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The Company of the Dead
He could feel it. The flutter of butterfly wings that would herald a brighter, better world. He looked out to the flat, calm ocean, the moonless night. Beyond the ship's illumination the dark waters rose up so that he felt as if he and the ship lay at the centre of a vast opaque bowl. Then at a distance, under the starlight's dim flicker, he saw it. First, a jagged edge, then two irregular peaks, riding black against the black night sky.
Conspiracies linking events as disparate as the sinking of the Titanic and the assassination of J.F.K., have played themselves out in dark and unforeseen ways.
The Cold War between Greater Germany and Imperial Japan is drawing to a close.
America, divided and scarred, will be the final battleground in a world distinctly different, yet disturbingly familiar to our own.
Six people have the means to avert the apocalypse.
Welcome to the secret history of the 20th Century.
Conspiracies linking events as disparate as the sinking of the Titanic and the assassination of J.F.K., have played themselves out in dark and unforeseen ways.
The Cold War between Greater Germany and Imperial Japan is drawing to a close.
America, divided and scarred, will be the final battleground in a world distinctly different, yet disturbingly familiar to our own.
Six people have the means to avert the apocalypse.
Welcome to the secret history of the 20th Century.
430 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 1, 2007
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December 16, 2011Warning: This is a non-review review. If you are one of those priggish scolds who demands actual review reviews, pass this one by. I'm just not in the mood right now for one of those 'How dare you review a book without reading it!' lectures. It's a free galaxy, so go ahead and buzz off. (Who am I kidding? Nobody will notice the irrelevance of this review because nobody will notice this book.)
I am David Kowalski. No, not that David Kowalski—the world-renowned Australian gynecologist who writes alternate history books about the Titanic on the sly—when he isn't elbow-deep in Australian pussy. (I realize that the word 'pussy' is considered offensive, distasteful, or absurd by many, but no other ready-to-hand vaginal epithet had the proper rhythm for that sentence.) I am also not the David Kowalski who is a Grammy and Emmy nominated audio engineer and who also owns the davidkowalski.com domain name. One day when I become insanely famous, this latter David Kowalski will become a obstacle and will be dealt with accordingly. Legally I must remain vague, but you are free to read between the lines as you wish. Between the line readings are generally not admissable in court.
It's difficult being David Kowalski for countless reasons, some of which those of you who know me can well imagine. But even those who haven't enjoyed my friendship will probably confirm that Kowalski is a ridiculous name, lacking both euphony and dignity. It's become something of a punchline, as a matter of fact. For instance, its clumsy, ethnic suggestivity is used as a gag in the I Accuse My Parents episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Consider these other emphatically tongue-in-cheek or unflattering uses of the name in popular culture:
1. Baby Kowalski was essentially a hairy, overweight, criminal knucklehead on Ren and Stimpy. His appearance is no doubt inspired by the big lug stereotypes of the early 20th century crime movies and certainly also indebted to actual physical bearings of countless of Polish-American males across this country. My paternal grandfather was not fat or particularly hairy, but I'd be lying if I said there wasn't something about Baby Kowalski that inspired a generalized nostalgia.
2. Kowalski (I've heard) is a penguin from the animated film Madagascar. Now why would a penguin be named Kowalski except for humorous effect? The incongruity of a waddling Arctic bird and a (usually) lower-middle class Polish-American is certainly an attempt at humor—whether it succeeds or not is up to the viewer.
3. Roxanne Kowalski is the title character in the 1980s Steve Martin-Daryl Hannah comedy Roxanne. In the 1980s Daryl Hannah was considered a beauty. An epitomal beauty almost. (Although I think she was much more... exciting decades later as Elle Driver in the Kill Bill movies.) Saddling this pretty young woman with such an ugly name is an Alanis Morissette-style attempt at comic irony. Get it? She's pretty, but her name isn't? Ha.
4. Recently, Clint Eastwood's character Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino made use of other latent implications of the name. You see, Polish-Americans, especially of the 'Greatest Generation' and the Baby Boom generation, are somewhat notorious for being bigoted assholes who watch over their well-tended lawns with the violent, blood-thirsty malice of barbarian chieftains. I realize that this statement would have a lot of broad-minded Polacks hot under the collar, but—sorry—it's true. I live in a Midwestern city with a disproportionately high population of Polish-Americans, and they hate 'coloreds' and 'Mexicans' like Richard Simmons hates sleeves. Of course the urban trend nowadays is that blacks and Hispanics are 'encroaching' [their perspective] on old Polish neighborhoods and ruining them—making them unsafe and polluted. More to the point, the darkies don't take care of their lawns. (Again, I am citing the argument, not endorsing it.) Gran Torino captures this dynamic with documentarian accuracy—except with gooks in this case. If you scratch the surface of at least three-quarters of elderly Polish-Americans, you'll find a hardcore bigot. These aren't the kind of people who will use the word 'nigger' or offer up their narrow-mindedness to just anyone—they are a squirrelly lot—but it's there... Trust me. It's there.
Others:
5. 'Kowalski' is a song by Primal Scream.
6. Kowalski is the criminal, remorseless driver in the 1970s cult film Vanishing Point. (This is far from reality. Most Polish-Americans prefer to drive ten miles under the speed limit. Traffic laws are too liberal for them.)
7. Kowalski is a Top Gun-like pilot in the parody Hot Shots!
8. Leon Kowalski is a character in Blade Runner.
9. And of course the ever-boorish Stanley Kowalski, from Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, was probably at one time the most famous Kowalski of all. But general illiteracy and cultural ignorance have taken care of that. I could probably count the number of Stanley Kowalski mentions I've had in my life on one hand—outnumbered now by references to Walt Kowalski and that damned penguin.
There are more, of course, but I'm bored with this. You probably are too. But maybe now you realize how difficult it is for us gynecologists, audio engineers, and office-bound automatons to be David Kowalskis. It just lacks the poetic vitality of other names, like Heath Ironsteel or Wade Theodore St. Cloud III, and the neutral simplicity of still other names, like John Jones or Dan Dean. The ironic thing is that Kowalski is (literally) the Smith of Polish names. In that country, it's probably tediously unremarkable. But here it's a punchline. A stereotype. An ugly bit of sound. Which is why I'm changing my name to Rodney Lowenstein before I get rich and famous. So remember that name... Lowenstein... Lowenstein...
I am David Kowalski. No, not that David Kowalski—the world-renowned Australian gynecologist who writes alternate history books about the Titanic on the sly—when he isn't elbow-deep in Australian pussy. (I realize that the word 'pussy' is considered offensive, distasteful, or absurd by many, but no other ready-to-hand vaginal epithet had the proper rhythm for that sentence.) I am also not the David Kowalski who is a Grammy and Emmy nominated audio engineer and who also owns the davidkowalski.com domain name. One day when I become insanely famous, this latter David Kowalski will become a obstacle and will be dealt with accordingly. Legally I must remain vague, but you are free to read between the lines as you wish. Between the line readings are generally not admissable in court.
It's difficult being David Kowalski for countless reasons, some of which those of you who know me can well imagine. But even those who haven't enjoyed my friendship will probably confirm that Kowalski is a ridiculous name, lacking both euphony and dignity. It's become something of a punchline, as a matter of fact. For instance, its clumsy, ethnic suggestivity is used as a gag in the I Accuse My Parents episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Consider these other emphatically tongue-in-cheek or unflattering uses of the name in popular culture:
1. Baby Kowalski was essentially a hairy, overweight, criminal knucklehead on Ren and Stimpy. His appearance is no doubt inspired by the big lug stereotypes of the early 20th century crime movies and certainly also indebted to actual physical bearings of countless of Polish-American males across this country. My paternal grandfather was not fat or particularly hairy, but I'd be lying if I said there wasn't something about Baby Kowalski that inspired a generalized nostalgia.
2. Kowalski (I've heard) is a penguin from the animated film Madagascar. Now why would a penguin be named Kowalski except for humorous effect? The incongruity of a waddling Arctic bird and a (usually) lower-middle class Polish-American is certainly an attempt at humor—whether it succeeds or not is up to the viewer.
3. Roxanne Kowalski is the title character in the 1980s Steve Martin-Daryl Hannah comedy Roxanne. In the 1980s Daryl Hannah was considered a beauty. An epitomal beauty almost. (Although I think she was much more... exciting decades later as Elle Driver in the Kill Bill movies.) Saddling this pretty young woman with such an ugly name is an Alanis Morissette-style attempt at comic irony. Get it? She's pretty, but her name isn't? Ha.
4. Recently, Clint Eastwood's character Walt Kowalski in Gran Torino made use of other latent implications of the name. You see, Polish-Americans, especially of the 'Greatest Generation' and the Baby Boom generation, are somewhat notorious for being bigoted assholes who watch over their well-tended lawns with the violent, blood-thirsty malice of barbarian chieftains. I realize that this statement would have a lot of broad-minded Polacks hot under the collar, but—sorry—it's true. I live in a Midwestern city with a disproportionately high population of Polish-Americans, and they hate 'coloreds' and 'Mexicans' like Richard Simmons hates sleeves. Of course the urban trend nowadays is that blacks and Hispanics are 'encroaching' [their perspective] on old Polish neighborhoods and ruining them—making them unsafe and polluted. More to the point, the darkies don't take care of their lawns. (Again, I am citing the argument, not endorsing it.) Gran Torino captures this dynamic with documentarian accuracy—except with gooks in this case. If you scratch the surface of at least three-quarters of elderly Polish-Americans, you'll find a hardcore bigot. These aren't the kind of people who will use the word 'nigger' or offer up their narrow-mindedness to just anyone—they are a squirrelly lot—but it's there... Trust me. It's there.
