Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is one of the great works of literature to come to us from America. The book defies any strict categorisation. It is at the one time a treatise on cetology, an account of the whaling trade in the 19th century and a novel plumbing those dark recesses of the human psyche where hatred, anger and revenge have their very seat. When I read David Marr’s account of Cardinal George Pell in the latest issue of Quarterly Magazine, Captain Ahab immediately came to mi…
