Hope, love and fear: why Moby-Dick is the perfect novel for our times | Paul Daley

I’d read it before but this time I found Captain Ahab more disturbed – and disturbing

Many readers have expanded their ambitions in these times of social isolation, disappearing into books that have previously beaten them.

Tolstoy’s War and Peace is mentioned often, along with Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy.

Related: André Aciman: 'I couldn’t finish Moby-Dick. I lacked the patience'

Here, then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals – morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue or right-mindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge.

I stood looking at him a moment. For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself – the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

Related: Great beasts and American exceptionalism: the world through the eyes of a mammoth

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