Others:
5. 'Kowalski' is a song by Primal Scream.
6. Kowalski is the criminal, remorseless driver in the 1970s cult film Vanishing Point. (This is far from reality. Most Polish-Americans prefer to drive ten miles under the speed limit. Traffic laws are too liberal for them.)
7. Kowalski is a Top Gun-like pilot in the parody Hot Shots!
8. Leon Kowalski is a character in Blade Runner.
9. And of course the ever-boorish Stanley Kowalski, from Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, was probably at one time the most famous Kowalski of all. But general illiteracy and cultural ignorance have taken care of that. I could probably count the number of Stanley Kowalski mentions I've had in my life on one hand—outnumbered now by references to Walt Kowalski and that damned penguin.
There are more, of course, but I'm bored with this. You probably are too. But maybe now you realize how difficult it is for us gynecologists, audio engineers, and office-bound automatons to be David Kowalskis. It just lacks the poetic vitality of other names, like Heath Ironsteel or Wade Theodore St. Cloud III, and the neutral simplicity of still other names, like John Jones or Dan Dean. The ironic thing is that Kowalski is (literally) the Smith of Polish names. In that country, it's probably tediously unremarkable. But here it's a punchline. A stereotype. An ugly bit of sound. Which is why I'm changing my name to Rodney Lowenstein before I get rich and famous. So remember that name... Lowenstein... Lowenstein...
May 15, 2012
THE COMPANY OF THE DEAD is an alternate-history novel that centers around the sinking of the Titanic. At the start, a time traveler named Wells attempts to stop the well-known disaster from occurring. He doesn't succeed, but he does delay the event by three hours. This small change creates massive ramifications that drastically alter the future. America is no longer United, Hitler is a famous artist, and most of the globe is under the rule of either the Japanese or German empires. A young man named Joseph Kennedy (ancestor of our famous, assassinated president), having glimpsed the even greater horrors that await this refurbished timeline, goes on a quest back in time to fix the rift in history and bring the world back to normal.
According to the acknowledgments, it took first-time author Kowalski nearly fifteen years to write this novel, and it shows. The alternate history he constructed is so intricate that it was astonishing. I started the novel with giddy amazement, ever more impressed as I turned the pages. I couldn't begin to imagine the detail, the thought, the mind-bending effort it must have taken not just to plot the book, but also to establish it firmly in a completely new and believable world. I tip my hat to Mr. Kowalski.
So why the two stars?
I read this book on my Kindle, and I didn't bother reading any reviews before I bought it. The product description alone was enough for me. Because Kindles don't list page numbers exactly, I didn't know that this book was -- in its printed form -- 751 pages long. That doesn't really matter to me; if a book is good enough, I'll read a thousand pages and gladly. Unfortunately, the middle five hundred pages or so are a convoluted mess that serve only to delay the entire story. Almost nothing important or meaningful occurs in this section. Instead, Kowalski sets up pointless obstacle after pointless obstacle, dragging the plot out until I was tearing my hair out in frustration. The cast list also grew more and more bloated for no good reason. One character -- a gruff-n-grumpy man named Hardas (I assume the name, with its missing 's,' is meant to be cheekily symbolic) actually questioned his own involvement in the adventure. When Hardas argued that he brought nothing helpful to the group's quest (he was right), Kennedy instead assured him that "every group needs its malcontent."
What? No, it doesn't. Pacing and plotting are critical in a book where characters say things like, "I need to know what you did with the time machine!" Plotting this book has in spades, but the pacing is perhaps some of the worst I've ever read. Every time I thought the story was finally going to go somewhere, whoops! here's another complication to slow the plot wa-a-a-a-a-a-ay down. "Great!" I thought at one point with relief. "They're finally at the time machine. NOW it gets good!" Nope. Let's have another hundred pages where they try to fix the darn thing, or fight off sinister outside forces, or simply bicker about the rightness of what they're doing.
I wanted SO MUCH to love this book as it had wowed me so incredibly right out of the gate. Kowalski obviously spent an amazing amount of time, energy, and thought into the research and writing of this story, and I respect that deeply. But by the time the characters managed to actually do what they'd spent five hundred pages talking about doing, I was sick of it all. My guess is that Kowalski, having spent fifteen years on the book, was loathe to chop out even one scene to shorten it down to a semi-reasonable length. To that, I quote Faulker: kill your darlings. If it's not important, if it doesn't move the story along, then get rid of it. No matter how beautiful your writing is -- and Kowalski's prose is pretty good, if not a little overwritten (ahem) -- if you use that writing to meticulously describe a falling row of dominoes that's a hundred miles long, you're going to lose a whole lot of readers.
You lost me this time, Kowalski, but based on the talent I saw glimmering underneath that massively constructed iceberg of words, I'll still give your next book a try.
According to the acknowledgments, it took first-time author Kowalski nearly fifteen years to write this novel, and it shows. The alternate history he constructed is so intricate that it was astonishing. I started the novel with giddy amazement, ever more impressed as I turned the pages. I couldn't begin to imagine the detail, the thought, the mind-bending effort it must have taken not just to plot the book, but also to establish it firmly in a completely new and believable world. I tip my hat to Mr. Kowalski.
So why the two stars?
I read this book on my Kindle, and I didn't bother reading any reviews before I bought it. The product description alone was enough for me. Because Kindles don't list page numbers exactly, I didn't know that this book was -- in its printed form -- 751 pages long. That doesn't really matter to me; if a book is good enough, I'll read a thousand pages and gladly. Unfortunately, the middle five hundred pages or so are a convoluted mess that serve only to delay the entire story. Almost nothing important or meaningful occurs in this section. Instead, Kowalski sets up pointless obstacle after pointless obstacle, dragging the plot out until I was tearing my hair out in frustration. The cast list also grew more and more bloated for no good reason. One character -- a gruff-n-grumpy man named Hardas (I assume the name, with its missing 's,' is meant to be cheekily symbolic) actually questioned his own involvement in the adventure. When Hardas argued that he brought nothing helpful to the group's quest (he was right), Kennedy instead assured him that "every group needs its malcontent."
What? No, it doesn't. Pacing and plotting are critical in a book where characters say things like, "I need to know what you did with the time machine!" Plotting this book has in spades, but the pacing is perhaps some of the worst I've ever read. Every time I thought the story was finally going to go somewhere, whoops! here's another complication to slow the plot wa-a-a-a-a-a-ay down. "Great!" I thought at one point with relief. "They're finally at the time machine. NOW it gets good!" Nope. Let's have another hundred pages where they try to fix the darn thing, or fight off sinister outside forces, or simply bicker about the rightness of what they're doing.
I wanted SO MUCH to love this book as it had wowed me so incredibly right out of the gate. Kowalski obviously spent an amazing amount of time, energy, and thought into the research and writing of this story, and I respect that deeply. But by the time the characters managed to actually do what they'd spent five hundred pages talking about doing, I was sick of it all. My guess is that Kowalski, having spent fifteen years on the book, was loathe to chop out even one scene to shorten it down to a semi-reasonable length. To that, I quote Faulker: kill your darlings. If it's not important, if it doesn't move the story along, then get rid of it. No matter how beautiful your writing is -- and Kowalski's prose is pretty good, if not a little overwritten (ahem) -- if you use that writing to meticulously describe a falling row of dominoes that's a hundred miles long, you're going to lose a whole lot of readers.
You lost me this time, Kowalski, but based on the talent I saw glimmering underneath that massively constructed iceberg of words, I'll still give your next book a try.
April 24, 2012
It is the maiden voyage of the Titanic and one man aboard knows exactly what is about to happen. As he hands the man on watch a pair of unusual binoculars he tells him to keep a close eye out for anything. As the warning whistles blow the ship avoids a collision with an iceberg … only to hit another one three hours later. Three hours which were enough time to change the list of survivors and thereby change the course of history.
I really, really wanted to like this book. The premise of the story sounded so wonderful, and some parts of the book were, indeed, wonderful. The rest of the story went into GREAT detail explaining how history had changed and explained the military and political reasons behind the change in equally GREAT detail. Quite frankly, not being up to snuff on mid 20th century American politics, this book just lost me in the details. I am sure it will appeal to some but left me dry. I was tempted to give up on this book many times but, just as I was going to put it away the story started to get interesting again. I am not put off by books with lots of pages but if I could have had the first 150 pages, about 100 in the middle and then the last 100 or so pages I would have enjoyed it much more.
I really, really wanted to like this book. The premise of the story sounded so wonderful, and some parts of the book were, indeed, wonderful. The rest of the story went into GREAT detail explaining how history had changed and explained the military and political reasons behind the change in equally GREAT detail. Quite frankly, not being up to snuff on mid 20th century American politics, this book just lost me in the details. I am sure it will appeal to some but left me dry. I was tempted to give up on this book many times but, just as I was going to put it away the story started to get interesting again. I am not put off by books with lots of pages but if I could have had the first 150 pages, about 100 in the middle and then the last 100 or so pages I would have enjoyed it much more.
March 4, 2012
This is the best book I’ve read in a long, long time…
The premise behind this book lies in the theory of chaos. This theory describes how a seemingly inconsequential event can change the way subsequent events evolve. In regards to the weather, it describes how the flapping of a single butterfly’s wing produces a tiny change to the state the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to diverge from what it would have done otherwise. The net effect being that markedly different weather conditions can eventually evolve.
