Redburn Audiobook By Herman Melville cover art

Redburn

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Redburn

By: Herman Melville
Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
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Drawn from Melville's own adolescent experience aboard a merchant ship, Redburn charts the coming-of-age of Wellingborough Redburn, a young innocent who embarks on a crossing to Liverpool together with a roguish crew. Once in Liverpool, Redburn encounters the squalid conditions of the city and meets Harry Bolton, a bereft and damaged soul, who takes him on a tour of London that includes a scene of rococo decadence unlike anything else in Melvilles fiction. Redburn is not a document; it is a work of art by the unexpected genius of a sailor, Herman Melville.

Public Domain (P)2010 Audible, Inc. Classics Fiction Historical Fiction

Editorial reviews

With few other choices left open, young Wellingborough Redburn signs on the Highlander, a merchant ship leaving New York City for England. Narrator Kirby Heyborne's youthful, easy performance expresses the intrepid Redburn's thoughts with charm and sympathy as he finds out that life at sea isn't what he'd naively expected. Heyborne, who has received numerous AudioFile Earphone Awards, as well as the Odyssey Award, describes Redburn's difficulties on the ship with dismay and resignation, and he intensifies the shock when the boy arrives in Liverpool and witnesses the corruption, desperation, and poverty there. As Redburn returns to New York, listeners will hear his new-found maturity in Heyborne's sober narration.
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This is a fantastic adventure of a kid with wanderlust in 1839. However, Melville’s style of writing in that period which shifted from third to first person is strange by contemporary standards. His reflection on the plight of the world’s poor, including Irish immigrants that he witnessed suffering in steerage just a few few years before the potato famine, revealed the disdainful chasm between the rich & penniless in the mid 19th century.

Classic Tale of Adventure … & Social Disparities

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Melville learned to write Moby Dick after Hawthorne suggested he rework the draft. This was from the period before Melville found his miraculous calling. Some of the book is fine. The strange erudition of the hero conflated him with the author at odd times.

The reader is well intentioned but lazy. He mispronounces so many words, relying on glibness and bluster. He should look up any word he is unsure of. And there must be non director to police the work. Many dozens of mispronounced words Many. Too common nowadays

Lesser Melville Poorly Read

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It’s good enough. Not Moby Dick caliber, but interesting on certain parts. A sailor’s tale.

Melville Fan

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Good reader. Better at accents than more accomplished narrators. The book is simply awesome. Profound, yet accessible.

Good reader

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It must be awful as a writer to dash off a novel for money or tobacco in a couple of weeks and have it praised, but see your earlier serious novel (Mardi) panned, and your later novel (Moby-Dick) under-appreciated until years after your death. That is the genius of a select group of writers -- they are destined to exist in this weird space between art and the public. Perhaps the strong bitter of Melville's art was just too early and too strange for the public, but they WERE ready for his swipes.

If you are into literature of the sea (The Sea Wolf, The Pilot, Captains Courageous, etc.,) or you are just into Melville, you will want to read this. If, however, this is your first Melville, I'd stick with Moby-Dick.

A funky autobiographical novel/bildungsroman

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What did you like best about Redburn? What did you like least?

I liked the hints of the themes Melville would elaborate in Moby Dick. The start was promising, if heavily "based on a true story" and I presume heavily autobiographical. The Famine emigrants in Liverpool and at sea gain some attention, perhaps notable in fiction. But I disliked the "Harry" diversion and the latter part of the story weakened the plot. It reminded me of how Huck Finn also falls apart after a strong start, a few decades later.

If you’ve listened to books by Herman Melville before, how does this one compare?

I have not heard any (yet).

What aspect of Kirby Heyborne’s performance would you have changed?

I liked Kirby Heyborne dramatizing David Mitchell's own "heavily autobiographical" coming-of-age "Black Swan Green." So I purchased this on that strength. But Kirby H. mispronounces hillocks, shillelagh, Lothario, Hecate, indefatigable, and over and over tarpaulin, to name but a few words he surely should have known, or checked. My rating reflects this shortcoming.

Was Redburn worth the listening time?

It unfolds more slowly than any other audiobook I can recall outside of, say, the dense Thomas Sowell treatise on Marxism. Not unpleasant, and I fell asleep (with the timer) many nights as I listened to segments. Melville does put you at sea with him vividly. Despite the clunky plot, this is mostly worthwhile. I assume it's not the highest-ranked among his canon.

Any additional comments?

It's a strain to hear the perorations to Carlo the Italian organ-grinder boy (yes, that's him) as well as the paeans to the "girlish figure" of the narrator's pal and bosum (?) buddy Harry. Their relationship and his backstory are occluded, but scholars now must have devoted feverish scrutiny to what Melville's alluding to. But the novel "goes south" and never returns.

A leisurely if perplexing voyage

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Presented as a series of vignettes of the sailors first passage from New York to Liverpool with the work and emotions as rolling as the sea. Not as earthy as his earlier novels and not as refined as the later, Melville continues to mature his style and storytelling.

Vignettes of late 19th century ship life

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