1. The Wager as a Survival/Naval Story
Do you like survival stories? Naval stories? How does The Wager compare to others you have read.
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I guess I do - I've read a bunch of them. Not because they're survival stories, and I'm not hunting for survival stories. I pick them because they're historical aventures, travelogues, or related fiction/non-fiction. Others like this I've read include Dan Simmons The Terror, Farley Mowat's Ordeal by Ice (which is mostly first person accounts of actual arctic exploration, many of which went spectacularly wrong), Michael Palin's Erebus, a novel about the Donner party, which name I can;t recall, and at least two about Cabeza de Vaca, the most recent of which was The Moor's Account by Laila Lalami, a fictional retelling.
Naval stories - I like them a lot and have read tons. Too many to list, both fiction and non-fiction.
How does The Wager compare? It's midling, I thought, but midling in a genre full of excellent books. In GoodReads terms, I gave it a 4/5, which means I really liked it. But It did quite rise to the level of Ordeal by Ice or Erebus or The Terror (which is fiction, not history).
I've not read many (any?) survival stories. I've read a few naval adventure stories, such as the Hornblower books. However, I've not read a great many "popular history" accounts of navies and survival. So not a great deal of comparison.
Treating this as a book, I didn't think it was great. Some of it was that it was the wrong level for me: I've read things like Hornblower, so I knew quite a bit of the detail of age-of-sail naval life. Apart from that, I think Grann overdid the description of the events and places, so I felt like I was wading through paragraphs and pages of description before getting to anything interesting.
The one thing that I did learn from this was just how devastating scurvy was, and how everyone just accepted that huge numbers of the crews would die, and they'd be expected to carry on.
Right? Scurvy. Daaaaamn.
Like the others so far, I've read plenty of naval fiction set in the Age of Sail but almost all of that has been set later on, around the time of the Napoleonic Wars (eg Alexander Kent, CS Forester, Patrick O'Brian) and rather less survival stories.
I had expected this to be a fictional tale and so had to rapidly adjust expectations when at a very early stage it became clear that in fact it was a partly fictionalised retelling of true events, as reconstructed from diaries and other contemporary records. So this was a new foray for me regarding naval literature and as such it was partly successful.
I found David Grann's style very uneven - there was (for me) way too much stuff early on about how lots of naval terminology had entered the English language... I'm sure this was new and helpful for lots of readers but I kept finding myself thinking, come on, let's get on with the real stuff. I wasn't all that bothered with the collection of pictures and diagrams at the end and just skimmed them. I'm sure that if I was more engaged with that period of history I would find them more stimulating.
For me, the central section describing the two small boat journeys was the best part (I suspect this was also, necessarily, more fictionalised than other parts as the first-hand accounts were more inconsistent and patchy), and that carried me through the rest. As others have said, the descriptions of scurvy were truly horrific.
The trial itself was decidedly anticlimactic, nicely reflecting the way that the Royal Navy and government in general really just wanted this to go away. That response, and the way it was handled in the court martial by simply avoiding asking questions which might be difficult, was interesting in itself, but hardly makes for great storytelling!
So to return to the starting point, The Wager was very different from any other naval fiction I've read, and I'm glad I've read it... but I don't think I'd rush to read another like it.
@RichardAbbott - I think you bring up a good point about audience. I don't read a ton of naval stuff fictional or otherwise. Some of those nautical terms that found their way into common speech surprised me. That doesn't say much for me as a reader, but I suspect the book was written more for folks like me than you. Meaning I bet he was shooting for a broad appeal to fairly low common denominator, not to write something that would stand out to age-of-sail-buffs. But I could be wrong.
(Is ‘fleeting’ a nautical term turned to broader use, too?)
No. it's derived from "fleet" meaning fast moving. Something which is 'fleeting' moves past very quickly. See also 'flit'.
I literally grew up with Mr. Midshipman Easy by Marryat and Mr. Midshipman Hornblower on the bookcase built into my bed, and they were favorite reading for my early childhood; and I have read immense amounts of naval fiction, particularly Age of Sail, since. Entire series from many authors. I have read, in fact, The Unknown Shore, Patrick O'Brian's fictionalized account of this very occurrence. I also wrote an Age of Sail RPG.
I felt it was interesting enough, but not engrossing. Being history it was fascinating, and I enjoyed the details of shipboard life, but would have rather read a history without interpolated story, or a work of fiction. This was neither fish nor fowl. I certainly enjoyed it, but lots of things I knew already. He's not that good a writer that he could enthrall me when telling me something I already knew, but it was good enough.
As in "fleet of foot" etc
Exactly!