Title: THE DEEP
Author: Alma Katsu
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Read: August 2020
Expected publication: out now
My Rating: 🌟🌟🌟
Book Description:
Someone, or something, is haunting
the Titanic.
This is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the
passengers of the ship from the moment they set sail: mysterious
disappearances, sudden deaths. Now suspended in an eerie, unsettling twilight
zone during the four days of the liner's illustrious maiden voyage, a number of
the passengers - including millionaires Madeleine Astor and Benjamin
Guggenheim, the maid Annie Hebbley and Mark Fletcher - are
convinced that something sinister is going on . . . And then, as the world
knows, disaster strikes.
Years later and the world is at war. And a survivor of that fateful night,
Annie, is working as a nurse on the sixth voyage of the Titanic's sister ship,
the Britannic, now refitted as a hospital ship. Plagued by the demons of
her doomed first and near fatal journey across the Atlantic, Annie comes across
an unconscious soldier she recognises while doing her rounds. It is the young
man Mark. And she is convinced that he did not - could not - have survived the
sinking of the Titanic . . .
What attracted me to this book:
Show me a person who isn’t fascinated by the history of the
ill fated Titanic and its passengers – I certainly am, and the promise of a
ghost story on the grand ship was just too tempting to resist!
My musings:
It is not all that farfetched to imagine that some
would blame an evil deity or spirit for the great ship’s demise, seeing how all
three sister ships of the White StarLine’s fleet of steamships succumbed to
tragedy. And even though Annie, our main protagonist, was an entirely fictional
character, Katsu wove several true historical figures into her story to lend it
substance – I enjoyed reading up on some of them after finishing the book, and
they provided a fascinating backstory. Especially intriguing to me was Violet
Jessop, the true survivor of all three White Star Line maritime disasters. A
stewardess on the RMS Olympic and the RMS Titanic, she also survived the
torpedoing of the last sister, the HMHS Britannic. To be honest, I thought that
Violet, who featured only peripherally, would have made a much better narrator
than the somewhat insipid Annie, but I can see that this would have created
inaccuracies that could not have been easily excused by writing fiction. My
biggest disappointment, however, was that I bonded with many of the narrators
who feature as passengers of the ill-fated Titanic, but never learned of their
final fate.
If I had to put my finger of why I
experienced an overall lingering feeling of discontent I would say that the
book suffered from having too much packed into the one story. Two timelines
from Annie’s POV, several POVs from various passengers on the Titanic, and a
final rather fantastical supernatural element towards the end that felt forced
and il-fitted to the overall story. Had the book stuck with the Titanic setting
and its characters, it would have worked much better for me, especially as I
never really connected to Annie but found some of the more peripheral
characters (such as the two boxers) much more engaging.
The supernatural element, which is
always a difficult theme to balance, was slightly underdone in the first part
of the story, where the vast bulk of the Titanic could have provided more
setting for unsettling encounters and an underlying feeling of menace and
dread. It ramped up in the second timeline, but seemed ill-matched to the rest
of the story and seemed unbelievable and forced to me. To be honest, the last
quarter of the book barely managed to hold my interest, featuring – in my
opinion - the two least interesting characters whose fate I was barely invested
in.
Summary:
To sum it all up into one coherent paragraph, THE
DEEP was the type of dual narrative where one timeline definitely overshadowed
the other one, to the detriment of my overall enjoyment. Whilst I loved the
chapters involving the voyage of the ill-fated Titanic, I felt myself skimming
through large parts of the second timeline. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the
historical details included in the book, and probably learned much about the
events leading up to the sinking of the great ship by reading up on many of the
people Katsu included in her story. It’s never easy to mix fact with fiction,
and I feel that the author did a great job here by bringing some of these
historical figures to life for us. I am very keen now to read her earlier book
THE HUNGER, which also blends historical fiction with a ghostly element.
Thank
you to Edelweiss and G.P. Putnam’s Sons for the free electronic copy of this novel and
for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.
