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A review by sherwoodreads
The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore
Thomas Edison vs. George Westinghouse. Nikola Tesla. The race for progress, and of course the horrible people determined to make a profit off progress, are part of this story, which centers around Paul Cravath, the 25-year-old lawyer who was at the center of the long-drawn-out lawsuit between Edison and Westinghouse over the invention of the light bulb, and the war over current. There is a horrible side trip into Harold Brown and his electric chair, whose experiments tortured to death far too many animals before he got his chance at a human being.
I looked forward to reading this book—and I enjoyed it. It was easy to put down, but equally easy to pick up again. I had to think about why it did not grip me the way I’d expected to be by the prospective twining of science versus capitalism, with a very colorful cast in fin-de-siecle New York.
About halfway through I kept feeling like I was reading a novelized version of reality TV.
Okay, I don’t really know that much about reality TV. But when I’ve been in a situation where it’s playing, I can’t help but notice how fake the “reality” is: the dialogue does not feel spontaneous, and yet it is banal in the manner of most real dialogue. It feel like real people are being posed, and told what to feel, and to try to express it, so they do their best, their hemming and hawing and constant repetitions of the same maybe two hundred words of vocabulary bolstered by extremely irritating doom muzak in the background.
This book did not remind me of reality TV because it was stupid or banal, because it wasn’t. I believe it was because the novel seemed to fall in an uncomfortably shifting ground between non-fiction and fiction, I which many scenes read like talking heads when taken from actual historical circumstances, and too many otherwise information-packed, not-very-dramatic chapters ended with somewhat heavy-handed narrative Foreshadowings of Doom.
There are exceptions. The electric chair scene was as disgusting and disturbing as Game of Thrones torture at its most harrowing. Another truly dramatic scene was the fire in Nikola Tesla’s lab, in which the author places Tesla and Paul Cravath—though neither was there when the actual fire happened.
Toward the end of the book, I wondered if the author had novelized a screenplay based on real events. Here was the female love interest in the mysterious Miss Agnes Huntington, whom Cravath did later marry; there was the exciting and deadly fire scene, the timeline was conveniently scaled down for pacing purposes, and so on. It read like a novelization more than a novel, entertaining, a fast read, but never delving deeply into any of the complex figures' psyches. Thomas Edison becomes a cartoony villain in order to furnish some drama, until he suddenly becomes a pathetic object of pity.
Moore includes an interesting essay at the end, describing exactly where he changed the facts, and why. It’s an interesting insight into how writers massage the messiness of real life to extract dramatic arcs, when of course real life is seldom artistically logical.
It’s certainly readable, and full of interesting facts about the famous figures of the time, with some nice descriptive passages about old New York. The characters are a bit one-dimensional—especially Tesla—but then Tesla is such an extraordinary figure I can’t remember reading anything that everyone agrees captures the inspiration for twentieth century science fiction’s Mad Scientist.
Copy received from NetGalley
I looked forward to reading this book—and I enjoyed it. It was easy to put down, but equally easy to pick up again. I had to think about why it did not grip me the way I’d expected to be by the prospective twining of science versus capitalism, with a very colorful cast in fin-de-siecle New York.
About halfway through I kept feeling like I was reading a novelized version of reality TV.
Okay, I don’t really know that much about reality TV. But when I’ve been in a situation where it’s playing, I can’t help but notice how fake the “reality” is: the dialogue does not feel spontaneous, and yet it is banal in the manner of most real dialogue. It feel like real people are being posed, and told what to feel, and to try to express it, so they do their best, their hemming and hawing and constant repetitions of the same maybe two hundred words of vocabulary bolstered by extremely irritating doom muzak in the background.
This book did not remind me of reality TV because it was stupid or banal, because it wasn’t. I believe it was because the novel seemed to fall in an uncomfortably shifting ground between non-fiction and fiction, I which many scenes read like talking heads when taken from actual historical circumstances, and too many otherwise information-packed, not-very-dramatic chapters ended with somewhat heavy-handed narrative Foreshadowings of Doom.
There are exceptions. The electric chair scene was as disgusting and disturbing as Game of Thrones torture at its most harrowing. Another truly dramatic scene was the fire in Nikola Tesla’s lab, in which the author places Tesla and Paul Cravath—though neither was there when the actual fire happened.
Toward the end of the book, I wondered if the author had novelized a screenplay based on real events. Here was the female love interest in the mysterious Miss Agnes Huntington, whom Cravath did later marry; there was the exciting and deadly fire scene, the timeline was conveniently scaled down for pacing purposes, and so on. It read like a novelization more than a novel, entertaining, a fast read, but never delving deeply into any of the complex figures' psyches. Thomas Edison becomes a cartoony villain in order to furnish some drama, until he suddenly becomes a pathetic object of pity.
Moore includes an interesting essay at the end, describing exactly where he changed the facts, and why. It’s an interesting insight into how writers massage the messiness of real life to extract dramatic arcs, when of course real life is seldom artistically logical.
It’s certainly readable, and full of interesting facts about the famous figures of the time, with some nice descriptive passages about old New York. The characters are a bit one-dimensional—especially Tesla—but then Tesla is such an extraordinary figure I can’t remember reading anything that everyone agrees captures the inspiration for twentieth century science fiction’s Mad Scientist.
Copy received from NetGalley