Checkmate Book

As Melville stated himself, Omoo is only a sequel to Typee in that it follows the events that occur to the narrator after his experience with the Typee people from his first book. Only referred to once by his nickname Typee, the otherwise unnamed narrator agrees to temporary employment on the whaling ship Julia but finds himself in the middle of a crew that is dominated by a first mate while the captain has abdicated his responsibility and retreated into his infirmity. Upon the rejection of appeals to the local British consul to be exempt from active duty due to their own infirmity and the insistence of the mate that they get back to work, the narrator joins a group of mutineers that are taken ashore at Tahiti and confined to a makeshift jail from which escape is absurdly easy.

Along with his fellow escapee and roving companion Doctor Long Ghost, the narrator proceeds to wander among the islands, seeking nominal employment only when it requires little effort and changing plan and direction upon momentary impulse. The two wanderers work for a pair of Australian and British planters briefly, then hear of other Westerners obtaining respectable employment as translators/private secretaries to chiefs of some of the clans and consider that that prospect might be enjoyable as well as respectable. As soon as they settle on one occupation they discard the idea in favor of something more appealing.

The book takes on the rambling, episodic shape of their wanderings and lacks the cohesive narrative arc of Typee. In that book a thread of tension inherent in fear of the narrator that his benevolent captivity masked the true intentions of his cannibalistic captors of preparing him for a nice, hearty meal. In Omoo there is no realistic sense of danger. The rovers roam freely, escape captivity easily and possess an ease of mobility that the character in the first book never attained. This book is a loose narrative that merely serves the purpose of providing a framework in which Melville can describe the local culture, including brief explanations of dress, history, lifestyle, industry and so on.

The most riveting portion of the book occurs early, with the description of the whaler and its crew. Notably, Melville's experience on a whaler such as the Julia not only enabled him to describe a whaling ship with verisimilitude but also provided him with the setting for Moby-Dick. The Julia and its crew is a greatly inferior forerunner of the more vividly realized Pequod and its array of memorable characters. No real whaling is described in Omoo and the conditions that precipitate the mutiny and subsequent Tahitian adventures are never sufficiently conveyed. The mate John Jermin is a weak predecessor of Captain Ahab.

Omoo is intermittently interesting and the depiction of the native life varies in the extent to which it is successful. After reading the facts of Melville's experience from which he derived the narrative, I can see that he indulged in a great deal of fictional invention, conflating events and creating composite characters. What he failed to do was to create a compelling story. I would recommend the book only to readers who, like me, are curious about the books that Melville wrote before Moby-Dick changed the course of his career and secured his position in world literature.