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Summary
Summary
In 1872, the American merchant vessel Mary Celeste was discovered adrift off the coast of Spain. Her cargo was intact, but the crew was gone. They were never found. While on a voyage to Africa, an unproven young writer named Arthur Conan Doyle hears of the Mary Celeste and decides to write an outlandish story about what took place. This story causes quite a sensation back in the United States, particularly between sought-after Philadelphia spiritualist medium Violet Petra and a journalist named Phoebe Grant, who is seeking to expose Petra as a fraud. These three elements - a ship found sailing without a crew, a famous writer on the verge of enormous success, and the rise of an unorthodox and heretical religious fervor - converge in unexpected ways.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Martin (Property) uses one of the most baffling maritime mysteries of all time as the starting point for a complex exploration of several different characters, including Arthur Conan Doyle. The melancholic and moving prologue, set in 1859, foreshadows the disaster that befalls a ship named Early Dawn. In 1872, the brig Mary Celeste, en route from New York to Genoa, is found floating at sea, no one aboard, and no real clues as to what happened to its crew of seven, including the captain, Benjamin Briggs; his wife; and his daughter. A decade later, Doyle, who has not yet created Sherlock Holmes, writes a fictional account of the ship's fate, in which a lunatic passenger is responsible for a massacre of the others onboard. "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" elicits strong reactions from those who knew the Briggs family. Martin is less concerned with exploring theories about what actually happened than in the repercussions of the baffling disappearances, in a manner that will remind some of the Australian writer Joan Lindsay. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Martin's latest novel delves into the lingering questions surrounding the Mary Celeste, an American brig found drifting, intact but abandoned, in the open Atlantic in 1872. Eschewing a traditional linear narrative for an unconventional yet far more effective structure, Martin creates what seem at first to be loosely connected vignettes. Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote a sensationalist tale about the ship's fate in his youth, appears at several different points in his life, and a journalist crosses paths several times with an enigmatic medium she hopes to debunk. It progressively becomes clear that their stories link in multiple ways with the Briggs family of Marion, Massachusetts, many of whom died at sea. Characterization is first-rate, as is the historical sensibility. Subtle undercurrents of impending tragedy create a disquieting effect throughout, a fitting atmosphere for a work about a society preoccupied with making contact with deceased loved ones. The scenes of maritime disasters are realistically terrifying. A haunting, if sometimes slowly paced, speculative look at a long-unsolved maritime mystery and the unsettling relationships between writers and their subjects.--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ON DEC. 4, 1872, the brigantine Mary Celeste was discovered abandoned, adrift in the North Atlantic near the Azores. The ship was empty and its crew missing, although its cargo and provisions were intact, as were the crew's possessions. The weather was calm and the ship was seaworthy, but no trace of the crew-or of the captain's wife and 2-year-old child - was ever found. Newspapers around the world carried the story, and it inspired one of Arthur Conan Doyle's first published pieces of fiction, "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement," printed anonymously in the British journal Cornhill. From then until the present, dozens of other investigations, novels, historical accounts, television documentaries and movies have been devoted to what has become the prototypical ghost ship. Given this background, what could Valerie Martin possibly contribute to the story in her new novel? The answer is plenty. "The Ghost of the Mary Celeste" is a sly and masterly historical novel, a page-turner written with intelligence and flair. One way of constructing a novel that makes the whole seem larger than its parts is to variegate the parts - to employ multiple voices, styles and points of view, even interpolated genres, from poetry and court records to newspaper clippings, letters and diaries. Martin does all this and more, and the effect is striking. Her book becomes an omnium-gatherum, a mix-and-match scrapbook of journals, documents, narrative bridges and stories within stories. The result is a novel that feels both more and less real than a conventionally written work of fiction - more because of its historical provenance, less because we experience the story as if through shattered glass whose fragments can't be pieced back together. Less, too, because one of its themes is duplicity, and there are suggestions that some of the "documents" aren't genuine. Martin's novel is a work of fiction but it's about fiction, too, which is why Conan Doyle is an important minor character. When he