Billy Budd (Herman Melville)

Billy Budd
Herman Melville
Dreamscape
Fiction, Literary Fiction
** (Bad)

DESCRIPTION: Young Billy Budd was a perfect sailor, uncommonly handsome and beloved by all who knew him... or nearly all. After being conscripted to a British warship, he inadvertently ends up on the wrong side of John Claggart, the man of arms and de facto enforcer of shipboard law, a one-sided conflict that inevitably must end in tragedy for all parties.

REVIEW: I try to expand my reading horizons on occasion, which includes tackling the odd classic. That said, clawing through the unabridged Moby Dick was one of the most trying reading efforts I've undertaken; despite some interesting parts and characters and some beautiful passages, I am firmly of the opinion that Melville would've benefited from a stern editor. (I'm well aware that this likely marks me as functionally illiterate. If this is an issue... well, it's my book review blog, and there are countless others.) So, given that impression, why did I try his work again? For one thing, this was a short enough work to slot into a slow work day. For another, as mentioned, I found some of Melville's writing intriguing, even if a little went a long, long way. And for a third, my library's Libby app inexplicably listed this as a "fantasy" title, not just a literary fiction title. If there was a fantasy involved in Billy Budd, it was not one that was clear to this reader.
The basic story covers, at rough guess, less than half or even a third of the total narrative, from Billy's conscription, his time aboard the Navy ship, and the tragedy of justice that concludes the affair. The rest, in Melville fashion, weaves around, under, over, and through this rather skeletal framework with asides, backstories, digressions, philosophical diversions, histories, and more. (I looked online, and discovered that Billy Budd was actually an interpretation of an unfinished work by Melville after his death, compiled by his widow and numerous editors from scraps of source material described more than once as "chaotic"... and I am very much not surprised, given how far over the metaphoric map it ranged before eventually, maybe, in a fashion getting back to the actual story it was ostensibly telling the reader.) Billy is described as nothing short of angelic in breeding and countenance (putting me in mind of a "Gary Stu" character, someone so inexplicably perfect and beloved and jealousy-invoking in bad people that he almost has to be an author self-insert), while his enemy is unfortunately "flawed" in countenance and soul, which may be the roots of the envy and resentment that blossoms into a dark scheme to knock young Budd off his pedestal of perfection. Throughout, there are threads of bloodlines and ancestry and class as being determinants of one's innate worth (particularly if those bloodlines involve good white English stock); though a foundling of unknown parentage (perhaps even literally celestial; there's a naïveté behind his oft-described handsome face that almost seems impossible for a flesh-and-blood human working the high seas), it's often noted how everyone just knows he must be of noble bloodlines, while Claggart, though not precisely ugly, always has some mark of an inherently flawed and low-born and perhaps even criminal nature that can never been concealed or expunged. The symbolism's about as subtle as a cannon blast, as the perfect yet tragically innocent Budd fails to comprehend the deceit and conniving of Claggart, unable to understand evil when it's looking him in the face, while Captain Vere finds himself torn between human empathy and immutable maritime laws (laws all the more important and harsh in the wake of recent revolts in the British Navy by ill-treated conscripts). It ends with yet more symbolism (and almost groveling praise for the better-than-this-world Billy Budd), and then three final chapters that do little but muddy the waters surrounding the fallout and legacy of the whole incident, none of which seem profound enough to justify building an entire novel around. At least Moby Dick ends with a cataclysmic tragedy, one that well explains why Ishmael felt compelled to tell others (like the reader) about it...
Long story short, this is another instance where I just could not connect with a piece of classic literature.

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