Requiem for Ahab takes place 20 years after the death of Captain Ahab in the novel Moby-Dick. Ahab’s young son has grown into a man seeking to understand his father’s life, so he seeks out the one man who may have answers -- Ishamel the sole survivor of the wreck of the Pequod.
Requiem for Ahab takes place 20 years after the death of Captain Ahab in the novel Moby-Dick. Ahab’s young son has grown into a man on a quest to understand his father’s life … and death. Requiem for Ahab is about fathers and sons, war and its warriors, suffering and reconciliation.
Anyone who has read Moby-Dick knows that Captain Ahab and his crew die hunting the white whale, Moby Dick. The only survivor was a sailor named Ishmael, who tells his story and then disappears. What most don’t remember is that Ahab left behind a young wife and child, Hannah and Thomas. Ahab's life has ended, but their lives must now go on without him. They move to a small town near Boston, where she meets and marries Aaron Stoddard. The years go by, and Thomas Stoddard grows into a young man. Ahab's memory recedes deeper and deeper into a past seldom revisited by either mother or son.
When the Civil War breaks out in 1861, Thomas enlists in the 2nd Massachusetts Infantry Regiment and sees action at Antietam and Chancellorsville. Then comes the Battle of Gettysburg, where Thomas is wounded and has his leg amputated. He can't help but remember Ahab's fate, and he wonders if he too will go mad. Thomas realizes he knows very little about his father's death ... or life. There is only one man who can help him discover the truth about his father’s madness—the sailor who called himself Ishmael.
The search for Ishmael leads Thomas first to New Bedford and then to a small town in central Massachusetts where Thomas finally meets the elusive Ishmael, who has found chasing after dreams to be as perilous as chasing after Ahab’s white whale. Thomas and Ishmael find common cause in laying Ahab’s ghost to rest once and for all.
Excerpt
I was not quite seven years old when my father died. His name was Ahab, and he was captain of the whaleship Pequod out of Nantucket. She sank off the Solomon Islands in March 1843, with all hands lost save for one sailor who was picked up two days later by another whaleship — the Rachel, captained by Josiah Gardiner — that was searching for its own lost crewmen in yet another of the mishaps that made whaling a dangerous and often fatal enterprise. The Seamen’s Bethel in New Bedford never lacked for new names to be engraved on the markers that adorned its spare white walls … markers that would never see a graveyard, memorializing sailors who would never again see the land. My father’s name was not among them. Ahab was an outcast, this being the result of the unspoken sentiment of a whaling community that resented the loss of ship and sailors not in the normal course of a dangerous trade but rather because of one man’s madness … or so it was said. The only available facts were collected during a brief official inquiry into the loss of the Pequod, facts derived mainly from the testimony of the lone survivor, a sailor identified only by the name Ishmael.
Professional Reviews
Thoroughly Enjoyable Read
I think I might be so bold as to call this the "best thing I've read this month". Written very much in a style similar to the book from which it's inspired, "Moby Dick", "Requiem for Ahab" is a wonderful tale of what happens to the son Ahab left behind. It's a quick read, more novella than novel, but highly worth the effort.
A good story
This book hooks you from the beginning. It is the kind of book that you think about when you are not reading. There is a historical novel aspect, as it starts in the civil war era. It also gives you some background on the life of fishermen and whalers at sea. When I finished the book, I immediately started reading Moby Dick.
New England Heritage Shines On
"Requiem for Ahab" answers a question few have thought to ask: When he wasn't the Captain of the Pequod, who was Ahab? In particular, did he leave
anyone behind when met his nemesis, Moby Dick, for the last time? This novella, set very authentically in several Massachusetts' locations and told in language true to its 19th
century inspiration, offers a suspenseful and satisfying answer. A great read and a worthy follow-up to G.J. Lau's "The Magpie's Secret" which I loved.
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