The “flutter of butterfly wings” in this book is the presence of a pair of binoculars aboard the Titanic. Meticulously researched to ensure each detail is historically correct, the ocean liner steams its way towards the iceberg. However one character seeks to avert the disaster we know as the sinking of the Titanic with all of its catastrophic loss of life. By handing these binoculars to the lookout aboard the Titanic, this character causes the world to diverge from its previous path, evolving into a world that we would not recognize today.
I loved this book. True, it’s a big read with a complex plot, but as you work your way through its 744 pages, you come to understand the characters and you appreciate why Kowalski has won numerous awards for his work, including the prestigious Golden Aurelus award. He seduces you with the sheer beauty of his writing, then ruthlessly ties you to the pages with the adventures he relays.
I highly recommend this book.
The premise behind this book lies in the theory of chaos. This theory describes how a seemingly inconsequential event can change the way subsequent events evolve. In regards to the weather, it describes how the flapping of a single butterfly’s wing produces a tiny change to the state the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to diverge from what it would have done otherwise. The net effect being that markedly different weather conditions can eventually evolve.
The “flutter of butterfly wings” in this book is the presence of a pair of binoculars aboard the Titanic. Meticulously researched to ensure each detail is historically correct, the ocean liner steams its way towards the iceberg. However one character seeks to avert the disaster we know as the sinking of the Titanic with all of its catastrophic loss of life. By handing these binoculars to the lookout aboard the Titanic, this character causes the world to diverge from its previous path, evolving into a world that we would not recognize today.
I loved this book. True, it’s a big read with a complex plot, but as you work your way through its 744 pages, you come to understand the characters and you appreciate why Kowalski has won numerous awards for his work, including the prestigious Golden Aurelus award. He seduces you with the sheer beauty of his writing, then ruthlessly ties you to the pages with the adventures he relays.
I highly recommend this book.
November 3, 2014
This is, it appears, a first novel by a medical doctor. I'm not sure that the doctor part comes across in the book, but some of the inexperience does. As it stands, this book has promise. It also has terrible pacing, and needs more fully developed characters to take advantage of the admittedly intriguing ideas he's throwing out there. In summary, it's uneven.
Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.
In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook
Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.
In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook
May 28, 2012
I like playing with the idea of alternative histories, like Fatherland. In this case, the query is: what would have happened if the Titanic hadn't gone down? Or if it had gone down and different people had survived? That's the way the book opens, and it's fairly good (though the main character uses the F-word so much that one of the contemporary passengers asks why he's being so crude), but then the book cuts to the present, where the Confederacy is still around, and the Japanese occupy New York, and there it took me until about page 160 to figure out what was going on, and then it just devolved into jet fighting and gun battles and double-crossing chases, all to get people back to some time-traveling opportunity, and I skipped ahead until the last 100 pages or so, in order to pick up the Titanic thread again.
The book could easily have been about 450 pages shorter.
The book could easily have been about 450 pages shorter.
March 22, 2012
I actually rated this book 4.5 stars but decided to round it up since it is a fascinating read.
It is April 1912 and Jonathan Wells is travelling on the Titanic towards New York. Armed with knowledge that he shouldn’t be able to have he is on a mission to save the ship from the Iceberg that would make the ships maiden-voyage also her last. His action will have shocking results for the world, results Wells couldn’t have foreseen and doesn’t live to experience.
In April 2012 a newly build copy of the Titanic is finishing its anniversary voyage to New York under captain Lightholler, a descendant of two passengers on the original ship. His ship is sailing through a world in which America never entered World War I and is split along a newly established Mason-Dickson line and the whole world is divided up between two empires ruled by Japan from the east and Germany from the west.
In this version of America Joseph Kennedy, grand-nephew to John F. Kennedy is on a mission to restore history to what it should have been. Armed with Wells’ journal and the same means of travelling through time, Kennedy is determined to save the world from the faith that awaits it as a result of Wells’ well meant but disastrous intervention.
While Kennedy is assembling the team he needs to accomplish his goal he is being pursuit by his military superiors, represented by Agent Patricia Malcolm, a woman he has a history with.
With the world on the brink of a massive conflict and nuclear weapons being available to the armies for the first time, Kennedy and his team have to stay alive and ahead of their pursuers for long enough to be able to get back to the Titanic and save the world from certain destruction in a quest that may well end up killing Kennedy, if not all of them.
This is an ambitious and fascinating book. David Kowalski has gone all out in creating an alternative world for us and created a place that we can still recognise yet different enough from our reality to make you wonder what if. What if America really hadn’t entered World War I, what if Hitler had never come to power, what if America had not remained the United States, what if…. There are too many what-ifs to list them all here, and all of them are plausible enough to make you shudder.
It takes a while before the reader has a real idea of what is going on in the story. Kowalski takes his time introducing the characters and even longer revealing their motivation and with a few characters I still wasn’t sure exactly what they were up to by the time the book had ended.
This is a book that is hard to categorize. A lot of different genres are integrated into one narrative whole. This is an alternative history story with elements that are pure science-fiction. We find ourselves in the middle of a strategic war story, as well as a fast paced thriller with conspiracies thrown in and some romance for good measure.
The reader is taken from the Titanic to Roswell and back to the Titanic in a story that opens their eyes to the fragility of history. The big question in this book is whether history develops according to a certain path or whether it is all a matter of chance, a question I will be pondering for a while yet.
For me there were one or two downsides to this novel. The military strategizing was way over my head and I found I couldn’t quite visualise the battle scenes. I’m convinced though that this is probably a result of my mind-set rather than any failing on the author’s part.
There was one story-line that I still couldn’t make complete sense of even after I finished the book, one character whose motivation and ultimate goal never became completely clear to me.
I also feel that Kowalski’s emphasis on action came at the cost of good characterisation. Although I did get some feeling for the various personalities in this book there wasn’t a whole lot of depth to them.
Overall though, I have to conclude that this is an original, fascinating and almost impossible to put down book. While I thoroughly enjoyed this reading experience I think anybody who loves science fiction and/or time-travel and/or alternative histories will adore this book.
It is April 1912 and Jonathan Wells is travelling on the Titanic towards New York. Armed with knowledge that he shouldn’t be able to have he is on a mission to save the ship from the Iceberg that would make the ships maiden-voyage also her last. His action will have shocking results for the world, results Wells couldn’t have foreseen and doesn’t live to experience.
In April 2012 a newly build copy of the Titanic is finishing its anniversary voyage to New York under captain Lightholler, a descendant of two passengers on the original ship. His ship is sailing through a world in which America never entered World War I and is split along a newly established Mason-Dickson line and the whole world is divided up between two empires ruled by Japan from the east and Germany from the west.
In this version of America Joseph Kennedy, grand-nephew to John F. Kennedy is on a mission to restore history to what it should have been. Armed with Wells’ journal and the same means of travelling through time, Kennedy is determined to save the world from the faith that awaits it as a result of Wells’ well meant but disastrous intervention.
While Kennedy is assembling the team he needs to accomplish his goal he is being pursuit by his military superiors, represented by Agent Patricia Malcolm, a woman he has a history with.
With the world on the brink of a massive conflict and nuclear weapons being available to the armies for the first time, Kennedy and his team have to stay alive and ahead of their pursuers for long enough to be able to get back to the Titanic and save the world from certain destruction in a quest that may well end up killing Kennedy, if not all of them.
This is an ambitious and fascinating book. David Kowalski has gone all out in creating an alternative world for us and created a place that we can still recognise yet different enough from our reality to make you wonder what if. What if America really hadn’t entered World War I, what if Hitler had never come to power, what if America had not remained the United States, what if…. There are too many what-ifs to list them all here, and all of them are plausible enough to make you shudder.
It takes a while before the reader has a real idea of what is going on in the story. Kowalski takes his time introducing the characters and even longer revealing their motivation and with a few characters I still wasn’t sure exactly what they were up to by the time the book had ended.
This is a book that is hard to categorize. A lot of different genres are integrated into one narrative whole. This is an alternative history story with elements that are pure science-fiction. We find ourselves in the middle of a strategic war story, as well as a fast paced thriller with conspiracies thrown in and some romance for good measure.
The reader is taken from the Titanic to Roswell and back to the Titanic in a story that opens their eyes to the fragility of history. The big question in this book is whether history develops according to a certain path or whether it is all a matter of chance, a question I will be pondering for a while yet.
For me there were one or two downsides to this novel. The military strategizing was way over my head and I found I couldn’t quite visualise the battle scenes. I’m convinced though that this is probably a result of my mind-set rather than any failing on the author’s part.
There was one story-line that I still couldn’t make complete sense of even after I finished the book, one character whose motivation and ultimate goal never became completely clear to me.
I also feel that Kowalski’s emphasis on action came at the cost of good characterisation. Although I did get some feeling for the various personalities in this book there wasn’t a whole lot of depth to them.
Overall though, I have to conclude that this is an original, fascinating and almost impossible to put down book. While I thoroughly enjoyed this reading experience I think anybody who loves science fiction and/or time-travel and/or alternative histories will adore this book.
July 27, 2024
I know I read this 750 page monolith to the obsession of the author with the Titanic and counterfactual history, I kept passing it on the shelves of my local second hand book shop until I eventually gave in and spent £1 to acquire it and who knows how many hours reading it. Did I have a lot of free time a dozen years ago? I don't remember having any. Was I laid up in bed, unable to access other diversions? No. Were my critical faculties perhaps dulled by the intake of amusing illegal drugs or vast quantities of alcohol? I'll decline to answer except to say that my drug and alcohol consumption was the same for the years either side of the one I read this book in.
