It would have been easy for Melville to allow the minutiae of whaling to get out of hand

It would have been easy for Melville to allow the minutiae of whaling to get out of hand, or for metaphysical speculations to make the maritime adventure a mere afterthought. But the quest for the whale deepens the speculations and is deepened by them. One can see why Jung, with his emphasis on “one world” neither purely material nor psychological, was so drawn to this work.There is a similar interpenetration in Melville’s treatment of evil. He implicitly denounces the Christian ideal of perfection as a metaphysical misunderstanding: “good and evil braided be”. The narrator Ishmael’s survival at the novel’s end denotes the tacking between the two perspectives. To make humanism prevail when there is no logical reason for hope completes Moby-Dick on an ambivalent note that mirrors the ambiguity of all that has gone before.Melville is never greater as an artist than when, unlike Ahab, he allows the heart to resist the head.

At a cerebral level, though, he was one of those who can believe in the reality of evil but not good: “Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.”Melville’s work will never be popular with readers who feel that a novel must deal primarily with relationships or else display political commitment. But for those who revel in whale-hunting scenes, who thrill to encounters with typhoons, sharks, giant squid and pirates, and who like the brew served up with lashings of St Paul, Kant and Hegel, Moby-Dick will remain one of the wonders of the world.. So the men you see around you bore you? Well, you have an imagination, don’t you, woman? Why not conjure a better one out of thin air? In her last novel, So I Am Glad, A L Kennedy tried just such a thought-experiment and came up with Cyrano de Bergerac, swordsman, poet and dignified loser extraordinaire. The result was interesting if a bit one-sided, what with Cyrano being long dead. She tries the spell again in her new book, and women everywhere will thrill to what she has made: Edward E Gluck, popular scientist and self-help guru.

A cyberneticist and neurobiologist, with an adorable fixation on the Jimmy Stewart of It’s A Wonderful Life, he is a hunky, brilliant and kindly mixture of Richard Dawkins and Steve Jones. A couple of years ago, I had an argument with a colleague about Kennedy’s books. I loved the image of life they suggested: a woman, probably in Glasgow, pottering about on her lonesome ownsome, dreaming of nuns and penguins, worrying about God This colleague, however, smelt a rat. He felt that ALK, if she wasn’t careful, was headed for emotional anorexia.