Half Moby Dick, half Sunless Sea, Nantucket sweats Nineteenth Century nautical drama the way the Charles W. Morgan to this very day sweats Nineteenth Century whale oil. Picaresque’s failure to recreate whaling’s most telling/pathetic scenes (The hopeless marguerite… the confused calf following the whaleship that slaughtered its mother…) worries me, but not sufficiently to cause a rift. I’m in for the long haul. Unlike, sadly, some of the Flare Path readers who, last Friday, volunteered to crew my ‘new’ barque. (more…)