Tags
2.5 stars, Austrian literature, books, first time read, historical fiction, naval fiction, own book, read in 2023, reading, review
Title: Sieben Lichter
Author: Alexander Pechmann
First published: 2017
Dates read: 9. 11. – 21. 11. 2023
Category: first-time read, own book, Austrian literature, naval fiction, historical fiction
Rating: 2.5/5
The book in five words or less: interesting subject, boring execution
My thoughts:
In June 1828, a trading vessel reached the port of Cove in Ireland. On board were four frightened boys, two badly wounded men, and seven bodies of passengers and crew members who had been gruesomely murdered. The suspect: The vessel’s own captain, currently missing. This setup, based on a true story, is the starting point of Alexander Pechmann’s novelization of what is essentially a 19th century true crime case that features murder and mania.
If you have been following this blog for a while, or really just my reading in general, you can probably guess why I picked up this book. It does, after all, feature a couple of my favourite things: a mystery, a shipboard setting, and a real-life polar explorer as the investigator. (In this novel’s case, the explorer in question is the whaler, arctic explorer, and theologian William Scoresby.) Sadly, neither the interesting premise nor the beautiful cover held up to the actual reading experience.
As it turns out, Alexander Pechmann may have turned up a fascinating subject (that his bibliography invites further investigation of), but his storytelling did not do it justice in the least. The novel is told from the perspective of Scoresby’s brother-in-law, who narratively fulfills a Watsonian function, but unfortunately does so with not even half the depth and charm of the actual John Watson. In fact, most of the characters – possibly with the exception of the main suspect – remain terribly flat. We rarely get more than the characters’ names, a rough sketch of their role on the ship, and – if we’re lucky – their perspective on the crime. None of them are fleshed out to the point where they feel like real people, nor are they contextualized in a way that makes the setting come truly alive. What is more, the writing style is boring and often superficial – almost as if the author purposefully avoided every instance where interiority, depth, and complexity would have been possible.
Don’t get me wrong: The actual case is extremely fascinating as it is one where the most likely interpretation is sudden onset mania or psychosis, tinged with religious zeal and resulting in extreme violence (but without clear clues as to the initial cause). The problem is that most of Pechmann’s novel is reporting – characters reporting events, characters reporting their interpretations of events – and whenever Pechmann tries to include deeper thoughts about fate, religious mania, or mental health, those discussions are oddly judgemental and stay firmly on the surface level. In short, Sieben Lichter isn’t a novel so much as a more narrative summary of the source material garnished with a handful of lines about the difficulty of determining ‘truth’ and diagnosing mental illness in the 1820s.
Read if you like: true crime, shipboard murder mysteries, Mike Ashley’s From the Depths and Other Strange Tales of the Sea