It is usually only in the shape of myths and legends that children are offered story on an epic scale. Which is a shame. How are they going to learn to think big if they don’t encounter giants? Anyway, that was my excuse for adapting this leviathan of a book for children. Adaptation, or even abridgement, must be heresy to true devotees — an act of sacrilege against a piece of literature they regard almost as holy writ. Indeed I understand there is one man who reads Moby-Dick six times a year, starting again as soon as he reaches the end — a circularity normally reserved for the Bible or painting the Forth Road Bridge.

For countless other moderately intelligent readers, though, Moby-Dick epitomises Mark Twain’s definition of a classic: a book that everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read. So what remains if, to make it an easier read, the impenetrable biblical language is stripped away and the arcane chapters about tying knots and mining ambergris have to be filleted out? What remains is a riveting adventure about a ship of mesmerising fools, and a wealth of thinking on an oceanic scale. Moby-Dick has everything: fate and fear, monsters and madness and obsession, good versus evil, order versus chaos; the inevitability of death . . . The crew of The Pequod blindly plunge towards a creature “like an open-doored marble tomb”.

If it turned up on the slush-pile these days, I’ll bet a publisher would either turn it down or want it stripped to the backbone. And, to be honest, I’d rather listen to it on audio in the car than carry the book around. (Mr Hootkins has done the world a great service.) But its set-piece scenes and storyline still grip as they gripped 150 years ago. Attitudes towards whaling may have changed — in those days the whaling men were the endangered species. (There is no way this book would sell to children if the whale didn’t get away in the end.) But Moby-Dick continues to work because there are still (and always will be) people too obsessive, too strait-laced, too superstitious, too fatalistic, people “daft with strength” and “daft with weakness”. And the sea is still in the business of eating anyone who passes over its back.

The thing that stretches the modern imagination almost to the limit is that men ever submitted themselves to the absolute tyranny of sea captains or dared pit themselves, over and over again, against vast, stinking, unpredictable monsters likely to drag them to the bottom without even noticing.

What does it lack? Women. Perhaps that’s why they’re all as mad as lemmings.

Geraldine McCaughrean’s re-telling of Moby-Dick is published by Oxford University Press (£4.99, offer £4.74 with free p&p, call 0870 160 8080), as is her new novel The White Darkness (£12.99, offer £11.69 with free p&p)

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