Green Shadows, White Whale

In 1953, John Huston hired the young Ray Bradbury to write the screenplay for his adaptation of Moby Dick. Bradbury, who had never been on a plane and was terrified of the ocean, found himself in a rented cottage in County Wicklow, Ireland, wrestling with Herman Melville's vast, strange novel while Huston hunted and drank and terrorised everyone around him.

Green Shadows, White Whale is Bradbury's fictionalised account of those six months, and it is one of his most purely enjoyable books. The Irish characters, encountered in pubs and on country roads, are drawn with enormous affection. The portrait of Huston, renamed John the Director, is both admiring and unflinching. And Bradbury's own terror and wonder at finding himself in the middle of this adventure, this impossible commission, give the book its energy.

He described Huston as his white whale, the great obsessive force that nearly destroyed him and absolutely changed him. Whether or not you care about Moby Dick, this is a book about what it means to be given an impossible task and somehow, against all probability, to complete it.