Reviews of audiobook fiction: Moby-Dick, Avenue of Mysteries, In the Cold Dark Ground

Moby-Dick

by Herman Melville

(read by Anthony Heald)

Blackstone Audio (audiobook)

With the whaling epic In the Heart of the Sea surfacing in cinemas, it’s a good time to revisit the classic novel that partly inspired it: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. There are no end of audiobook versions from full-length versions by Alan Munro and William Hootkins, to starry dramatised versions with F. Murray Abraham and a short three-hour edit read by George Kennedy. I went for Anthony Heald whose marvellous turn as the oily Frederick Chilton in The Silence of the Lambs will ensure his immortality. He is the “old friend” whom Hannibal Lecter is “having” for dinner. His expressive voice is ideal for Melville’s prose, soaked at once in nature and the Bible, madness and meditation. Heald gives the priceless sense that he is not only reading but understanding sentences as winding as: “Take almost any path you please, and 10 to 1 it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it … Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor.” You may have to rewind now and again, but that only doubles the pleasure.