I can't explain why I read it, I think I may have been mesmerised by the sheer convoluted nature of the plot as well as its absurdity, to have John Jacob Astor IV the man who before going down with Titanic was most famous for his nickname Jack Ass-tor (and it was meant to be unflattering) as one of the, admittedly many, driving forces in this counterfactual of just about everywhere and everything since 1912 is simply superb, insane, madness.
This is a book for delusional cranks, did I mention how many times the Titanic sinks as various heroes try and make it sink at the proper time and place? or that the fate of the Romanovs is involved? no I didn't and I am not going to even try and explain.
I am rather ashamed that I didn't use the time more usefully by reading The Leopard again or washing my hair. I can't say that this is disappointing, unratable, a waste of time or shouldn't have been written. It is a folie de grandeur which in a mad way you have to say it is magnificent but it is not literature, it is not even a novel. I cannot recommend anyone to read it but I can't help thinking the world would be a poorer place without it.
I can't explain why I read it, I think I may have been mesmerised by the sheer convoluted nature of the plot as well as its absurdity, to have John Jacob Astor IV the man who before going down with Titanic was most famous for his nickname Jack Ass-tor (and it was meant to be unflattering) as one of the, admittedly many, driving forces in this counterfactual of just about everywhere and everything since 1912 is simply superb, insane, madness.
This is a book for delusional cranks, did I mention how many times the Titanic sinks as various heroes try and make it sink at the proper time and place? or that the fate of the Romanovs is involved? no I didn't and I am not going to even try and explain.
I am rather ashamed that I didn't use the time more usefully by reading The Leopard again or washing my hair. I can't say that this is disappointing, unratable, a waste of time or shouldn't have been written. It is a folie de grandeur which in a mad way you have to say it is magnificent but it is not literature, it is not even a novel. I cannot recommend anyone to read it but I can't help thinking the world would be a poorer place without it.
March 26, 2013
At times I found this book a gripping and encompassing read, and then other times I just wanted Kowalski to get on with it.
The idea of what would happen if the history of the Titantic changed is interesting, and I liked the plays with history ideas.
The pacing could have been slightly better, and the sole female character better drawn - not been the object of lust for so many men.
The idea of what would happen if the history of the Titantic changed is interesting, and I liked the plays with history ideas.
The pacing could have been slightly better, and the sole female character better drawn - not been the object of lust for so many men.
February 25, 2017
We’ve all heard of the ‘Butterfly Effect’: a metaphor in chaos theory wherein a butterfly flaps its wings in Central Park resulting in a devastating hurricane in China—a tiny, seemingly inconsequential change in a nonlinear system leading to immense, even catastrophic changes of a future state. This theory largely drives the debate concerning time travel and provides the stimulus for a great many science fiction stories, including The Company of the Dead.
The fluttering butterfly wings of this massive tome is a pair of binoculars aboard the RMS Titanic in April, 1912. Meticulously researched to ensure historical accuracy, debut author David J. Kowalski deftly depicts the famous ocean liner as it races toward an ill-fated iceberg. However, a mysterious man from the future seeks to avert the unimaginable disaster by merely handing these binoculars—an artifact from the distant future—to a stationed lookout, unaware that this simple action would drastically alter the world as we know it today. The Company of the Dead presents an America that is no longer United, where WWII never occurred, and most of the globe is ruled by either the German or Japanese imperial empires. Major Joseph R. Kennedy, ancestor of President JFK, having glimpsed the cataclysmic horrors that await this refurbished timeline, embarks on a mission back in time to right the wrong, to repair the rift in history and return the world to its rightful timeline.
Kowalski constructs an alternate history so convoluted that David Lynch would take a look at it and be, like, "Dude, what the f***?" It’s no surprise that it took Kowalski fifteen years to write this book. With two cups of military sci-fi, a dash of historical fiction, and a sprinkle of romance, this multi-genre thriller is epic in scope and rich in its ensemble cast of well-rounded characters—genuinely likeable for the most part, though the larger-than-life Maj. Joseph Kennedy seemed overly sanctimonious at times and so wholly bent on martyrdom that it was disconcerting. My favorite characters by far were Darren Morgan and Jonathan Wells, and not just because each of them made a hopeless attempt to save a tiny cat whilst aboard the sinking steamship.
Albeit dense with perhaps a few too many subplots, Kowalski's first effort is still quite enjoyable. The incredibly short chapters made the book easy to put down at any given moment and resume later. The compelling character dialogue is better than most movie scripts and goes a long way to maintaining the reader's interest. Would I recommend this title? Sure, just so long as you’re not daunted by the book's 750-page thickness, and you're willing to commit to it with the understanding that the payoff is almost entirely tucked away in the final 120-or-so pages. Indeed, the pacing is somewhat slow and some middle portions of the book probably could’ve been excised...but then again, it makes reaching the end all the more rewarding. In short, it’s a pretty good yarn. Laced with conspiracies and political intrigue, profound world-building, historical figures, time-travel paradoxes, and high-octane battles both on the ground and in the air—there’s something in this book for everyone.
The fluttering butterfly wings of this massive tome is a pair of binoculars aboard the RMS Titanic in April, 1912. Meticulously researched to ensure historical accuracy, debut author David J. Kowalski deftly depicts the famous ocean liner as it races toward an ill-fated iceberg. However, a mysterious man from the future seeks to avert the unimaginable disaster by merely handing these binoculars—an artifact from the distant future—to a stationed lookout, unaware that this simple action would drastically alter the world as we know it today. The Company of the Dead presents an America that is no longer United, where WWII never occurred, and most of the globe is ruled by either the German or Japanese imperial empires. Major Joseph R. Kennedy, ancestor of President JFK, having glimpsed the cataclysmic horrors that await this refurbished timeline, embarks on a mission back in time to right the wrong, to repair the rift in history and return the world to its rightful timeline.
Kowalski constructs an alternate history so convoluted that David Lynch would take a look at it and be, like, "Dude, what the f***?" It’s no surprise that it took Kowalski fifteen years to write this book. With two cups of military sci-fi, a dash of historical fiction, and a sprinkle of romance, this multi-genre thriller is epic in scope and rich in its ensemble cast of well-rounded characters—genuinely likeable for the most part, though the larger-than-life Maj. Joseph Kennedy seemed overly sanctimonious at times and so wholly bent on martyrdom that it was disconcerting. My favorite characters by far were Darren Morgan and Jonathan Wells, and not just because each of them made a hopeless attempt to save a tiny cat whilst aboard the sinking steamship.
Albeit dense with perhaps a few too many subplots, Kowalski's first effort is still quite enjoyable. The incredibly short chapters made the book easy to put down at any given moment and resume later. The compelling character dialogue is better than most movie scripts and goes a long way to maintaining the reader's interest. Would I recommend this title? Sure, just so long as you’re not daunted by the book's 750-page thickness, and you're willing to commit to it with the understanding that the payoff is almost entirely tucked away in the final 120-or-so pages. Indeed, the pacing is somewhat slow and some middle portions of the book probably could’ve been excised...but then again, it makes reaching the end all the more rewarding. In short, it’s a pretty good yarn. Laced with conspiracies and political intrigue, profound world-building, historical figures, time-travel paradoxes, and high-octane battles both on the ground and in the air—there’s something in this book for everyone.
October 6, 2020
Rarely have I read a book that I tried so hard to like. Imagine going back in time to prevent the sinking of the Titanic. What would the world be like? Or what if you didn’t prevent the sinking but instead changed events somehow so different people survived?
This novel held a lot of promise for a reader like me: a time travel novel with (hopefully) accurate history, an in-depth world-building extravaganza based on an alternate history, and a race by a dedicated team of interesting characters to correct history back to the way it should be.
So, was the promise kept? Well…somewhat. I really did like the setup as well as the historical sequences at the beginning and the ending of the novel. The author's research and knowledge of the era is impressive. The alternate history was handled fairly well even if a bit too close to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Yes, the alternate history involves Germany and Japan dividing up the northern hemisphere. But the middle two-thirds of the book could have used a better editor. It seemed like the author kept coming up with “good” ideas to stick in there, resulting in too many sub plots and characters. For a long time, I lost track of the main plot to correct history. I was also disappointed in how the time travel worked. A rather lame explanation and no efforts to address paradoxes, etc. Might as well have gone with “magic”.
This is the author’s first novel and certainly an ambitious one. So, while I’m glad I read this lengthy tome, I think it would have been much better if 200-300 pages in the middle were cut out.
This novel held a lot of promise for a reader like me: a time travel novel with (hopefully) accurate history, an in-depth world-building extravaganza based on an alternate history, and a race by a dedicated team of interesting characters to correct history back to the way it should be.
So, was the promise kept? Well…somewhat. I really did like the setup as well as the historical sequences at the beginning and the ending of the novel. The author's research and knowledge of the era is impressive. The alternate history was handled fairly well even if a bit too close to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Yes, the alternate history involves Germany and Japan dividing up the northern hemisphere. But the middle two-thirds of the book could have used a better editor. It seemed like the author kept coming up with “good” ideas to stick in there, resulting in too many sub plots and characters. For a long time, I lost track of the main plot to correct history. I was also disappointed in how the time travel worked. A rather lame explanation and no efforts to address paradoxes, etc. Might as well have gone with “magic”.
This is the author’s first novel and certainly an ambitious one. So, while I’m glad I read this lengthy tome, I think it would have been much better if 200-300 pages in the middle were cut out.
March 8, 2012
Loved this book to bits. It's scope is truly huge.
