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Like many readers I’ve had a long and tortuous relationship with Herman Melville. Moby Dick IS my Moby Dick: I’ve attempted to read it several times and found it fascinating and absolutely bonkers, but lacked the stamina to read more than a couple of chapters. I finally listened to Moby Dick as read by Tilda Swinton et al during a tour of Turkey which included drives of up to six hours. Someday I will read the novel in its entirety.

For now I’ve managed Jean Giono’s fictional account of the events leading up to the writing of Moby Dick. It is as strange and hallucinatory as the novel it introduces (Giono had worked on the French translation). In it, Melville, whose parents have tried and failed to make him a respectable businessman on land, has become a successful writer of novels of the sea. In 1849 he goes to London to deliver his novel White Jacket to his publishers.

Like Moby Dick, Giono’s novel mentions the Philippines. “Manilamen” have long been renowned seafarers. What if Melville, who worked on whalers, stopped in the Philippines? What would he have thought of the place? (Reminds me of my friend’s long-delayed Joseph Conrad in Mindanao story.)

On impulse he decides to travel to a town called Woodcut, and on the mail carriage he meets a beautiful woman smuggling wheat for the famine-stricken Irish. Her name is Adeline White. He explains storms to her with a leaf.

They begin a correspondence. He writes Moby Dick for her, but she never tells him what she thinks of his masterpiece—she falls ill and he never hears from her again. He goes to work as a customs inspector and in his 34 remaining years, never writes again.

Not true, Edmund White points out in the foreword. Melville was not a ladies’ man. He was bisexual and probably in love with his neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. He wrote other books after the big one, including Billy Budd. So Giono’s Melville is not a factual biography, but it is weird and gorgeous.