"Captain Ahab was not my first husband nor my last." With that first sentence, Una, the narrator establishes herself as an intriguing storyteller and role model, as well as sets the tone of the book. She's spunky and adventurous, intelligent, and a thoughtful observer. The author, Sena Jeter Naslund, uses an old-fashioned writing style to capture the sense of historical period, which naturally places Una's experiences in a context. Since Una is a skeptic and a truth-seeker, she is open to meeting a wide variety of people in the diverse situations in which she finds herself. She uses these experiences to understand the world and her place in it.
From a fundamentalist, frontier log cabin childhood, Una moves to a North Atlantic, island lighthouse adolescence. Both settings foster her latent individualism and self-sufficiency. At the lighthouse, she battles an eagle. A minor literary incident, but a stamp of identity. Una the eagle fighter is an appropriate metaphor for her subsequent adventures and a foreshadowing of her reaction to them - a mixture of courage, self-doubt, and growth. From the lighthouse, Una runs away to sea dressed as a boy, gets shipwrecked, encounters cannibalism, marries her first husband, and meets Captain Ahab.
The story is told entirely in the first person, placing the reader in the middle of the action. Some of the most compelling language occurs when describing the shipwreck. It becomes increasingly spare and lyrical, mimicking what the mind does when confronted by hunger, thirst, blazing sun, and a situation too intense to be processed whole by the conscious. Much more than excessive detail, this lets the reader feel the experience. While several of the book club members found this scene disturbing, it was necessary to establish the later connection and understanding between Una and Ahab. When another character's voice is needed to promote the story, Naslund uses letters written to Una, or in a few cases the thoughts of Kit, Giles, and Ahab, maintaining the sense of immediacy in first-person narrative.
The book is well-researched and many of things Una experiences and the people she meets are solidly based on actual events and historical figures. The shipwreck is modeled after the wreck of the whaler Essex, which was the spark for Melville's own book. The reader also learns much about the mechanics and economics of whaling, its culture. Una meets Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Maria Mitchell, and Frederick Douglass. And in most cases these interactions do not appear contrived as literary devices, although they allow discussion of the major issues of the time.
The book can be enjoyed simply as a period piece or a lively adventure. But it can also be appreciated on a deeper level, a metaphysical level, forcing questions about the role of religion, science and individual adaptability in confronting life's turns. The lessons Una learns, if they resonate with the reader, can certainly be carried into situations in our modern world.
I found the ending a little too tidy and a few of the relationships contrived. But, on the whole, Ahab's Wife is an excellent, well-written book. We rated it from 3.5 to 4.5 on a scale of 5, with more votes at the high end. An easy book to recommend.