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Ebook234 pages7 hours
Submergence: A Novel
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this ebook
A hostage and a deep-sea scientist recall their romance in this “strange, intelligent, gorgeously written” novel about love, oceans, lust, and terror (New York Magazine).
In a room with no windows on the coast of Africa, an Englishman, James More, is held captive by jihadist fighters. Posing as a water expert to report on al-Qaeda activity in the area, he now faces extreme privation, mock executions, and forced marches through the arid badlands of Somalia. Thousands of miles away on the Greenland Sea, Danielle Flinders, a biomathematician, prepares to dive in a submersible to the ocean floor. She is obsessed with life at the lowest strata of water.
In this “masterly evocation of the intricacy of life,” James and Danny are separately drawn back to the previous Christmas, to a French hotel on the Atlantic coast, where a chance encounter on the beach led to an intense and enduring romance (Teju Cole). For James, his mind escapes to utopias both imagined and remembered. Danny, meanwhile, is drawn back to beginnings: to mythical and scientific origins, and to her own. It is to each other and to the ocean that they most frequently return: magnetic and otherworldly, a comfort and a threat.
In a room with no windows on the coast of Africa, an Englishman, James More, is held captive by jihadist fighters. Posing as a water expert to report on al-Qaeda activity in the area, he now faces extreme privation, mock executions, and forced marches through the arid badlands of Somalia. Thousands of miles away on the Greenland Sea, Danielle Flinders, a biomathematician, prepares to dive in a submersible to the ocean floor. She is obsessed with life at the lowest strata of water.
In this “masterly evocation of the intricacy of life,” James and Danny are separately drawn back to the previous Christmas, to a French hotel on the Atlantic coast, where a chance encounter on the beach led to an intense and enduring romance (Teju Cole). For James, his mind escapes to utopias both imagined and remembered. Danny, meanwhile, is drawn back to beginnings: to mythical and scientific origins, and to her own. It is to each other and to the ocean that they most frequently return: magnetic and otherworldly, a comfort and a threat.
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Author
J. M. Ledgard
J. M. Ledgard was born in the Shetland Islands. He is the author of the novels Submergence and Giraffe, is a longtime foreign correspondent for The Economist, and serves as the director of a future Africa initiative based at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
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Reviews for Submergence
Rating: 3.474999925 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
40 ratings4 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Submergence is a book obsessed with the ocean. This, given the title, is entirely appropriate. But it's a book where time does not quite have the meaning we might otherwise believe, where people are benevolent and violent in the same breath, where philosophies can contradict practice and still produce the same results. In short, the characters, so far, represent the ocean in the same way that they are obsessed with its characteristics, with the movement of the Hadal deep and the way that fresh water works. It opens with violence enacted against human flesh, much in the way that storms batter vessels, and continues to show the softness of the sea, the sex and life that teems there. It is, to be fair, also a history of modern violence in Somalia, and in being this, serves as the most brutal and honest to the ground portrait of Al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa that I have ever encountered. This is unsurprising, given Ledgard's background as one of the Economist's African War Correspondents. And yes, all capitals because I do think he covers the continent, and War Correspondent just feels like one of those jobs which deserves a great deal of capitalization to make sense of. The plot moves between two or three views, the authorial voice and the minds of the two main characters. The shifts are jarring, and sometimes feel like knowledge dumped on the reader for context. But that's because, like its topics, Submergence works in many ways. It serves as education in the ocean and Somalia, as a romance, a story of freedom. The depths of the book are quite impressive, evoking the best possible feelings of isolation and fear, while reminding us of the joys of being human. The characters feel dangerously close to real, and thinking of a world with them in it scares me just a little bit, in the best ways possible. A masterful book, and one that anyone with an interest in the 21st century should seek out.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Submergence is a compelling novel by J.M. Ledgard. In it, he uses submergence as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of life and death.James More is a British spy who lives in Nairobi. His job is purportedly that of a water engineer. Danielle, Danny, Flinders is a scientist who studies the life of the deepest part of the ocean. They meet at a hotel in France one winter and become lovers; then both go back to their jobs. James is captured by jihadists in Somalia and his and Danny's stories alternate through the novel.After James' capture, he "immerses" himself in his mind,trying to escape his captors by focusing on writers and ideas and happier times. Danny is immersed in her job. She sees the environmental importance of the ocean deeps. Through these characters, Ledgard explores philosophy, science and politics and ways they connect everyone:"What is likely is that, sooner or later, carried in the wind and in rivers, or your graveyard engulfed in the sea, a portion of each of us will be given new life in the cracks, vents or pools of molten sulphur on which the tonguefish skate...It will be a submergence. You will take your place in the boiling-hot fissures, among the teeming hordes of nameless microorganisms that mimic no forms because they are the foundation of all forms."There's a lot to think about. I found James' and Danny's stories compelling. I wanted to share in Danny's discoveries of the deep, and I wanted to see if James escapes from his captors alive.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5No sale. Don't get me wrong. There are beautiful stunning moments in this book so it is for those fleeting events worth reading but it is not alas a novel. Ledgard is a non fiction writer and an intellectual who is attracted to some extraordinary ideas that he built the novel around. But the characters aren't there, they are given a stylistic surface treatment that says "deep" but there is no center that Teju Cole blurbs, another writer heavy on style and weak on substance. Ledgard could become a novelist, he has the chops but this is the work of an editor in terms of shaping. That said the scenes, impressionistic as they were of Somalia were powerful. The stuff about Danny the scientist passionate about the Haldal deep were nonsense and better put in an essay. Nothing convinced me they loved each other since there wasn't enough of either of them there to claim feeling.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Unbearably pretentious, with occasional passages of great elegance and insight. I was kind of hoping the Somali captors would somehow end up storming that disgusting old world French hotel.