The Wager

"This gripping historical narrative of survival and leadership aligns with Barack Obama's interest in stories of human resilience and complex moral dilemmas."

"It’s about a voyage on an 18th-century British ship, the H.M.S. Wager, which ended with shipwreck and mutiny on a remote island, and about the betrayals and feuds among the survivors. It is tremendous. You learn so much: about maritime history, the world of the sea, the workings of Empire. It’s a fantastic, dark adventure story with heroes and villains. It’s also an incredible work of archival research—Grann has translated what he found in the archives and in printed materials from the 18th century into this very live, vivid story. It reminded me of how transporting it can be to read old papers and documents. In nonfiction, some of the drama or mystery that you feel when you’re researching can be recaptured on the page in the form of an adventure story or a criminal investigation. It made me think how these things are not dissimilar—although one takes place in your head as you sit in an archive. The book captures that thrill. So yes, it’s a very powerful work. I believe Grann traveled to the island in the course of his research, and his book has a very strong sense of place. One of the exciting things about researching the past is that though you can’t travel in time, you can travel in space, and visit the scenes in which your story took place: the house in which a murder was committed, or the fields through which somebody escaped, or the island on which people were stranded. Yes, I did go to the neighborhood and worked out where the house would have been. It was an extraordinarily notorious address after the murders, not least because Christie’s victims had been found in the seams and crevices of the building. He’d put bodies under the floorboards and behind a wall, and it attracted a lot of ghoulish tourism for years afterwards. Immediately after it was demolished in a slum clearance in 1970, an enterprising local mocked up a different house in the street as number 10 Rillington Place and charged people for entry. And even now there’s a reconstruction of one of the rooms in the Chamber of Horrors at Madam Tussauds. It’s almost as if we want to hang on to these places, as if they might divulge some secret or offer some explanation. It’s a very strange impulse, the desire to enter places where terrible things happened, but it’s very strong. In a way, writing a book about a place is a version of that. Yes, I suppose when I’m researching, the gleanings that I gather up and keep are the things that make it vivid for me. And I think, ‘Oh, that’s what you would have had for breakfast, or where you would have shopped. This is what things smelt like or sounded like.’ All that feels like treasure, finding the details that allow you to really imagine yourself back there. It’s funny, my subject matter is usually quite lurid and outsized and unbelievable—an extraordinary thing that happened that seems almost fictional, beyond the normal, and yet, in writing about it, the things that I’m really drawn to are the things that root it again, that ground it, that are to do with the banalities of everyday life. The quotidian stuff is compelling to me. The sensational, explosive event is the premise, but where I want to go is to be there in that moment, to imagine that place and time. Absolutely. I first realized when I researched The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher what fantastic sources crime stories generate. The police gather their evidence, most of which turns out to be irrelevant to the criminal case and is not heard in court. But in the files, if they’ve been preserved, there are witness statements from neighbors, friends, family, shopkeepers, employers. There are clues throughout these testimonies to how people lived, what mattered to them, their habits and views and feelings and their language, the phrasing they used. The files are so rich in this material about everyday life which doesn’t get recorded in the history books, on the whole, because it seems too ordinary to be interesting."

"The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder is an exhaustively researched and thrilling account of a long-forgotten, 18th-century calamity at sea. Unlike Herman Melville’s or Patrick O’Brian’s nautical adventures, which I also love, this historical narrative isn’t just based on a true story – it really is one, despite extremes of psychology and nature that make the recounted events almost unbelievable. That’s part of why reading it felt like getting swept away by a hurricane-force gale, as journalist David Grann laid out the stunning facts and surprises in his deceptively simple and spare writing."