wrote about the Mary Celeste, he got a lot of things wrong. But what's "wrong" in fiction? When inventions are secreted inside a larger invention, do they multiply the lies? Or do they magnify the truth that they're fiction? Martin's novel, with its cacophony of points of view and its sometimes contradictory personal accounts, stirs up uncertainties - these accounts could be hoaxes. Through her ingenious weaving of fiction and fact, she both "solves" the mystery and (as one of her characters says) deepens it. "The Ghost of the Mary Celeste" is also about late-19th-century spiritualism. A ghost story as well as a serious and sometimes comic inquiry into the existence of ghosts, it opens with a vivid account of a shipwreck in which the captain and his wife are lost overboard. In Massachusetts, the wife's 13-year-old cousin claims to have seen the dead woman's ghost, prompting her father, a minister, to grow concerned about his daughter's "spookism." "It's this insalubrious craze for talking to spirits," he complains. "It's loose in the world." This craze becomes a linking thread as the novel turns corner after corner, confounding our expectations while leading us on. There are more corners to turn than in the Pentagon, but the persistent conjuring of ghosts - or are they hallucinations created by psychic trauma? - becomes the novel's keel. I should add that the body count is high, producing an abundant supply of apparitions, all lost at sea. And the sea is virtually a character itself, inherently dangerous and indifferent: "We are nothing to it." As with "MobyDick," we can't help thinking that in the 19th century the malignancy of the oceans was inseparable from their indifference. In a novel that repeatedly exposes its own artifice, this image of the sea becomes an irreducible reality, underpinning all the imaginings. The 13-year-old cousin surfaces later in the novel as a celebrated psychic, now calling herself Violet Petra, described in a memoir written by Phoebe Grant, who introduces herself (with a jab at Henry James) as "that risible hobgoblin of the contemporary male novelist's imagination: the female journalist." Her specialty is the exposure of frauds. Amid the shifting points of view in "The Ghost of the Mary Celeste," Phoebe Grant's may be the strongest. She's a quick-witted skeptic, and the battle of ideas between her and Violet (which actually results in a friendship) is at the novel's heart. Readers may wonder what this centrifugal book, with its changing versions of reality, is finally about. It's about Violet Petra and what she represents: the notion that life is continuous after death and spirits live among us. But it's also about the opposite, as expressed by Phoebe, who has this to say about Violet and her kind: "The spirits they peddled had no mystery; they were ghosts stripped of their otherness. In their cosmography, the dead were just like us and they were everywhere, waiting to give us yet more unsolicited advice." "The test of a first-rate intelligence," F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked, "is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." The opposing ideas here, taking shape in Phoebe and Violet, come together in the novel's climactic passages, where some actual and chilling ghosts do appear. Whether they're "real" or not is up to the reader. I would say they're "real" in the fiction: They act appropriately to dramatize an intellectual conflict that is also deeply personal. "Voice" in fiction is language plus character, but character in the broadest sense - not just individual personality and psychology but the character of a region, class or historical period. Voice can be an exaggerated caricature; take a look at the early-20th-century American naturalists and the grotesque rendering of immigrant speech in novels like Frank Norris's "The Octopus." At the other extreme, a voice can be bland and flat, entirely lacking in character. As she moves from narrator to narrator, Martin modulates their voices in subtle but convincing ways, from the ingenuous and proper but emotionally engaging journal of a young mid-19th-century woman to Phoebe Grant's caustic irony to a close third-person narrator inflected by Conan Doyle's quaint deductions and imperial robustness. Martin's light touch serves her well. In a novel this replete, the novelist herself becomes a kind of familiar spirit who sees everything at once and finds a common tongue in these disparate voices. At times she even gently mocks her subjects, as when a mysterious femme fatale knocks on Conan Doyle's door and is described with a nearly sculptural touch, including telling details that beg to be deciphered. This woman then launches the creator of Sherlock Holmes across London through a maze of clues and coded messages that lead him to the Mary Celeste's log. This is a novel full of questions. What happened on the Mary Celeste? Is Violet Petra a genuine psychic or a fraud? Are terrible losses God's will or pure chance? Valerie Martin never sacrifices the richness of her novel for easy answers. She's more interested in the questions. And so, then, are we. JOHN VERNON is the author of 11 books, including six novels. He teaches in the creative writing program at Binghamton University.
