David Grann’s The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder is spectacularly good. Non-fiction, spectacularly good you say? Well, willing to try because it’s as close to historical fiction as it comes while still being non-fiction. Told with all the narrative oomph you’d expect of a thriller, The Wager charts (get it? a nautical joke?) the efforts of the British navy in the mid 1700s to secretly capture a Spanish ship filled with gold and treasure in some hard-to-understand war between the two empires.
From the beginning the expedition seems doomed. The book catalogues the near-impossible effort of just finding enough sailors as almost everyone – rightfully – viewed naval war as doom and ran away. Like soldiers running through the street capturing any able-ish bodied man or boy and forcing them on board. As you can imagine truly committed to the war effort. And then setting out with barely a plan, at the wrong time of year, with not the right crew and you can imagine things did not Go Well. Enter lots of waves and broken ship parts and some light cannibalism and casual encounters with naval battle.
After the ship wreck (spoiler: there is a ship wreck) and the mutiny and the two incredibly improbable successful returns to England, what really captivates -and what Grann does so well to weave throughout the book – is the importance of owning narrative. As the two different groups try to persuade the public and the naval authorities of their version of events the reader comes to recognize the way the very history they’re reading – contested, partial, necessarily incomplete – does similar work. Toward the end and in the concluding chapters Grann makes more explicit the way Britain and all empires used this narrative authority to justify their colonial ambitions and violence, and the way this pattern of declaring authority by means of ‘owning the narrative’ persists in the present.
Literary Vice 