Billy Budd by Herman Melville; read by Simon Jones; abridged by Donald Bancroft (Listen for Pleasure: 2 cassettes; 3 hours; $13.95 until March 1; $14.95 thereafter; LFP 7189-7)

When he died in 1891, Herman Melville had earned scarcely more than $10,000 in book royalties in 45 years. His eight major works had sold no more than 50,000 copies here and in England, and “Moby Dick,” his masterpiece, was out of print. He left a few poems and the rough manuscript of a last novel, “Billy Budd.” It was not published until 1924, when, at last, Melville had begun to be rediscovered.

His story of pure innocence (the cheerful young sailor Budd) confronting pure evil (John Claggart, master of arms,) aboard the British warship Indomitable in 1797 became an operatically intense film in 1962. Peter Ustinov co-authored and directed it, with Terence Stamp as Budd and Robert Ryan as Claggart.

These days, Melville no longer needs to be rediscovered. “Moby Dick” is a steady seller. “Billy Budd” and other Melville writings are available in various editions, including a recent Library of America volume. A 27-hour reading of the unabridged “Moby Dick” has found wide audiences, and now the Canadian audio-recording outfit, Listen for Pleasure, has published this two-cassette, three-hour abridged version of “Billy Budd.”

Purists, of course, regard abridgements of major literary works as blasphemies, to be compared with wearing brown shoes with a tuxedo or mixing single-malt Scotch and root beer. But there is already ample evidence that skilled condensers can, at the price of no more than a few discursive passages, prune free the narrative line and yet preserve mood, place, character and the work’s powers of implication.

“Billy Budd” is actually no more than novella length--82 comfortable pages in the Library of America volume--so that abridger Donald Bancroft has, by a very rough reckoning, had to trim no more than a quarter of Melville’s text, probably less.

The reading by the British actor Simon Jones has been very well calculated. Melville’s narrator might once more be Ishmael, a well-voyaged sailor recalling and recounting another extraordinary parable of man at sea, in every sense. “Budd” ’s Ishmael has no name, but he is a particular human voice, not the omniscient scribe, God with a quill.

Thus Jones is conversational, intimate, not overly histrionic although making the various voices distinct and individual. He is perhaps (as Ishmael was in one of the stories-within-the-story in “Moby Dick”) the tale-teller in the next chair at the club or at a table in a sidewalk cafe, with a mesmerizing hold on his audience.

Melville, who variously titled his manuscript “Billy Budd, Sailor” (preferred by Harrison Hayford, the editor of the Library of American volume) and “Billy Budd, Foretopman,” was evidently creating fable out of fact. A sailor had been hanged for taking part in a mutiny on a U.S. warship in 1842--a ship on which Melville’s brother Gansevoort had coincidentally been an officer.

Budd, who has been seized from his merchant ship and impressed into service on the warship, a common enough practice in the 18th-Century British navy, kills Claggart accidentally. He is, as no one doubts, innocent of murder. But by the strict interpretation of maritime law, he must die.

It is a tragedy in which large lessons can be read about the fall of man, about good and evil and man’s flawed nature. The brooding and often profoundly depressed Melville, whose family at times thought him insane, meant the lessons to be taken. And in “Billy Budd” as in “Moby Dick,” he embedded them in an engrossing narrative. The Jones reading is compelling enough that the cassettes could just possibly lead a listener to the originating text.