Everyone complains about Moby Dick's length, turgid prose, philosophical ramblings and endless digressions, but to a certain extent that was part of most novels of that period. Abridged versions that cut out all but the "good parts" (no doubt underlined by recruits with red pencils at Fort Dix) miss the phenomenal layering of this novel.

Today, critics ramble on about its ecological and homoerotic allusions, but this is all modern academic rubbish. I'm sure Melville would have been quite amused, as well as totally baffled, by these interpretations. He was there, and he was a seaman. No one is better qualified to tell that story than he.

MD is really about whales, not just the beast, but its representation in the art, science literature and folklore of its day.

It also is about the fishery itself, an industry of vital importance to the technology and commerce of its time in those days prior to petroleum. Whale oil was medicine, lubricant and fuel for the world, it was a vital commodity. Civilization could not run without it, and the tiny upstart USA was very good at getting it and practically had a world monopoly on it. Read the book and you will have enough background to ship out as an ordinary seaman yourself!

On another level is the Pequod itself, with its Christian officers and pagan harpooneers and multiracial, multiethnic crew. Forty totally different men sharing nothing but the mariner's craft and their own specialties, stuck together on a tiny ship for years at a time.

It is a terrific adventure story, a profound philosophical novel, a psychological and social study, a meditation on reality and the Universe, and most of all, the unbelievable portrait of a man who has chosen to wage war on the Almighty himself. And at the end, the White Whale still swims that empty ocean, as old as the world itself, unstoppable, inscrutable, unknowable. Read this book and you are transported to another time and place and life and mind, and when you get back you will find yourself changed by it.

Bradbury couldn't possibly capture all of this, even with Huston's magnificent direction, but if you know both the film and the book, you will know they both understood it perfectly.