Easy to see why this was a failure upon release, harder to see why it didn't sink down to the dark oceanic depths to be consumed by bottom feeders.
It really strikes me as two books layered together, a decent narrative about a whaling voyage (3.5*) and a dour, academic tract on the history, process, tools, art, and biology of whaling as it stood in the mid 19th century (1*).
The story itself is quite slow, we are a third through before we get to a boat, further still before we meet the famous Captain Ahab. But it builds in tension and we have a large and varied supporting crew, the prominent role given to southern Pacific 'savage' Queequeg standing out the most, especially for the time no doubt. He was my favourite character. (Apart from the whale who I was rooting for.)
Captian Ahab is the prototypical monomaniacal leader hell bent on a doomed course, though we learn little of the why. One seeming insightful passage near the end where he laments his 40 years at sea and young family at home gives us no answer to why he carries on.
Our narrator Ismael takes us through everything and everybody else. There are signs of a keen mind and hints of wide reading with philosophical ideas speakled throughout the dense whale talk. Good points on the murder of animals in general and how farming, hunting and even a touch of cannibalism is no different, ahead of its time here. Also correctly identifies whales as mammals. But is way off in thinking they can't go extinct.
The story, when allowed to flow, is interesting and has moments of high drama. But it is punchuated by constant cetacean minutiae.
How much whale talk do I mean? Well on whale phrenology we don't have a paragraph, or an extended footnote, but 4 chapters. That's just the head, we go through the entire animal. It's a large animal. Then the extinct ones. Lord, did they not have editors in the 1850s? An abridged version would lose almost nothing without the majority of these sections.
Even with this idealised version I am lost as to why this is considered one of (the?) great American novels. I recently read 'The Terror' by Dan Simmons, also a lengthy book set upon the seas in the same time period, full of detail and a great beast, I enjoyed that one far more. Send me to the Arctic not whaling please captian!