esrosedotblog

BOAT RIDE

I finished Herman Melville's Mardi.

It has been a long haul. Well, a long boat ride.

The scheme of the novel/commentary is to get a guy onto an island and then take him to many other islands where various cultures exist. It is a bit Swiftian. The comments about the politics, culture, and foibles of the people make up a lot of the 'novel'.

Such plot, as there is, finds him leaving a ship on a small craft with a particular friend—sure sounded gay to me—a viking-type sea daddy. He arrives on the said island where he is thought to be a demi-god and then to take a tour with the king/demi-god of the archipelago to which the island belongs.

Along the way, my gay fantasy implodes as he finds a princess captive on a pirate craft and liberates her. He bcomes 'romantically' attached. Then, she disappears.

The journey through the archipelago includes a search for the princess and escape from the pirates who continue to chase him.

So it is part story and part tract. The story is OK and I wish for more of it. The tract part is full of 19th century humor with a lot that is topical to the day so we are left out some.

I am moving on to a more storied novel, again a sea tale; Redburn