Guardian Review
On 4 December 1872, a merchant brigantine called the Mary Celeste, out of New York and headed for Genoa, was found drifting in the Atlantic off Portugal, under full sail but apparently abandoned. Of her crew, including her master Benjamin Briggs, his wife Sallie and their two-year-old daughter Sophia, there was no sign, although all the possessions of those on board seemed to be in place, along with enough food and fresh water for six months; her cargo was intact. For more than a century, the legend of the Mary Celeste has fascinated us. There have been theories, wild and considered, attributing her fate variously to undersea earthquakes, sea monsters, methanol fumes and insurance fraud, but most of all she has attracted storytellers. The iconic image of the ghost ship, looming empty out of the Atlantic fogs and sailing on to eternity unmanned, has been taken up by generations of writers, from the anonymous authors of Edwardian penny dreadfuls to Stephen King. One of the first of these, and most instrumental in fixing the mystery in the public imagination, was Arthur Conan Doyle. As a fledgling writer, the future creator of Sherlock Holmes published his own fictionalised account in the Cornhill magazine in 1884 under the name J Habakuk Jephson. He drew heavily on fact but included significant errors that have since accreted to the myth, not least in calling the ship the Marie, rather than Mary, Celeste. A template for the locked-room mystery that was to become Conan Doyle's own trademark, the breathtaking inexplicability of the Mary Celeste's fate is the key to its fascination: it has acted as a blank sheet for lurid fantasy, swashbuckling adventure and elaborate theorising. However, prizewinning American novelist Valerie Martin has employed it for a novel of an altogether more nourishing sort - which will come as no surprise to those familiar with her subtle and psychologically potent historical fictions. Despite the nod to the supernatural in her title, Martin swerves a century of speculation and melodrama in favour of immersing herself in the real lives of those involved, and conjuring up their long-lost world. The daughter of a sea captain herself, she begins not with Conan Doyle, nor with the Mary Celeste's master Benjamin Briggs, but with a heartstopping account of the death of Briggs's aunt, Maria Gibbs, drowned in 1859 with her husband off Cape Fear following a collision at sea. From here, Martin steps into the life of Briggs's brisk, optimistic wife-to-be Sallie, whose sister Hannah, haunted by Gibbs's death, has taken on responsibility for the orphaned son Maria left behind. Increasingly unbalanced, she seeks communication with his mother from beyond the grave. Thence the reader is drawn into a succession of narratives, at times apparently unconnected but circling the central mystery. These range from newspaper reports and consular cables regarding the Mary Celeste's fate to Conan Doyle's account of a steamer trip to Africa and the investigations of Phoebe Grant, a rigorously rational spinster journalist who is on the trail of a medium called Violet Petra. Holding court at a spiritualist summer camp, Petra has a particular sensitivity to the story of the Mary Celeste and may, Grant gradually comes to understand, hold in her possession clues, if not a solution, to its puzzle. Without ever being told that we are drawing nearer to a central horror, the centrifugal tug of these accounts intensifies page by page: the final section purports to be the log of the Mary Celeste itself, which will be delivered into Conan Doyle's own hands. "Was it simply another hoax," Conan Doyle asks himself, "the desperate ploy of a poor, ambitious young writer, just as he had been, who schemed, just as he had schemed, to captivate the fickle attention of the public?" As the accounts - bona fide and otherwise - build towards revelation, we are drawn into an interrogation of both the dangerous seductiveness and higher purposes of fiction, even as we are held captive by Martin's skill as a storyteller. Each character springs to life as she gently reveals their flaws, from the tender, sexually intoxicated young sea-captain's wife to tetchy, sentimental, male chauvinist Conan Doyle. The most vivid and tangible member of a wide cast is the sea itself, a constant, dark, murmuring presence that holds them all in terrified thrall. There may still be readers who expect a definitive solution to this puzzle along with their story, but what Martin provides is more rewarding: along with a satisfying ghost story, she gives us the soil from which its central mystery grew. This is a perilous, oppressive world in which women spend months confined in cabins and parlours, waiting for terrible news, or battened in their husbands' quarters; where ships go down with all hands in far-flung seas in the blink of an eye. It is the death-obsessed society of the Victorians, with their bombazine and mourning brooches and seances, a culture that found its apogee in Tennyson's outpouring of grief and despair, In Memoriam, here quoted by Martin. Her great creation, the restless, unfathomable sea that swallows the Mary Celeste's crew whole, allows us to draw a line direct from Tennyson's "Nature red in tooth and claw" to the oceanic darkness foreseen by Conrad, emblematic of the chaos of the new century to come, where belief will be sacrificed to stern rationalism. Without for a moment losing her grip on her story, in a masterpiece of fine detail and intense reimagining, Martin evokes a world suspended between faith and reason, in which "the other side" is quite real - and always beckoning. Christobel Kent's latest book is A Darkness Descending. To order The Ghost of the Mary Celeste for pounds 14.