From the moment Ishmael follows his grimmest inner promptings and signs up to become a whaler until that cataclysmic final whirlpool, set spinning by the White Whale himself, and which swallows up not only the Pequod and its crew but every oar, spar, barrel, and chip of wood, Melville’s “Moby Dick” moves with the deadly momentum of an incoming tidal wave. No wonder Melville, throughout the novel, keeps clinging to makeshift structures.

Father Mapple’s cavernous Whaleman’s Chapel, the freezing New Bedford inn where Ishmael shares his bed with Queequeg, every habitable surface of the pitching ship from the quarterdeck to the hold, promises some refuge that always proves illusory. Melville cherishes the solidity of objects. He lovingly evokes everything from carpet bags to harpoons, and he lingers in describing them, as though anything man-made, of wood or iron, might somehow withstand the onrush of a malevolent destiny.

The relentless momentum of this ungainly book never impressed itself upon me quite so forcefully until I listened to an unabridged reading by the actor William Hootkins, which has just been released (Naxos Classic Fiction, 19 CDs, $126.98). The performance takes almost 25 hours; too long, I find, to spend at one go amid the sizzle of whale-blubber and the fulminations of mad Ahab. But heard one CD at a time, over a week or two, the reading builds steadily in your mind with all the insinuations of an obsession. “Avast!” and “Thar she blows!” begin to echo in your head at unbidden moments, but these more comical side-effects quickly fade. “Moby Dick” isn’t only about monsters – Ahab as much as the White Whale itself – it is itself a monstrous book.

The language of the novel is the first symptom of this monstrosity. Nothing in American literature even comes close to the cascading quirkiness of Melville’s prose. Odd phrases leap from every page. The Pequod’s whaleboat has “a god-bullied hull.” Ahab sobs like “a heart-stricken moose.” At the last, Ahab is garrotted by his own harpoon rope and Melville describes him noosed as “voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim.” The wreckage of the Pequod is obliterated by “the great shroud of the sea.” All the characters, from Starbuck and the other mates, to the lowest member of the doomed crew, distinguish themselves by pungent, eccentric, and loopy soliloquies, but Ahab himself has the truly unforgettable lines. “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me,” he raves in one of his more startling, and coherent, outbursts.

In his reading Mr. Hootkins re-creates every nuance of voice in each of the many characters. From the pidgin stammerings of Queequeg the harpooner to the pinched utterances of Bildad the ship owner, he articulates a whole world of teeming individual accents. Though I’ve read “Moby Dick” several times, I’d never before appreciated the slow, almost inconspicuous change in Ishmael over the course of the narrative, but Mr. Hootkins conveys this to perfection. In the early chapters, Ishmael’s narrative tone betrays the starry-eyed, if melancholic, dreamer, but by the end, when he alone survives, he speaks with a chastened, and tragic, timbre.With his chameleonic voice, Mr. Hootkins gets this across.

The experience of listening to a long book is surprisingly different from reading it.When we read we commune, embroidering the narrative with our own imaginings, but we often daydream too, mingling our own thoughts with those of the author. When we are read to, we feel summoned rather than seduced; we have to focus and narrow our attention. But listening to a story also stirs recollections of childhood, when one of the greatest pleasures was that of being read to sleep. The fading borderline between fantasy and reality then seemed easiest to step across, there on the edge of sleep, and as the world began to dim, those fictional figures – especially the scary ones, like Long John Silver – came swaggering into their own.

Listening to “Moby Dick” enhances this dreamy sensation, but with nightmare overtones. Never has the flimsiness of the world been rendered more terrifyingly than in these pages. Ahab once exclaims, “All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask.” Moby Dick in his cunning and his malevolence embodies that “unknown but still reasoning thing,” at once machine-like and curiously conscious, whom Ahab burns to destroy.

“Moby Dick” might be called the most architectural of American novels. (Ahab even describes the hated whale as “a wall,” a wall that must be broken through.) But it isn’t an architecture of bricks and stone (as in, say, “The House of the Seven Gables,” by his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he dedicated “Moby Dick”). Melville’s novel employs an architecture of voices. Set speeches, soliloquies, asides, and stage whispers from the human characters, abetted by the shrieks of sea birds, the hiss of waves, and the spoutings of whales, form a huge Shakespearean uproar in the rigging in which all nature colludes.

Melville published “Moby Dick” in 1851, and though he continued to write and publish novels, stories, and a very sombre epic poem, his career went into well-documented eclipse. He toiled for some 25 years as an inspector in the Customs House at Battery Park. He suffered bouts of near madness; one of his sons committed suicide; his marriage soured and his wife claimed to live in fear of his violence. When he died in 1891, 40 years after his masterpiece appeared, he was almost completely forgotten.

What he called “the malevolence” of the White Whale (Melville always capitalizes the phrase) seems to have pursued its creator, as though the strenuous originality of the work somehow condemned Melville to his final decades of silence and obscurity. After listening to this marvelous recitation, I learned, to my sadness, that William Hootkins had died of cancer shortly after completing it. Moby Dick is still claiming his victims.

eormsby@nysun.com