BOOK REVIEW: AHAB'S RETURN: OR, THE LAST VOYAGE BY JEFFREY FORD

20/8/2018

BY JOHN BODEN

Jeffrey Ford is one of the best writers working today. There, I said that right out of the gate and I mean it.

I have yet to read anything from him that is anything but brilliant. Always brimming with rich characters and wonderful settings, great premises and wonderful dialogue. Often times a simmering cauldron of the dark fantastical with some historical sprinklings and more than enough creepiness. This book is no exception.

Ahab's Return, is a wonderfully paced novel wherein we meet George Harrow, a writer who toils for a rag known as The Gorgon's Mirror. He doesn't get to break the big stories or even write the want ads, he dreams up fallacy and legend and splices them together around tidbits of truth. He's like the Weekly World News of the mid-1800's.

Harrow's world is turned upside down with the arrival of Ahab. The very captain from the famed novel, Moby Dick. You see, Ishmael wrote that work as fiction but it was in fact mostly true, before he quit his journalist job to become an addict. Ahab survived his written demise and has spent many years fighting his way back to find the wife and son who moved on after thinking him dead. Now with that strict purpose of finding his long lost son and repairing a lifetime of damage wrought, he tries to integrate himself to these different times and attitudes. With the help of Harrow and former crew members, Ahab fights for the soul of his son and himself in a world blacker than any he has known before. The belly of a whale was most likely brighter.

That alone would be premise enough but being this is Ford novel, we get much more. We get a cult of street urchins working under a barely human sorcerer to cleanse the city in horrific ways. We find mountains of Opium and we follow zombies and ghosts, hallucinations and mythical creatures and on top of it all, we have truths and lies bent to a point where they become mirror twins. And all of it written in such a way that it's fun. The historical and fictional mashing was truly inspired.

I greatly enjoyed it and cannot recommend it enough.

Ahab's Return is available from William Morrow Books, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishing.

A bold and intriguing fabulist novel that reimagines two of the most legendary characters in American literature—Captain Ahab and Ishmael of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick—from the critically acclaimed Edgar and World Fantasy award-winning author of The Girl in the Glass and The Shadow Year.

At the end of a long journey, Captain Ahab returns to the mainland to confront the true author of the novel Moby-Dick, his former shipmate, Ishmael. For Ahab was not pulled into the ocean’s depths by a harpoon line, and the greatly exaggerated rumors of his untimely death have caused him grievous harm—after hearing about Ahab’s demise, his wife and child left Nantucket for New York, and now Ahab is on a desperate quest to find them.