Tuesday, July 19, 2016

The Midnight Watch

I enclose my Goodreads review of this book by David Dyer about the 'side story' of inaction by a nearby ship when Titanic struck an iceberg and failed to recover. He has researched the characters and actions that  turned a maritime accident into a human disaster.

The Midnight Watch: A Novel of the Titanic and the CalifornianThe Midnight Watch: A Novel of the Titanic and the Californian by David Dyer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I wasn't particularly interested in an analysis of the events surrounding the Titanic story, but I was rather captivated by the failures that made it such a disaster.
The unfathomable distortions of a truth, or maybe just the exploration of the impossibility of truth as memory lie just beneath this fictional rendition based upon actual events and people in the sinking of Titanic and the loss of so much life- apparently unnecessarily. The book explores the terrible inaction of a nearby ship when Titanic was damaged and unable to recover.
In the last pages Dyer masterfully resolves a lifetime of focus by a fictional newspaper journalist who struggled for decades to explain the human failures at the heart of the tragedy, and did so finally by understanding that human action takes place within a lived emotional and psychological context.


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