Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania (book review)
engrossing, but not Larson’s best…
Book review:
Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania
by Erik Larson (b1954)
Crown Publishers, New York, 2015
430 pages
I’m a fan of Erik Larson, starting with The Devil in the White City. Dead Wake offers a similar reading experience in Larson’s “no frippery” prose, and with a consistent tension that makes it a page turner.
I confess that it’s hard to avoid the somewhat deadening spoiler in this story: from Page 1, we know how it’s going to end. Torpedoed by Germany’s U-20, the Lusitania went down in about 18 minutes. Larson’s approach is exclusively chronological; it’s not a bad thing, but I found myself almost thinking out loud—“let’s get on with it”—as I navigated through the certainly more than adequate number of anecdotal scenes involving the ill-fated passengers and their clothing/meals/flirtations/premonitions/self-assurances…
Full disclosure: to the end, I was rooting for passenger Theodate Pope to get some love in her life. On the other hand, I now know far more than I care to know about President Wilson’s mushy courting of Edith Galt (who became his second wife).
The thing is, Larson tells a great yarn here but he doesn’t invite the reader to grapple with it. It falls short of shattering, consequential drama. The sociable elements—the almost chatty context—of much of his tale seem to displace full engagement with the terror of the event, and the outcomes that it hastened.
Larson tries to invest this story with solemnity, respect, and understanding.
Dead Wake is a dutiful—indeed, engrossing—account, but it doesn’t quite rise to the occasion.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2023 All rights reserved.
Play review: A Doll’s House
Henrik Ibsen’s classic on abuse…
click here
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