After more than a decade of feminist reimaginings of classical myths, folk tales and canonical novels, one might have thought the market was saturated, the public sated. But then along comes the novelist, filmmaker and memoirist Xiaolu Guo to test these assumptions. From her 2007 debut, A Concise Chinese–English Dictionary for Lovers, to her remarkable trilogy of memoirs, Guo has surprised and delighted readers. Her new book, a take on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, doesn’t disappoint. 

Call Me Ishmaelle opens with our heroine’s birth in a ‘windswept cottage on the coast of Kent in the year of 1843’. At eighteen, Ishmaelle disobeys her mother and picks some white sea campion, known as dead man’s bells, a bringer of bad luck. Disaster duly follows in the shape of her father’s death and, shortly afterwards, that of her mother in childbirth. When her brother goes off to sea, she tries to join him but is refused passage on the grounds of gender. In response, she hacks off her ponytail: ‘I cut more and more, until I felt I looked like a man … What a curse to be woman, to be a girl.’ Before long, she’s sailing to Nantucket. There, disguised as a man and going by the name of Ishmael, she’s taken aboard the Nimrod, a whaling ship that corresponds to the Pequod in Moby-Dick.

Ishmaelle’s concealment of her gender and the constant threat of detection keep the tension high for the first half of the book. The pleasure of matching the characters to their originals in Melville’s book also keeps us interested. The tattooed harpooner Queequeg becomes the Polynesian Kauri, with whom a trembling