Lyn Gardner 

David Cameron reads Moby-Dick – review

The prime minister has read a chapter of Herman Melville's classic novel as part of an online project. How did he fare against his fellow performers?
  
  

Illustration of the White Whale by A. Burnham Shute
Moby-Dick … obsession and insanity, as interpreted by David Cameron. Photograph: CORBIS Photograph: CORBIS

"They told me how Mr Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right," remarked Winston Churchill about his 19th-century Liberal predecessor. Future prime ministers may well feel similarly about David Cameron's professed love for Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, a novel that charts the obsession and near insanity of Captain Ahab, the skipper of a whaling vessel who has only one plan: to stalk and kill the great white whale, Moby-Dick. Captain Ahab has no plan B.

Cameron has attempted to demonstrate his devotion to a novel that fits Mark Twain's definition of a classic as "something everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read", by reading chapter 30 for The Big Read. It's an online project in which a chapter is broadcast per day, read by Stephen Fry, Neil Tennant, Tilda Swinton and other devotees of the book.

Moby-Dick is a whale of a novel, but inspires only a minnow of a performance from Cameron, who delivers the brief text with some clarity but considerably less animation than the speaking clock. Maybe it's a style honed for bedtime reading and cunningly designed to put the little Camerons to sleep instantly.

In a novel in which several sections are devoted to descriptions of the whale's outsize penis, the chapter – called The Pipe – chosen for Cameron to read is entirely unremarkable and even comes with an inbuilt anti-smoking message which should please new health secretary Jeremy Hunt.

Even so, perhaps in his eagerness to avoid dwelling on suggestive words and phrases such as "pleasuring", "tossed" and "my final jets", Cameron is inclined to go for some very strange stresses, particularly on prepositions. It's not a terrible performance, just a terribly dull one. Perhaps they should have got Ed Miliband: on current speech-making form, he'd have been a bigger catch.

 

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