As an historical fiction it's both fascinating in its exploration of an alternative (and fascinating) 20th century as well as presenting the most realized world I've yet to explore.
From there it segways seamlessly into an amazing thriller, with wild action sequences and an exploration of paradox which you'll never see coming. (at least I didn't!)
The book is excellently written, brilliantly plotted, and I read a blog somewhere that stated the alternate timeline was constructed with the help of a noted 20th century historian, which should tell you all you need to know about how interesting this world Company of the Dead drops you into.
The author manages to sink you into the world, exploring it thoroughly without ever resorting to jarring info dumps.
I read it and it instantly went into my top 10. I'll leave it at that.
As an historical fiction it's both fascinating in its exploration of an alternative (and fascinating) 20th century as well as presenting the most realized world I've yet to explore.
From there it segways seamlessly into an amazing thriller, with wild action sequences and an exploration of paradox which you'll never see coming. (at least I didn't!)
The book is excellently written, brilliantly plotted, and I read a blog somewhere that stated the alternate timeline was constructed with the help of a noted 20th century historian, which should tell you all you need to know about how interesting this world Company of the Dead drops you into.
The author manages to sink you into the world, exploring it thoroughly without ever resorting to jarring info dumps.
I read it and it instantly went into my top 10. I'll leave it at that.
July 31, 2015
This profoundly tedious seven hundred page epic fails as a kooky science fiction tale, fails as a tense thriller and fails as a character study of its lead; the disturbing moral hypocrite Joseph Kennedy, who the narrative begs and pleads with every gasping breath we root for. Shilled into the second coming by his rabid band of fanatics that compose the rest of this aggravating tale's cast.
A simple and conceptually effective 'For want of a nail' story misses the mark by three archery dojos as more as it merrily spins on the conceit that the existence of a united states of America is a crucial dynamo for social progression and enfranchisement for PoCs and women and with the vacuum left by a disunated states, the whole world would be stuck in colonial sensibilities. Humorous camp (Tom Clancy for Confederate President) is juxtaposed against tasteless cliche (Hitler revered as a genius artist) as the book paints its impossible obtuse alternate history in dull grey strokes.
While the narrative gives lip service to social progression and the plight of them poor disenfranchised folks, it is also alarmingly racist in the way it treats the african american character (Ostensibly a lead) as expendable and irrelevant, the amerindian characters as munitions and the the Big Ol' Evil Glorious Praise Be Sun Empire of Nippon as a blight on the earth. Especially telling is a scene towards the end, where Kennedy puts John Lightoller, a man he's known for a week, in charge of his final line of defense ahead of his loyal amerindian troops he's known for decades (Who obediently acceot this within the same twenty page frame as giving a Very Enlightened Speech about maybe white man coming to the americas and taking their land and culture was necessary to teach them Important Lessons).
The books' sole female, Patricia Malcom, is an unnecessary addition by an author so caught up in his machismo he never really figures out how to write women. Cut out the masses of Super Professional Agent Malcom's mooning over her old flame Joseph 'Jesus' Kennedy and you might have a chapter. Possibly two. Her badly handled subplot makes up the sleazy trash at the bottom of this gutter of a story. Passive and docile throughout; the one sided love triangle involving her is cringe inducing to read, the antagonist's obsession with her gross and without foundation and to top it all off, she literally (In its true meaning) gets told to stay at home during the story's final act (of chauvinism).
The story is divided into three acts. The first act is a five hundred pages or so not stop thriller of a chase which lasts for five hundred or so pages too long. Character interactions feel like special mentions from the inaugural Loehner Prize as bland heavy handed dialogue is exchanged without wit, warmth or passion (With the occasional sprig of Lifetime TV sentimentality). Worldbuilding is overrun by detail, failing to connect to the audience, the roadtrip fading into oblivion the instant the next stage of their joyless romp begins. The second act defines colonial power fantasy, as white men order around natives to slaughter themselves to attrition against nasty foriegners while waving a flag of freedom. As ugly and garish as that is, it does not compare to the story's final act, set to the sinking of the Titanic, where character motivation dies alongside internal consistency and the remainder of the plot splutters out towards its anticlimax, carried by the remainder of the cast acting as stupidly as possible.
Every sleight of hand and shocking temporal twist is screamingly obvious (With the exception of the last, which I grudgingly admit to being 'Kinda cute') and the final product just fails to live up to the story's ambition, with Big Concepts like destiny and penance being thrown out with the reckless abandon of last second election promises. Descriptions remain procedural and characterless throughout and the whole thing is about as quotable as a standard supermarket thriller.
This is a bad book and far too long. Don't be fooled by the enchanting high concept you see above water and steer your ship away, lest you be caught by the ugly mess of a thriller underneath.
A simple and conceptually effective 'For want of a nail' story misses the mark by three archery dojos as more as it merrily spins on the conceit that the existence of a united states of America is a crucial dynamo for social progression and enfranchisement for PoCs and women and with the vacuum left by a disunated states, the whole world would be stuck in colonial sensibilities. Humorous camp (Tom Clancy for Confederate President) is juxtaposed against tasteless cliche (Hitler revered as a genius artist) as the book paints its impossible obtuse alternate history in dull grey strokes.
While the narrative gives lip service to social progression and the plight of them poor disenfranchised folks, it is also alarmingly racist in the way it treats the african american character (Ostensibly a lead) as expendable and irrelevant, the amerindian characters as munitions and the the Big Ol' Evil Glorious Praise Be Sun Empire of Nippon as a blight on the earth. Especially telling is a scene towards the end, where Kennedy puts John Lightoller, a man he's known for a week, in charge of his final line of defense ahead of his loyal amerindian troops he's known for decades (Who obediently acceot this within the same twenty page frame as giving a Very Enlightened Speech about maybe white man coming to the americas and taking their land and culture was necessary to teach them Important Lessons).
The books' sole female, Patricia Malcom, is an unnecessary addition by an author so caught up in his machismo he never really figures out how to write women. Cut out the masses of Super Professional Agent Malcom's mooning over her old flame Joseph 'Jesus' Kennedy and you might have a chapter. Possibly two. Her badly handled subplot makes up the sleazy trash at the bottom of this gutter of a story. Passive and docile throughout; the one sided love triangle involving her is cringe inducing to read, the antagonist's obsession with her gross and without foundation and to top it all off, she literally (In its true meaning) gets told to stay at home during the story's final act (of chauvinism).
The story is divided into three acts. The first act is a five hundred pages or so not stop thriller of a chase which lasts for five hundred or so pages too long. Character interactions feel like special mentions from the inaugural Loehner Prize as bland heavy handed dialogue is exchanged without wit, warmth or passion (With the occasional sprig of Lifetime TV sentimentality). Worldbuilding is overrun by detail, failing to connect to the audience, the roadtrip fading into oblivion the instant the next stage of their joyless romp begins. The second act defines colonial power fantasy, as white men order around natives to slaughter themselves to attrition against nasty foriegners while waving a flag of freedom. As ugly and garish as that is, it does not compare to the story's final act, set to the sinking of the Titanic, where character motivation dies alongside internal consistency and the remainder of the plot splutters out towards its anticlimax, carried by the remainder of the cast acting as stupidly as possible.
Every sleight of hand and shocking temporal twist is screamingly obvious (With the exception of the last, which I grudgingly admit to being 'Kinda cute') and the final product just fails to live up to the story's ambition, with Big Concepts like destiny and penance being thrown out with the reckless abandon of last second election promises. Descriptions remain procedural and characterless throughout and the whole thing is about as quotable as a standard supermarket thriller.
This is a bad book and far too long. Don't be fooled by the enchanting high concept you see above water and steer your ship away, lest you be caught by the ugly mess of a thriller underneath.
August 1, 2022
This reads like one man's obsession, and I have to say that I like a lot of it. Some of his approach is problematic (black and native Americans are very poorly portrayed as adjuncts to the white folks trying to save the timeline). To be fair, I don't think Kowalski realizes how patronizing he is, and since not one person in the book bears a resemblance to an actual human being, they don't stand out very much as badly written characters.
Clearly Kowalski is (was? don't know if he is still alive) nuts about the Titanic, the American Civil War, World War I and alternate historical narratives. A few of my own obsessions (I'm with him on the last three) also get worked into the book: the Romanovs, the Kennedys, royalist France and time travel. Readers who complain that The Company of the Dead is too long (I feel you, folks) may not share Kowalski's determination to write about everything in which he has ever been interested at great length. The plot is almost secondary, which is good because it is so Byzantine that I had to keep checking the thoughtful maps included in order to keep the opposing powers straight. What kept me turning pages was Kowalski's finicky attention to weird details: John Jacob Astor and Charles Lightoller both survive the Titanic, and then team up, which allows Imperial Germany to win World War I. The "hero" is a descendant of Joseph P. Kennedy through his oldest son Joe, Jr. The Japanese detonate an atomic bomb over Berlin. I mean, hundreds of these things are crammed into The Company of the Dead, so when I tell you "but wait, there's more!", believe it.
I can only recommend the book if the description whets your appetite. If not, there are better-written alternate histories and time travel novels. But if full-on obsessive nuttiness is your thing, this may be the book for you!
