Yes, I Liked: The Wager
Nautical non-fiction for #117
There’s a not-insubstantial group of people who, when they ask me what I’m currently reading and I respond with a non-fiction title, react with over-the-top incredulity — “really? You’re reading non-fiction?” These people may love me, but they clearly do not think I am a serious person.
Well, joke’s on you, judgey people, because I’ve read 11 non-fiction books so far this year, and we’re gonna talk about one of them today. (Is calling people “judgey” in itself a judgey thing to do? If so I don’t want to put this energy in the universe I take it back I love you all.)
OK so The Wager opens in 1742 with the unbelievable arrival in Brazil of 30 British castaway sailors whose boat had gone missing nearly a year before from a mission to capture a Spanish galleon. They’re hailed as heroes … until six months later, another three sailors wash up in Chile and tell a very different story about the voyage, one of mutiny, incompetence, death and betrayal. The Wager traces the entire voyage from triumphant launch through to court-martial.
Ahoy and avast, right?! While I am generally quite partial to narrative non-fiction, an historical seafaring tale wouldn’t at first have grabbed me had it not been on my Sun Valley Writers’ Conference reading list. So learn from my almost mistakes, friends, and don’t miss this one (or, you know, trust the ten million great reviews this book has received, that might make more sense.)
To be honest, I found the first quarter of the book hard-going, with an endless overview of nautical terms and visions of imperialist conquests. I guess authors like to show their work. Or perhaps it’s a deliberate literary device to keep us slowly, tensely ticktickticking up the rollercoaster hill so that when the action starts, it catapults us forward. Because once we actually get on the water, it’s a thrilling tale of seafaring, skullduggery and survival, and what humans are capable of doing.
First, what absolute trials and horrors our incredible bodies can withstand. You’ll give shuddering thanks for modern medicine, citrus, and the fact that you are not standing on a ship with fifty-foot Antarctic waves breaking over you for hours at a time. So much of this story is relentlessly physical and intimate, describing in detail hardship after hardship, from typhus to lice to scurvy to starvation. It seems impossible that generations of men survived this.
But it’s also a study of not just the extraordinary resilience but also the thoughtless, harmful, cruel and heartbreakingly arrogant choices humans will make in pursuit of whatever we justify to ourselves, particularly when it’s a question of literal survival and the unbreakable desire to live. It’s horrifying and disappointing and understandable, at all once.
You can enjoy The Wager simply as an adventure tale worth reading for its feats of daring, but for me it’s made excellent because it is a brilliant tale of human storytelling - literally how we are all the heroes of our own stories, and how we justify our actions to ourselves and others. The book is pieced together with impossibly thorough reporting from salt-bleached captain’s logs, waterlogged sailors’ journals, court records, and published books, and Grann is masterful in teasing out discrepancies to show not just “the truth” of what happened, to the extent that this exists, but the conflicting stories that were told about it.
Not just by the sailors themselves, but also the macro stories of the voyage itself and how countries justify anything to themselves in the pursuit of power. (Spoiler?) Grann has just the right amount of distance to recognize the colonialist, domineering structures that drove - and drive - so much of what we do as societies in the name of “conquest” and “world order” and good old fashioned power. It doesn’t feel scolding but neither does it whitewash what happened in the name of military glory and human accomplishment.
Heads up, this is a good Father’s Day book gift! But honestly, good for readers of all kinds. FWIW, I greatly preferred this to Killers of the Flower Moon, which I also liked.
The Wager receives 2.5 lambs on the Gentle Lamb Diagnostic Scale not because it’s a tearjerker per se but it rigorously details hardship after hardship. Delicate sensibilities should be advised.
You Guys! (She Said in a Gen X Non-Gendered Way)
I’d like to air a grievance and frankly I’d like you to side with me even if I’m wrong.
When I hear about a book I like, I add it to my library app holds list. Then when it shows up, it’s like Christmas morning, I get the book, birds sing, there’s raindrops on roses, it’s all great.
But THIS WEEK I was CUT OFF from adding more books to my library holds.
!!!
I have a MERE 25 BOOKS ON HOLD. I blame the arbitrary but heartless choices of an app developer (my new nemesis) who CLEARLY did not do enough user research to discover that anyone dedicated enough to use their library app is going to have a long reading list. I mean, how am I meant to keep track of all the books I need to read?!? WHOMST am I harming with 26 book holds, your Honor? I am a library patron of voluble library praise and EXCELLENT BORROWING STANDING.
Stay tuned for more tales of deprivation and protest from the front lines.
A Postscript from the Captain’s Log
This week’s links go to Unabridged Bookstore in Chicago, a place that depressed and illiquid 20-something Kerry would spend a lot of time though regrettably not a lot of money. A great indie bookstore to support, especially in Pride Month. Don’t forget to share your fave indie bookstores with me for future newsletter inclusion!
For more narrative non-fiction or really any other genre of book except climate dystopia (sorry, Emily St John Mandel), check 116 weeks of recommendations in the archive!
To that end, I’m toying with renaming this newsletter “Right Book, Right Time” (s/o to Danielle for the idea which I boldly stole from her in the manner of 1700’s imperial mariners). Because here we read new books, old books, five lambers and one lambers. WDYT?
Love this book? Hate this genre? Want to tell me about what you’re reading? Leave me a comment, send me an email, or just share this newsletter with a friend so they too can live laugh love books alongside us and I can become an independently wealthy book newsletterer. But mostly the former. Okay thanks!
Solution for the library hold issue - get a second library card and you can switch between accounts when holding books.
If you liked The Wager, you should read (if you haven't already) Endurance by Alfred Lansing! It's everything you liked about The Wager and more.