going-nowhere story before I quit. ( )

Continues Melville's adventures in the Pacific, at first aboard a very miserable and poorly commanded whaler, then at Tahiti and a nearby island with his comic sidekick, Doctor Long Ghost. Very entertaining and thought provoking. ( )

"Then throw in one of Melville's Otaheite books now far too completely forgotten " Typee " or " Omoo,"... Then you will
have enough to turn your study into a cabin and bring the wash and surge to your ears, if written words can do it. " --Through the Magic Door, p. 241

You may have heard of the author. This is one of his lesser-read works, although not the least read, that would be Clarel. Even though part of this novel takes place on a whaleship, and has preachers in high pulpits, a Maori, a negro cook, and uses the word gallied, it is quite different from Moby Dick.

This novel is a straightforward first-person account of adventure by a sensitive, well-read sailor called consecutively Typee and Paul. He escapes from his previous novel (where he was called Tammo) to a whaleship, becomes a mutineer, is clapped in a Tahitian calabooza, and then released to explore the nearby island of Eimeo. He finds the farther he is from Western influence the happier are the natives. That’s it.

Two things stand out in this wisp of an adventure story. One is Melville’s humor. “There was no absolute deformity about the man, he was symmetrically ugly.” “About the eyes, there was no mistaking him; with a villainous cast in one, they seemed suspicious of each other.” “The very men he flogged loved him as a brother, for he had such an irresistibly good-natured way of knocking them down, that no one could find it in his heart to bear malice against him.”

The other is Melville’s prophetic outlook. He seems more like us, more at home in our liberal, tolerant, 21st century Obama democracy, than he does in his own era. This comes across when he laments the decimation of the Tahitian people from 200,000 at the time of Cook to barely 9,000 people in 1842; deplores the introduction of western commerce which left the Polynesians with nothing to do; and regrets the effort to civilize and christianize the natives which brought about "ignorance, hypocrisy and hatred of other faiths."

I’ll end with a digression. At times I felt insulted by the editor. Editors have to decide who is my audience? what should I assume they know? It would seem natural to believe that anyone bothering to read this book has a high degree of cultural literacy and is more likely to read literature than adventure tales. I would bet we’re reading this book because we like Melville. However, this gal Edwards believes her audience knows NOTHING. As a result she wastes a good deal of ink correcting Melville’s spelling, and needlessly explaining obvious things like what are casks, harpooners and pearl-oysters, where are Palermo and Cape Horn, who were Napoleon and Lord Nelson, and that Taurus is a constellation. It would have been better if she had followed the example of Beaver in Penguin’s excellent 1972 edition of Moby Dick: maps of the Society Islands, a couple of diagrams of a whaleship indicating the technical names of its structure and sails, and notes that identify obscure technical terms, literary allusions and repeated themes. ( )