Column Chronicles: The Brutal Critic, Moby Dick

The Brutal Critic: Moby Dick

Frank Cotolo
August 18, 2022

Let me introduce myself whether you like it or not. My name is Bruce Danko, better known as the Brutal Critic. They call me that because I get right down to the grit of books, movies, plays and I find all the flaws.

Moby Dick may as well be a trillion pages long. It was written by Herman Melville, who became a measly cabin boy on merchant ships in the 1800s. He was so bored with life at sea that he began to write books - long, tedious and highly exaggerated stories that went on and on and on and on, like his most popular, the white whale tale, Moby Dick.

First of all, who would name a whale, no less give it a first and a last name? Moby? And what is Dick? A type of whale? No. But Herman gives his big white whale a given and a surname - as if there were a Dick family of whales in the ocean.

It so happened that Moby was a target by a vengeful ship captain named Ahab. Just Ahab. The whale has a given name and a surname but the human captain has one name. Ahab. Just Ahab.

The captain is obsessed with killing Moby (Dick) because Moby is responsible for the loss Ahab's leg. Stop right there. Moby (Dick) is at least seven hundred sized bigger than Ahab and has a mouth big enough to swallow the entire crew of Abab’s ship in one gulp. And he only bit off one human leg? Come on.

The story becomes even more ridiculous when Ahab swears he could recognize Moby (Dick) among all the whales that might be seen in the seven seas. He wants Moby dead but no character in the book asks him how he is going to kill a whale.

Ahab sails the ship aimlessly through the ocean, looking for the whale that has a given and a surname and the crew never once mentions mutiny. The guy telling the story - Ishmael - is hung up on learning rope knots and puts the reader to sleep explaining how to tie some.

Moby Dick is a stupid book, uninspired and too heavy to fit in your pocket. The digital version takes up too much space and there is not one drawing of the white whale or any kind of whale.

The Brutal Critic gives Moby Dick a minus 5o on a scale of zero to minus 50.

Frank Cotolo can be found hosting the talk and interview programme Cotolo Chronicles. You can send him an e-mail at this address: frank@148.ca.