Redburn - Herman Melville

Redburn (Melville, 1849)

Melville is such a strange beast.  Objectively considered, he's not a very good writer. Of his first six books, only Mardi and Moby Dick are true creative works, the rest being fictionalized autobiography.  In all his books I've read so far, his "formula" seems to be this: start out interesting, go on lots of philosophical, metaphysical, poetical, and intellectual tangents for most of the middle, then rev back into what little is left of the plot for the end.  From anyone else, it's bad writing.  However, those tangents are good enough to keep me interested, even in a book Melville himself wasn't particularly proud of.

Such is Redburn.  There is very little plot to speak of: young Wellingborough Redburn, son of a bankrupt gentleman, sees his opportunities for a better life dwindle and so ships to sea on a merchant vessel.  He is woefully uneducated and unprepared for the life and duties of a sailor, but he gradually gets his sea legs on the voyage to Liverpool and back. That's pretty much the whole plot, the interim consisting of various episodes and philosophical asides.

There are some genuinely good episodes interspersed: the depiction of poverty, crime, and vice in Liverpool; the attempt to retrace his father's footsteps from an earlier visit, only to find the city drastically changed and his father's fifty-year-old guidebook useless; the plight of the immigrants to America packed into the steerage like cattle, suffering disease and death; the "final salute" by the crew to their despised captain.  Though Melville detracts Redburn as a "job done for money", he still slips in plenty of philosophy and moral indignation, probably to the chagrin of his editors.

Unfortunately, Redburn has many false starts and undeveloped avenues.  There is the infirm sailor Jackson, whose nihilism and tyranny over the other sailors is illustrated offhandedly in a couple episodes but never brought to the forefront as a plot element, as it should have been.  Then we have some humor in non-drinking, non-smoking Redburn's falls from grace in the course of sailor life, but they too drift away in the wake of the ship, when they could have furnished the makings of a full-fledged story.  As with most Melville, the first-person narrator is barely a character, doing very little, mostly observing and recounting the actions of others.

Though ultimately unsuccessful as a whole, Redburn has enough worthwhile chapters to keep it afloat.  And there are more than a few embryonic flashes that will come to full fruit in Moby Dick.

Arbitrary rating: 3.5 out of 5 embryonic flashes