To start things off, I’d like to share some good news I read about earlier in the week. Hopefully, this makes up for some of those grim statistics I was waving around in my first column a couple of weeks back–again, 2009 is a very grim year for a lot of people, and focusing on the positive, wherever we can find it, can at least counterbalance some of that free-floating anxiety that’s out there, right?

I hope so. Anyway, here’s the link. It’s from the New York Times books section a week or so ago, and it mentions a recent report from the National Endowment for the Arts that found an increase in the number of adults reading fiction in the United States, for the first time since 1982. Most heartening was the fact that the most impressive increase was among readers aged 18-24, younger readers who are hopefully picking up a habit that will last them a lifetime. Now whether people are BUYING more fiction is a whole other question, as are their motives (escapism? nostalgia? stories with zombies in them?) but this is a heartening blip among blips, as they say in the information-gathering business.

What I’d like to talk about for the bulk of this column, however, is another bit of news that appeared on the internet a few more weeks earlier, just before the end of ’08.  It passed through IGN, Dark Horizons, AICN, possibly Chud , a lot of the fanboy web sites. The upshot was this: There was a new version of MOBY DICK being adapted to the screen, directed tentatively by Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambatov, the man behind NIGHT WATCH, DAY WATCH, and most recently the adaptation of Mark Millar’s WANTED. The gist of the announcement was that the producers and creative team want to make a film of Moby Dick that feels more like ’300′, with Captain Ahab as a Charismatic Leader (Perhaps played by Gerard Butler?) and a focus on Moby Dick’s early acts of destruction, including, perhaps, the taking Ahab’s leg. So the whole story would become more of an action/revenge picture. The exact pull-quote that jumped out at me from the article, given, IIRC, by one of the screenwriters, is ‘This is not your grandfather’s MOBY DICK’.

There’s some interesting ideas in that sentence, not least among them the fact that, in 2008, Moby Dick (or THE WHALE) as Melville subtitled it, is a book for your grandfather. Certainly, it can be intimidating—it’s a novel written over a hundred years ago, more than seven hundred pages long, with long sections detailing life aboard a whaling ship, and the process of turning whales into meat and candle-fat. It’s not unfair to say that many modern attention spans chafe at such a work. I worked through the book many years ago, and there were parts of it that I struggled with, and have since repressed in the filing cabinet of my forgotten memories. Melville’s prose is stylish and enjoyable, especially in shorter stories, like BARTLEBY, THE SCRIVINER, where the effect of his writing is hypnotic. In a longer work like Moby Dick, however, the impact of his prose can be exhausting, as though your mind is climbing a mountain or pushing its way through a jungle in order to follow the story. In Jeff Smith’s charming BONE series, there’s a running gag about Phone Bone’s favorite book being Moby Dick—whenever he brings it out to read to someone, they invariably fall asleep! So it is with many critics of the work in this day and age. Moby Dick may be beyond discussion at this point—moved to a plateau that it, along with a few other books like War and Peace occupy, where University departments guard the passes that stretch to them, and few that are not academics dare to pick them up and read them all the way through.

Then again, there is the fact that Moby Dick has haunted Hollywood for a long time. The IMDB lists seven different productions of the story that are either completed or currently ongoing. Two are TV series, five (including Mr. Bekmambatov’s version) are feature films. The first was made in 1930, starring John Barrymore. I’ve seen two: The John Huston film from 1956 starring Gregory Peck as Ahab, and the 1998 TV Miniseries with Patrick Stewart as Ahab. In both cases, there are great actors playing Ahab, but something of the significance, the alchemy of Melville’s Pequod-universe, is lacking in the transfer to a visual medium. Both Gregory Peck and Patrick Stewart are great actors, but they don’t feel like the mad, driven Ahab from the novel, one moment charming and in command of all he surveys and the next, raging against the universe itself. I don’t know who would feel like the Ahab of the novel, in my eyes. And at the same time,  I can’t speak of the versions of the story which I haven’t seen. Given their number, however, it doesn’t seem wrong for someone to try something drastically different from previous adaptations while filming the story. If they fail, the film will at least be a noble failure, having produced a new variation on the legend of the one-legged captain and the white whale.  And if they succeed, it’ll suggest that Ahab and the Whale still exist at the peak of some colossal mountain of the subconcious, that their story, as Ishmael chronicled it in Melville’s book, is strong enough to be twisted into new, strange shapes for a new, strange generation. It might even inspire a few brave souls to pick up the original novel and traverse its many pages.

To paraphrase and mangle something a wise man once said, maybe every generation gets the Ahab that they deserve. If that’s the case, I’m genuinely curious to see the latest incarnation, and how it compares to previous visions of Melville’s story. If anything, it shows that there’s still inspiration to be drawn from the bookshelf, something other than the remake-mania of ’70′s and ’80′s films currently flowing through Hollywood. And there is some alchemy, some magic in a bottle that exists on the page, that’s difficult to capture even on the silver screen. For how else could a book make people so nervous and yet inspire so many different visions?