The Ghost of the Mary Celeste is Valerie Martin's return to the historical novel, a form she has practiced with much skill in works such as Property and Mary Reilly. This superb gothic piece of fictionalized history takes us back to the seafaring days and families of 19th-century Massachusetts with a young Arthur Conan Doyle, a Philadelphia spiritualist and a persistent female journalist. Martin seamlessly weaves them all together in a beautiful, affecting literary tapestry.
The opening chapter is a tour de force. It's 1859, and we're aboard the brig Early Dawn. Captain Joseph Gibbs's wife, Maria, accompanies him on this voyage, leaving their young son, Natie, at home with the Cobb family. During a massive storm, their ship is rammed by another and sinks; Joseph and Maria drown. This powerful, dramatic, carefully realized scene could be a stand-alone story, but it's only the first step in Martin's amazing tale. Next, she delves into the famous real-life disappearance of the crew of the brig Mary Celeste, found floating in the Atlantic in 1872.
The missing included Captain Benjamin Briggs, his wife, Sarah, and their daughter, Sophia, and Martin links them to the story of the Early Dawn in the novel's second section, "The Green Book." It's a journal kept by Maria's young cousin Sarah Cobb in 1860. She worries about her sister, Hannah, and the visions--a "ghoulish fantasy"--she has of the drowned Maria coming for Nathan. She also writes lovingly of Benjamin Briggs, whom she marries.
Enter Arthur Conan Doyle, who is told about the Mary Celeste during an African voyage in 1881. It inspires him to write a story--that many take as fact--"solving" the mystery. Then Petra Violet meets journalist Phoebe Grant at a spiritualist meeting at Massachusetts's Lake Pleasant resort. They strike up a friendship; there's talk of ghosts, the Mary Celeste, the Briggs family. Later, Petra meets Conan Doyle in Philadelphia. Already interested in spiritualism, he's much taken with her--was she the real thing?
One by one, Martin's narrative dominoes tip and fall, touching off yet another twist or turn in her developing tale as they lead us to the "fathomless and waiting sea far below." --Tom Lavoie
Shelf Talker: Enter the richly atmospheric world of a Victorian gothic built from fiction and fact, at whose heart lies an exquisite and intricately layered ghost story.