Clearly Kowalski is (was? don't know if he is still alive) nuts about the Titanic, the American Civil War, World War I and alternate historical narratives. A few of my own obsessions (I'm with him on the last three) also get worked into the book: the Romanovs, the Kennedys, royalist France and time travel. Readers who complain that The Company of the Dead is too long (I feel you, folks) may not share Kowalski's determination to write about everything in which he has ever been interested at great length. The plot is almost secondary, which is good because it is so Byzantine that I had to keep checking the thoughtful maps included in order to keep the opposing powers straight. What kept me turning pages was Kowalski's finicky attention to weird details: John Jacob Astor and Charles Lightoller both survive the Titanic, and then team up, which allows Imperial Germany to win World War I. The "hero" is a descendant of Joseph P. Kennedy through his oldest son Joe, Jr. The Japanese detonate an atomic bomb over Berlin. I mean, hundreds of these things are crammed into The Company of the Dead, so when I tell you "but wait, there's more!", believe it.
I can only recommend the book if the description whets your appetite. If not, there are better-written alternate histories and time travel novels. But if full-on obsessive nuttiness is your thing, this may be the book for you!
July 10, 2012
Without a doubt, the best book I have read in the past year, and one of the best time-travel / alternate history works ever. From plot, to prose, to tone and intersection with actual historical events, this book is masterful.
I give it five stars; however, I do have one small critique: the main protagonist, Joe Kennedy, could have used a bit more character development, perhaps in the form of internal monologue or emotional reaction to events. We do get a decent sense of the man, but I closed the book wanting something deeper, something to explain his actions and motivations in deeper detail.
All that being said, a tremendous work, and it reflects the ten years the author spent writing it.
Highly recommended.
I give it five stars; however, I do have one small critique: the main protagonist, Joe Kennedy, could have used a bit more character development, perhaps in the form of internal monologue or emotional reaction to events. We do get a decent sense of the man, but I closed the book wanting something deeper, something to explain his actions and motivations in deeper detail.
All that being said, a tremendous work, and it reflects the ten years the author spent writing it.
Highly recommended.
April 20, 2012
The last 50 pages were great-everything a time-travel novel should be. However, you had to force your way through hundreds of pages of boring military strategy to get to it. Not really worth it.
January 27, 2013
Just because something is improbable does not mean it is impossible. That is a common phrase you will find in David Kowalski's The Company of the Dead. Originally published in Australia, this award-winning novel is Kowalski first work to be published in the United States and a lot of hype has come with it, including praise from John Birmingham and S. M. Stirling. So does the novel deserve the attention it has been getting?
The story begins when a time traveler from OTL goes back in time to prevent the sinking of the Titanic. The result of his efforts is a world where the United States does not enter World War I leading to a German victory. An increasingly troubled United States eventually splits between a reborn Confederacy centered around Texas and the Deep South, while the rest of country reorganizes itself into the Northern Union. The Union is later defeated and occupied by Japan, which along with Germany, is one of the world's two superpowers. By the present day, the two empires have conducted a long cold war with actually fighting played among their proxies. Meanwhile, culture and technology has stagnated. Decolonization, women's suffrage and civil rights all failed. There was never a space race (but this world does have giant airships called stratolites that act as airship carriers in the upper atmosphere) and nuclear weapons are a recent discovery.
The setting is the weakest part of the novel. Despite its ASB point of divergence, the events blossoming out from the changes wrought by the time traveler are not always logical. The idea that the Germans could be victorious in WWI simply because the United States stayed out of the war ignores the effect of British tanks on the fighting on the Western Front and Germany's own internal problems. Japan being able to defeat and occupy half of the OTL USA is also given way to much credit to the Japanese Empire, even this alternate one. On a related note, the book's jacket and promotional material appear to misquote the setting of the novel. America is described as being split by the two superpowers, with Japan holding the West Coast and Germany holding the East Coast. In reality Japan occupies the West Coast and New York, with the entire Northern Union being a client state. The Confederacy, however, is independent and a nominal ally of Germany. Not sure why that mistake was not caught before publication.
Despite the implausible history of the novel, The Company of the Dead is still a good book. The meat of the story follows Confederate spy Joseph Kennedy as his plan to restore history to its rightful order unfolds. By linking the plot with Roswell, Area 51, the sinking of the Titanic and the assassination of JFK; Kowalski managed to write an intriguing spy-thriller with mysteries abound. More importantly, Kowalski presented an important message that all alternate historians should take to heart: changing the past does not always mean a better future. This is especially true if your intention is to avoid an historical tragedy. For example, what if you went back in time and killed Hitler before his rise to power? Would that lead to a better world? As bad as the Holocaust was, without it we probably never would have had world nations embrace human rights. Or something worse could have happened, such as the Soviets invading Europe or someone competent taking charge of Germany. Do you remember what the road to hell is paved with?
Kowalski's debut American novel is a good story with an important message for fans of the genre, as long as you are not bothered to much by plausibility issues. You only have to remember that just because something is improbable, does not mean it is impossible.
The story begins when a time traveler from OTL goes back in time to prevent the sinking of the Titanic. The result of his efforts is a world where the United States does not enter World War I leading to a German victory. An increasingly troubled United States eventually splits between a reborn Confederacy centered around Texas and the Deep South, while the rest of country reorganizes itself into the Northern Union. The Union is later defeated and occupied by Japan, which along with Germany, is one of the world's two superpowers. By the present day, the two empires have conducted a long cold war with actually fighting played among their proxies. Meanwhile, culture and technology has stagnated. Decolonization, women's suffrage and civil rights all failed. There was never a space race (but this world does have giant airships called stratolites that act as airship carriers in the upper atmosphere) and nuclear weapons are a recent discovery.
The setting is the weakest part of the novel. Despite its ASB point of divergence, the events blossoming out from the changes wrought by the time traveler are not always logical. The idea that the Germans could be victorious in WWI simply because the United States stayed out of the war ignores the effect of British tanks on the fighting on the Western Front and Germany's own internal problems. Japan being able to defeat and occupy half of the OTL USA is also given way to much credit to the Japanese Empire, even this alternate one. On a related note, the book's jacket and promotional material appear to misquote the setting of the novel. America is described as being split by the two superpowers, with Japan holding the West Coast and Germany holding the East Coast. In reality Japan occupies the West Coast and New York, with the entire Northern Union being a client state. The Confederacy, however, is independent and a nominal ally of Germany. Not sure why that mistake was not caught before publication.
Despite the implausible history of the novel, The Company of the Dead is still a good book. The meat of the story follows Confederate spy Joseph Kennedy as his plan to restore history to its rightful order unfolds. By linking the plot with Roswell, Area 51, the sinking of the Titanic and the assassination of JFK; Kowalski managed to write an intriguing spy-thriller with mysteries abound. More importantly, Kowalski presented an important message that all alternate historians should take to heart: changing the past does not always mean a better future. This is especially true if your intention is to avoid an historical tragedy. For example, what if you went back in time and killed Hitler before his rise to power? Would that lead to a better world? As bad as the Holocaust was, without it we probably never would have had world nations embrace human rights. Or something worse could have happened, such as the Soviets invading Europe or someone competent taking charge of Germany. Do you remember what the road to hell is paved with?
Kowalski's debut American novel is a good story with an important message for fans of the genre, as long as you are not bothered to much by plausibility issues. You only have to remember that just because something is improbable, does not mean it is impossible.
June 13, 2012
This squat, massive trade paperback has room enough on the spine to print the quote that drew me in... "A magnificent alternate history, set against the backdrop of one of the greatest maritime disasters" (Library Journal). Well, no. Magnificent, it's not. But... The Company of the Dead is well-timed, coming as it does upon the centennial of the Titanic's sinking, and it is for the most part suspenseful and compelling.
Time traveler Jonathan Wells keeps the Titanic from colliding with the iceberg that lay in wait for it in our reality, simply by supplying a pair of 21st-century state-of-the-art binoculars to Mr. Fleet, the man on deck as the Titanic approached its fate. A small course change, and the Titanic will have missed its night to remember, creating an alternative timeline in which two world wars never happen, while the pace of technological advancement slows to a crawl... though so, too, does the pace of societal change.
To save the Titanic, and in so doing to engineer a better world. And just how well did that go for you, Mr. Wells? The best-laid plans, and all that... The Company of the Dead is more evidence, as if more evidence were required, that even time travelers don't have the kind of perfect knowledge required to fix the past. Because the moment you change something, all of your carefully-gathered knowledge of future history becomes unreliable. All of it.
The 2012 that results from Wells' actions is a world in which some things really are better than in our own—stately zeppelins ply the skies, Anne Frank is still writing novels, and Adolf Hitler is no worse than a notable if second-rate painter. But... overall, it's an altogether nastier world than our own. There were no World Wars I and II, to be sure, but the great empires of the early 20th Century—the British, Japanese, Germans and Russians—survived and expanded instead, growing ever larger, more rickety, and more brutally repressive of their colonies. China's billions have either vanished or been enslaved; African-Americans are denied free movement in large swathes of North America; sexist and racist epithets are common currency; and tobacco is still king. The United States are disunited—a second Confederacy has declared independence and made it stick this time. And now the world Wells made is on the brink of a global disaster that our "true" timeline has, so far, failed to experience... atomic weapons are a new and frightening addition to international diplomacy, in the hands of multiple nations with no desire for restraint.
Kowalski is an Australian, it says here, and his take on the skewed America that forms the bulk of Company's setting is suitably askew as well. There are some bobbles in his extrapolation—without WWII and a President Eisenhower, I doubt that an interstate highway system would have been constructed and named the same way ours was. But he can read a map; his various characters' journeys across North America do convey some idea of the scale involved—unlike many people from places where the borders come more closely packed, Kowalski seems to realize just how large our own Outback really is.
