Thumbs down to Sable Island

My sole contribution to American letters is a book review for Salon.com. Despite this, I don’t think I’m very good at evaluating writing, because I tend to like almost everything I read. This may be partly because I’m picky about what books I buy, but it’s also because my brain is, to put it charitably, synthetic rather than critical. Sure I can identify poor writing, clumsy ideas, inept organization and all that, but I rarely walk away from a book with the feeling that it was a waste of my time. There was even a nugget of enjoyment buried deep in the dark heart of The Da Vinci Code, although you’ll never catch me admitting that out loud.

All of this is just to make the point that when I dislike a book, it must be really, really bad. And when I dislike a book as much as I disliked Sable Island by Marq De Villiers and Sheila Hirtle , it must be because the author(s) set out with the intention of pissing me off, right?

It felt like it sometimes. You can’t call them talentless, because it requires extraordinary skill to take a subject as inherently interesting as Sable Island and produce a book about it that is so uniformly dull. The subtitle is “The Strange Origins and Curious History of a Dune Adrift in the Atlantic.” Sable Island’s origins are strange and its history is curious, but it’s hard to care about such things when they are lost amongst so much tedious prose. When the writing isn’t tedious, it’s purple, and sometimes it reaches inane. Sometimes they just list shipwrecks without any accompanying narrative. Remember the catalogue of ships from the Illiad? Neither do I and that because it was the most boring part! Imagine taking it, expanding it to book length and selling it for 15 bucks in the non-fiction section! The only spark of vitality comes from the frequent inclusion of first-hand accounts, some by people only halfway literate and almost all livelier than the authors.

There is also a conspicuous lack of any organizational principle and I repeatedly found myself lost in time and space. The book jumps between centuries and explorers and settlers at random, both within chapters and between them. People and events appear, disappear and then suddenly reemerge 100 pages later. I’m sure some structure or pattern must exist, but finding it would require spending more time with a book I already had to force myself to finish.

Sable Island also suffers, somewhat unfairly, from comparison with the book I started reading when finished it, William Langewiesche’s The Outlaw Sea. The book is partly composed of a series of articles Langewiesche had written for the Atlantic Monthly, some of which I read and greatly admired. Langewiesche is a functional yet stylish writer and a superb reporter. We’re fortunate to see him here at the top of his game, tackling a subject of immense importance and interest. Highly recommended, although it will keep you up nights, both by gripping you in the narrative and scaring you awake with the facts. If you want to sleep, I recommend Sable Island.