New Audio Project Offers Four Months of \'Moby-Dick\'

September 18, 2012, 12:38 pm

By JOHN WILLIAMS

The actress Tilda Swinton and 134 other readers are lending their voices to the Moby-Dick Big Read, an online audio version of Herman Melville's epic novel.

The chapters will be available as free downloads, a new one appearing on the Web site each day until mid-January alongside a related image by a contemporary artist.

The author Philip Hoare and the artist Angela Cockayne came up with the idea, having previously teamed up in 2011 to present a whale symposium and exhibition at Peninsula Arts, a public arts program at Britain's Plymouth University. Mr. Hoare's book “The Whale,” a wide-ranging cultural and natural history of the animal, won the BBC's Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 200 9.

“The digressive nature of ‘Moby-Dick' really suits the medium of going online,” Mr. Hoare said. “The book was never edited. It's quite analogous to a kind of blog, really.”

The democratic list of readers includes celebrities like Ms. Swinton, John Waters and Stephen Fry as well as fishermen, schoolchildren and a vicar. The youngest is Cyrus Larcombe-Moore, a 12-year-old who contributes a few lines of dialogue to a chapter read by his teacher, Tom Thoroughgood.

The list also includes Prime Minister David Cameron. “That happened at the very last minute,” Mr. Hoare said of Mr. Cameron's participation. “I'm glad it hadn't happened before, because it would have unbalanced the project in a way.” The organizers had difficulty finding a chapter for Mr. Cameron that didn't have “some kind of coded message,” political or otherwise. They settled on chapter 30, “The Pipe.”

“Even that - they may say he's condoning smoking,” Mr. Ho are said.

According to Mr. Hoare, 40 percent of the artworks were made specifically for the project, but many of the pre-existing works had been made with the book in mind. “It's extraordinary how many contemporary artists have been inspired by ‘Moby-Dick,' ” he said.

The artists and readers all contributed their efforts free of charge.

Mr. Hoare said every entry has been recorded save two, including the last chapter, because “there's a possibility it might be a really big name.”

Big Read follows another recent obsessive treatment of the book, “Moby-Dick in Pictures,” in which the illustrator Matt Kish created an original work to correspond with each page of the novel. A work by Mr. Kish (inset) will accompany chapter 76 in the Big Read.