Kowalski also avoids the trap that snares many alternate-history writers, in that his extrapolations of the careers of individuals famous in our world rarely seem forced. The Kennedys are important, but in a different way; the American Presidents here are figures who, in our universe, may have had prominence in other fields but whose political interests make them plausible alternatives.
The alternatives here are all too plausible, in fact; the suicidal nations of Kowalski's alternate 2012 seem entirely too realistic.
Some odd coincidences marked my reading of this book. At one point Wells is reading Jerome K. Jerome's brilliant Three Men In A Boat—a book that was brought to my mind just days ago by my recent review of Connie Willis' own time-travelers in Blackout. And of course Willis has written her own book featuring the Titanic, Passage. And... my eye caught on the uncommon surname "Saffel" appearing once or twice in Company, but it was not until the very end, in Kowalski's Acknowledgements, that he reveals this "best friend I've never met" to be none other than editor and author Steve Saffel, a man I've known myself for many years. (Although I do not believe that this connection has colored my current review, I do think it best to mention it explicitly.)
I wouldn't say The Company of the Dead is magnificent—it's too long, and it does tend to ramble more than it should. An interminable desert battle late in the book could have lost 100 pages without making me cry. But—especially for a first novel—it's an interesting new take on some well-worn old premises, and definitely worth a look.
Time traveler Jonathan Wells keeps the Titanic from colliding with the iceberg that lay in wait for it in our reality, simply by supplying a pair of 21st-century state-of-the-art binoculars to Mr. Fleet, the man on deck as the Titanic approached its fate. A small course change, and the Titanic will have missed its night to remember, creating an alternative timeline in which two world wars never happen, while the pace of technological advancement slows to a crawl... though so, too, does the pace of societal change.
To save the Titanic, and in so doing to engineer a better world. And just how well did that go for you, Mr. Wells? The best-laid plans, and all that... The Company of the Dead is more evidence, as if more evidence were required, that even time travelers don't have the kind of perfect knowledge required to fix the past. Because the moment you change something, all of your carefully-gathered knowledge of future history becomes unreliable. All of it.
The 2012 that results from Wells' actions is a world in which some things really are better than in our own—stately zeppelins ply the skies, Anne Frank is still writing novels, and Adolf Hitler is no worse than a notable if second-rate painter. But... overall, it's an altogether nastier world than our own. There were no World Wars I and II, to be sure, but the great empires of the early 20th Century—the British, Japanese, Germans and Russians—survived and expanded instead, growing ever larger, more rickety, and more brutally repressive of their colonies. China's billions have either vanished or been enslaved; African-Americans are denied free movement in large swathes of North America; sexist and racist epithets are common currency; and tobacco is still king. The United States are disunited—a second Confederacy has declared independence and made it stick this time. And now the world Wells made is on the brink of a global disaster that our "true" timeline has, so far, failed to experience... atomic weapons are a new and frightening addition to international diplomacy, in the hands of multiple nations with no desire for restraint.
Kowalski is an Australian, it says here, and his take on the skewed America that forms the bulk of Company's setting is suitably askew as well. There are some bobbles in his extrapolation—without WWII and a President Eisenhower, I doubt that an interstate highway system would have been constructed and named the same way ours was. But he can read a map; his various characters' journeys across North America do convey some idea of the scale involved—unlike many people from places where the borders come more closely packed, Kowalski seems to realize just how large our own Outback really is.
Kowalski also avoids the trap that snares many alternate-history writers, in that his extrapolations of the careers of individuals famous in our world rarely seem forced. The Kennedys are important, but in a different way; the American Presidents here are figures who, in our universe, may have had prominence in other fields but whose political interests make them plausible alternatives.
The alternatives here are all too plausible, in fact; the suicidal nations of Kowalski's alternate 2012 seem entirely too realistic.
Some odd coincidences marked my reading of this book. At one point Wells is reading Jerome K. Jerome's brilliant Three Men In A Boat—a book that was brought to my mind just days ago by my recent review of Connie Willis' own time-travelers in Blackout. And of course Willis has written her own book featuring the Titanic, Passage. And... my eye caught on the uncommon surname "Saffel" appearing once or twice in Company, but it was not until the very end, in Kowalski's Acknowledgements, that he reveals this "best friend I've never met" to be none other than editor and author Steve Saffel, a man I've known myself for many years. (Although I do not believe that this connection has colored my current review, I do think it best to mention it explicitly.)
I wouldn't say The Company of the Dead is magnificent—it's too long, and it does tend to ramble more than it should. An interminable desert battle late in the book could have lost 100 pages without making me cry. But—especially for a first novel—it's an interesting new take on some well-worn old premises, and definitely worth a look.
August 17, 2023
This book has a great story. The world laid out is fantastically well thought out for an alternative history novel. The world inside is detailed with a full alternate sequence of events from 1912 to 2012. That part is fantastic. The overall story is also interesting, compelling, and thrilling. Then we come to the actual writing. This book is 751 pages long. It could probably get away with being about half that or less. It dragged on in a lot of places. Numerous times I found myself begging for the book to just get on with itself so that the plot would advance. There's just a few too many characters to fully keep track of. Furthermore, with the plot of the book and the inevitable resolution, I found myself finding many parts pointless. Overall however, it was a mostly fun read.
January 11, 2023
While it was good, it was not as I expected. Some of it could have been cut as it felt like two books merged into one. I was hoping for more of what happened with the alternate history concerning the people that might have survived. What I got was a very brief account of how everything changed and thrust into the distant future. I did find it very twisty and turny with lots of ups and downs. I am a Titanic lover so I missed having more story surrounding it. Lots of double spy stuff and lots of descriptions of fights in the desert.
January 18, 2021
Not sure how many people I’d recommend this to but for me it was a perfect storm of everything I like. Time travel, the Titanic and some history! Only complaint is it got a little too drawn out in the middle.
January 29, 2021
What a waste.
If you’re going to put a picture of the Titanic on the cover of your book, you’d better be willing to deliver on that promise. And if you’re going to write a novel about time travel, time travel needs to be seeping into every chapter, if not every line. Combining the Titanic and time travel to create an alternate history should make for a gripping story packed with questions like ‘are our actions determined by fate or can we truly change anything we like?’ and ‘how can we know that the timeline we are creating will be any better than the one we are leaving?’ and ‘Is it more important to save a few lives now or many lives later?’
Well, none of that happens in this book. There’s a brief and intriguing opening where the sinking of the Titanic goes differently and the history of the 20th century changes as a result. The first few chapters are fun as the reader tries to figure how the world has changed and how that all ties back to the Titanic. Then there’s a middle that has nothing to do with either the Titanic or time travel and is very boring and generally a waste of time. The end wraps up with all of the characters going back to the Titanic for a brief, quasi-interesting conclusion which I will completely spoil below.
Oh, and fair warning: I'm gonna include lots of gifs from Timeless, because it is a time travel show and it's excellent and I want to break up my big blocks of text with some visual aids. But first, the obvious go-to meme for this book:
Spoilers below!
There is only one female character in the whole book and she mostly swans about doing woman things like thinking about our Dull Boy Hero Joseph Kennedy, her former lover. She also gets pregnant. I guess I should have expected from a book written by a male obi/gyn but it still felt kinda cheap.
There is only one black character, and he works for the Confederates. Oh but, not those Confederates! These are good Confederates…but they are going to continually refer to him as ‘the negro’ and he is going to die for them. There’s also repeated use of the n-word, but don’t worry – it’s only said by the Bad Northerners. Racism solved!
Mmmkay.
There is no discussion of the civil rights movement, or the end of Jim Crow. Did these things happen? Did women ever get the right to vote? Can Shine drink from the same water fountain as Kennedy and Lightoller? The state of race relations in the Confederacy is a total mystery, which is a huge oversight given, you know…history. It’s pretty glaringly obvious that Kowalski only wants to discuss his historical faves (read: white men) and hasn’t even thought about how a changed century would affect the lives of women or persons of color. It’s like he just…forgot them, a pretty staggering omission considering how many of these 750 pages he wastes on pointless actiony shit between indistinguishable whiteboy scouts secret agents. But we’ll get to all that later.
While I have no doubt that Kowalski has a huge board in his house full of black and white photographs strung together with yarn that fully explains what he thinks happened in the alternate timeline, I as a reader couldn’t make sense of all of it. How did the Romanovs hold onto power during the Great War? How did the Japanese get the atom bomb? Why did the confederate states secede from the Union…again? As a Texan I feel I need to inform Mr. Kowalski that when Texans threaten to secede from the union (as we do occasionally) we are not planning on taking the other southern states with us, nor would we let them if they tried, because we hate all of them because they suck. And how did Nevada end up joining the New Confederacy? Was there a geographic rationale for which states went confederate and which ones ended up in Japanese hands? Because I can’t follow it. I’m not saying he should have made his world different, but the audience should be able to follow the events of the story, especially given the book’s length.
There needed to be more Titanic. And also, better Titanic.
I’m not a historian, but I’ve read a few books on the Titanic myself, and even I was able to pick out a few places where Kowalski went wrong. It quickly becomes clear that Kowalski hails from the Anti-Ismay school of thought – I, personally, am of the Anti-Smith side, because, you know, there’s no hard proof that Ismay pushed the Titanic to its doom. This becomes kind of glaring when Kowalski goes so far as to record that Smith ordered an evacuation and then dove off the deck. In actuality, the officer seen diving off the ship’s stern was Officer Lightoller, and one would think Kowalski knows that, given that one of his protagonists is a descendant of Lightoller.