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Christobel Kent There may still be readers who expect a definitive solution to this puzzle along with their story, but what [Valerie Martin] provides is more rewarding: along with a satisfying ghost story, she gives us the soil from which its central mystery grew. This is a perilous, oppressive world in which women spend months confined in cabins and parlours, waiting for terrible news, or battened in their husbands' quarters; where ships go down with all hands in far-flung seas in the blink of an eye. It is the death-obsessed society of the Victorians, with their bombazine and mourning brooches and seances, a culture that found its apogee in Tennyson's outpouring of grief and despair, In Memoriam, here quoted by Martin. Her great creation, the restless, unfathomable sea that swallows the [Mary Celeste]'s crew whole, allows us to draw a line direct from Tennyson's "Nature red in tooth and claw" to the oceanic darkness foreseen by Conrad, emblematic of the chaos of the new century to come, where belief will be sacrificed to stern rationalism. Without for a moment losing her grip on her story, in a masterpiece of fine detail and intense reimagining, Martin evokes a world suspended between faith and reason, in which "the other side" is quite real - and always beckoning. - Christobel Kent.
Kirkus Review
Martin (The Confessions of Edward Day, 2009, etc.) offers a complex, imaginative version of historical fiction, playing literary hide-and-seek with the unsolved mystery surrounding an American cargo vessel found abandoned in the Azores in 1872. Martin follows a linear chronology. In 1860, Benjamin Briggs, who will become the Mary Celeste's captain, courts his cousin Sallie Cobb, somewhat to the chagrin of her younger sister Hannah, a spiritual rebel who drifts into reveries during which she has visions. In 1872, the ship is found seaworthy but abandoned, with no sign of the crew, the captain, or his wife and infant daughter, who accompanied him on the voyage. In 1884, Arthur Conan Doyle, a young doctor and aspiring author, writes a fictional (and racist) solution to the mystery of what happened to the Mary Celeste that is heavily colored by his own less than happy trip to Africa three years earlier. The story, which captures the public's imagination and launches his career, is assumed factual by many but not by Philadelphia medium Violet Petra, who readers will immediately realize is Hannah Cobb, who long ago ran away from home and assumed a new identity. Violet is being dogged by reporter Phoebe Grant, who initially wants to expose Violet as a Spiritualist fraud but finds the young woman more victim than victimizer. On an American tour in 1894, the now famous Conan Doyle meets Petra, and she impresses him with a message from his long-dead father. He invites her to London. She disappears en route but not before giving Phoebe a document that only complicates the mystery of what happened to the Mary Celeste. And really, that mystery is the least compelling element of a novel that sheds unromantic but not unsympathetic light on 19th-century New-Age spirituality and feminism while beaming a less sympathetic focus on brilliant but highly unlikable Conan Doyle. It is Violet, the lost soul, whom readers will not be able to forget. Martin has wound the disparate threads of her novel into a haunting personal drama.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Martin's (The Confessions of Edward Day) evocative historical novel covers events leading up to, flowing past, and swirling around the enduring mystery of the "ghost ship" Mary Celeste, which was found adrift without a crew in 1872 off the Azores. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a short story positing about the fate of the ship, the publication of which led to a confrontation between a medium and a reporter. Martin's work explores the world of spiritualism and standards of truth and fiction. Narrator Susie Berneis navigates safely through the many characters and points of view. -VERDICT A great choice for historical fiction collections. ["Martin's seafaring story contains history, suspense, and heartbreak in equal measure as it slowly builds to an enigmatic conclusion. Highly recommended for all readers who appreciate quality historical fiction," read the starred review of the Nan A. Talese: Doubleday hc, LJ 10/15/13.]-Kristen L. Smith, Loras Coll. Lib., Dubuque, IA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
