Omoo

By: Herman Melville

Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld

Following the commercial and critical success of Typee, Herman Melville continued his series of South Sea adventure-romances with Omoo. Named after the Polynesian term for a rover, or someone who roams from island to island, Omoo chronicles the tumultuous events aboard a South Sea whaling vessel and is based on Melville's personal experiences as a crew member on a ship sailing the Pacific. From recruiting among the natives for sailors to handling deserters and even mutiny, Melville gives a first-person account of life as a sailor during the nineteenth century filled with colorful characters and vivid descriptions of the far-flung locales of Polynesia.

Public Domain (P)2010 Audible, Inc.

Melville continues where he left off...

(1847). Melville continues where he left off in Typee without any fuss. The young author knows how to keep things simple. The mutiny aboard the dysfunctional whaler the Julia and his misadventures in and around Tahiti are laid out in a very orderly and digestible manner. In all locations the author plays the amiable tour guide (a role he would later bring to such fanciful heights aboard the Pequod). Many of the scenes are enchanted. Yet even in the most desperate situations or before undeniably lamentable sights, he maintains his mild, wry voice, well suited to showing the ludicrous side of things. (It's hard to think of antecedents to this comic and unusually readable style of writing, and easier to think of comparisons from decades later--Jerome K. Jerome, for example). Even the rats and roaches infesting the cramped ship are humorously described, though living in such conditions must have been truly appalling (along with everything else, Melville was a tough son of a bitch). You're also introduced to a panoply of colorful characters, coming from all walks of life to meet in that far-flung spot on the globe. Most of these personages are quirky, but some are more moving. The picture of the inept and despised landlubber is a timeless portrait of the bullied, written with compassion.

In Typee Melville fashioned a remarkably Hollywood plot out of his experience of "indulgent captivity" among the cannibals. Suspense, action, adventure, humor, romance, a thrilling climax. This material lacks the same readymade structure, yet sails along quite delightfully. I loved it. I'm nearing the last of the popular Melville, the books praised in his day and our own (and yes, that includes Moby Dick), and can see in the offing the more notorious productions. It'll be hard to go from such an eminently sane work as Omoo to ones that caused fear, even for Melville himself, that he'd gone mad.

The narrator is quite good, especially at dialogue, but he has a curious habit of ending declarative statements on an up-note.

Sequel to Typee

Omoo finds the narrator of Typee once again at sea but not much more willing to carry out his responsibilities. He and most of his shipmates reach a point where they simply refuse to work; so they are put ashore on Tahiti where they are loosely held in a compound by the island's consul.

The narrator and a tall companion he calls Doctor Long Ghost eventually make their way from Tahiti to the neighboring island of Imeeo now known as Moorea). They wander around the island, courting the native girls (sometimes being stabbed with a thorn for their troubles), attending feasts, witnessing special dances. Eventually the narrator decides to leave, signing on to a visiting whaler; Long Ghost decides to remain behind.

The book is entertaining: Melville has a wry sense of humor and a humane sensibility. He respects the natives as human beings in a way few other Europeans or Americans do. He accepts them on their own terms. He believes the Christian missionaries who frequently visit the island have done more harm than good: mostly, under their influence, the happy, languid and hospitable life of hunting and gathering is exchanged for uncomfortable clothes and even more uncomfortable ideas. The novel is also surprisingly discreet - surprising at least to me, who grew up with a far more sensual image of Tahiti. Once or twice, the stages of undress in which they find the natives are referred to, but whether any of the various young women the wanderers take up with are more than friends is never really discussed.

Robert Blumenfeld is an excellent narrator, reading most of the book in a cheerful style and providing a variety of voices. If you've read or listened to Typee, you probably should take this one in too. (Arm yourself with a map or two before you go.)

South Pacific Ramble

Delightful rambling story not really about anything in particular but nice vignettes of life on the sea and in the South Pacific in the mid 1800s. Delightful narration in the audible edition.

See Melville's Fiction Genius Pushing Hard

Omoo is Part II of Melville's adventures in the South Pacific. Typee, his first book, focused on the French Polynesian island of Nuku Hiva (Marquesas Islands). Omoo starts after Melville leaves Nuku Hiva, and centers on his adventures on a whaling ship, the ship's subsequent "soft mutiny" and his imprisonment with a majority of the ship's crew on the island of Tahiti.

Melville writes travel memoirs the same way my father-in-law would tell stories of his youth: built on a solid framework of veracity, but completely filled-out and fattened with fiction. Both my wife's father and Melville, however, were d@mn good storytellers. Early Melville is fun because after reading these books one grasps a firmer hold of the author and the influences that brought on his later, great novels. Here is a man writing a memoir and you see the fiction genius pushing hard against the boundaries of his own narrative.

Melville's prose is straightforward and his narrative is quick. He also approaches the people of the South Pacific with a dignity and reporting that was very very forward thinking for the time. He avoids both the 'savage' and the 'noble savage' world views that so dominated Western thinking at the time. Melville's views of Christian missionaries (although he heavily redacted them before publication) still managed to keep it from being printed in the US.

The ways western civilization corrupted the ways of the native island people.

Given the history of the world and the approach of European cultures to dominate it, I’m sure these Islands and the indigenous people would eventually have to blend in, however the damage done to their culture in the name of Christianity by the missionary is in hindsight disgraceful.