Another thing that particularly rubbed me the wrong way was Kowalski including a bit where a crewman watching Irish steerage passengers board snipes ‘at least this lot speak English’. This is a true anecdote, but Kowalski leaves out the context – the crewman was making a racist comment regarding the steerage passengers who had boarded at Cherbourg earlier – many Lebanese, some east Asians, some Italian (Italian was the English catchall racist term for any Other, and was used so freely at the time that Italy demanded an apology shortly after the sinking. But I digress). Without the context of racism and classism, the remark loses all meaning, and that’s sort of a microcosm of why this book fails. Kowalski wants to tell a dramatic story, but he doesn’t really know who to make the villain of the piece, since he only wants to include his boring white faves in the story at all.
In addition to the historical confusion and Titanic peeves, I have issues with the time travel and the overall writing.
If you haven't figured it out yet, I am a huge fan of the time travel show Timeless. Early on in the show, the team are faced with the choice to save Lincoln and change the course of history, or let him die and keep things as they are. “Our history isn’t perfect but it’s ours.” Says Lucy, the historian. “Your history, maybe. My history sucks.” argues Rufus, a black man. It’s a small moment, but it sets up what become major issues in the show’s two-season run: Can they morally allow a man to die, knowing that it could condemn or save millions in the future? How can they be sure the world they’ll create will be better than the one they leave behind? If they do change something, as they inevitably will, how much change is too much? Don’t they have a moral responsibility to save as many lives as they can? And can they at all, or are there some events that will correct? How much can fate intervene in their travels? These are classic time travel questions that Kowalski doesn’t care about at all because he’d rather drag us through some silly Confederate intrigue. So instead we get some hand-wavy stuff about ghost dancers and a time loop where all the characters get to pat each other on the back in 1947.
It’s lazy. It’s a waste of a time-travel story. Moving on.
The characters are flimsier than cardboard. They are: Lightoller (a bland white man who wants…something?), Kennedy (a bland white man who wants to reunite north and south? I think?), Morgan (a bland white historian who uh…wants to do the right thing?) and Wells (a bland white time traveler who wants to change history). Wells is the most interesting because he’s the only one whose goals are clear through the whole book, and even he’s pretty weak because he accomplishes, uh, none of them. If he got anything done he might be considered the antagonist, but he turns out to be as useless as the others.
So in the end the main characters are all committed to making sure the Titanic goes down the way it’s supposed to, and also to making sure that J.J. Astor definitely dies. If he lives, the future is, well, history.
So once the ship is sinking Kennedy puts Morgan and Patricia in a lifeboat. Why don’t he and Wells also get in? We don’t know. Kennedy just says that ‘we leave in batches’ with no further explanation. Okie dokie. Maybe the ghosts told him. And I know you're thinking, 'what ghosts?'. The answer is that I didn't really get it either, but they're there and they convince Morgan to get out of the lifeboat so he can stay behind with Kennedy and Wells. Why? Because…honor? More on that later.
The result of all of this is that the story ends with the Titanic sinking exactly as it does in history, and none of the characters do a DAMN THING to stop it or save anyone on board. Because our history hinges on everything happening exactly as it always does, the big climax of the book is three dull boy scouts following J.J. Astor around the ship because they definitely need him to die, but Not Killing Him themselves because that would be…bad?
Listen, I’m not saying I want heroes who enjoy violence or bloodlust, but if the future of the universe hinged on a rich old man dying AND I had a clear shot to off him mercifully while he bids goodbye to his beloved dog, I’d make like Danny Devito and start blasting. Especially when the whole middle of the novel involved these same characters shooting randos and fighting silly battles that led to nothing. Violence is never a problem in this book until it affects the plot somehow.
But they don’t. Our troop of useless heroes stay on the ship, doing nothing, until it’s far too late – again a stupid decision. These characters have had a year to prepare for the sinking, and all of them were knowledgeable about the Titanic before time traveling, so there is no reason at all for them to hang about and do fuck nothing while the ship goes down under them. Anyone who has read survivor accounts has several ideas of how to avoid drowning in the freezing water. Make for one of the last lifeboats? Make a timed jump off the side before it’s too late? Or, failing that, follow in the steps of Baker Joughin to drink and provide flotation devices and position yourself to be the last man on board.
(I digress again to Timeless. While that show never got a Titanic episode, there was one planned and we know enough about the characters to guess exactly what each of them might do were they on the Titanic during it’s sinking. Because the characters have background and are well developed. None of Kowalski’s characters are developed – to the point that even he doesn’t know what they need to be doing in a severe crisis, so he has them stand about and watch the crisis unfold. Garcia Flynn would never.)
Instead of acting, Kennedy and Wells choose to stay on the ship and die in the freezing water like idiots. Morgan, on the other hand, does jump for it. He survives. So if he was going to get off the lifeboat to achieve nothing on board, kill no one, save no one, and then live in the end anyway, why bother getting him out of the lifeboat at all? Why couldn’t he have just stayed on the damn lifeboat with Patricia? Because…honor?
And that’s exactly it. That’s why Kennedy can’t board the lifeboat at all, that’s why none of them can kill Astor, that’s why Morgan has to pointlessly swan around on deck. Because honor demands it, and that is (again) why Kowalski fails to tell a good Titanic story: Because he hasn’t learned anything from the sinking at all. The sinking of the Titanic was inevitable, sure, but the tragedy was exacerbated by purely human factors. The hubris of Smith, the racism and classism inherent in the English upper class, the fact that ‘honor’ achieved nothing and condemned hundreds to an unnecessary death. But Kowalski still believes in all those things. He might as well be a White Star Line employee himself for all his devotion to the ideal of the honorable Anglo-Saxon descended male boldly staring into the dark, drowning out the screams of those he chose not to save because of…honor.
What a waste of the Titanic, and what a waste of a story. There are so many factors to explore, opportunities to change history or show what kind of meaningful change one person could make in the face of certain disaster. But Kowalski still believes in all that racist, classist bullshit so he changes nothing. Apparently our world really is the best possible timeline. Never mind the holocaust and all that.
Oh, and Astor does die. He floats by Wells and Kennedy as they’re drowning. So there’s another writing problem: The whole story hinges on Astor dying, but none of the protagonists kill him. So who is the hero, or the villain? Nature? Time? The water? No idea. The whole story wraps up with the chief aim – Astor’s death – being accomplished off page and revealed to us like an afterthought.
It’s bad writing.
So, in summation: This was bad. As a Titanic story, as a time-travel story, as a story about people, and as a novel. Kowalski doesn’t understand that characters need motivation, that a story needs a villain and a climax needs to be the result of the characters actions and growth. Hell, he doesn’t even understand the difference between chapter breaks and scene breaks, leading to sometimes absurdly short chapters. It's painfully obvious that this is a first novel written by someone who hasn't really studied the medium.
This just isn’t a good book. I’m very disappointed, but on the positive side this experience has made me want to go back and write that Timeless Titanic fanfiction I’ve had bouncing around my head because that show rocked and it’s a travesty that it got canceled.
Anyway.
If you’re going to read this, read only the first 200 and the last 150 pages. But overall, I don’t recommend it.
If you’re going to put a picture of the Titanic on the cover of your book, you’d better be willing to deliver on that promise. And if you’re going to write a novel about time travel, time travel needs to be seeping into every chapter, if not every line. Combining the Titanic and time travel to create an alternate history should make for a gripping story packed with questions like ‘are our actions determined by fate or can we truly change anything we like?’ and ‘how can we know that the timeline we are creating will be any better than the one we are leaving?’ and ‘Is it more important to save a few lives now or many lives later?’
Well, none of that happens in this book. There’s a brief and intriguing opening where the sinking of the Titanic goes differently and the history of the 20th century changes as a result. The first few chapters are fun as the reader tries to figure how the world has changed and how that all ties back to the Titanic. Then there’s a middle that has nothing to do with either the Titanic or time travel and is very boring and generally a waste of time. The end wraps up with all of the characters going back to the Titanic for a brief, quasi-interesting conclusion which I will completely spoil below.
Oh, and fair warning: I'm gonna include lots of gifs from Timeless, because it is a time travel show and it's excellent and I want to break up my big blocks of text with some visual aids. But first, the obvious go-to meme for this book:
Spoilers below!
There is only one female character in the whole book and she mostly swans about doing woman things like thinking about our Dull Boy Hero Joseph Kennedy, her former lover. She also gets pregnant. I guess I should have expected from a book written by a male obi/gyn but it still felt kinda cheap.
There is only one black character, and he works for the Confederates. Oh but, not those Confederates! These are good Confederates…but they are going to continually refer to him as ‘the negro’ and he is going to die for them. There’s also repeated use of the n-word, but don’t worry – it’s only said by the Bad Northerners. Racism solved!
Mmmkay.
There is no discussion of the civil rights movement, or the end of Jim Crow. Did these things happen? Did women ever get the right to vote? Can Shine drink from the same water fountain as Kennedy and Lightoller? The state of race relations in the Confederacy is a total mystery, which is a huge oversight given, you know…history. It’s pretty glaringly obvious that Kowalski only wants to discuss his historical faves (read: white men) and hasn’t even thought about how a changed century would affect the lives of women or persons of color. It’s like he just…forgot them, a pretty staggering omission considering how many of these 750 pages he wastes on pointless actiony shit between indistinguishable white
While I have no doubt that Kowalski has a huge board in his house full of black and white photographs strung together with yarn that fully explains what he thinks happened in the alternate timeline, I as a reader couldn’t make sense of all of it. How did the Romanovs hold onto power during the Great War? How did the Japanese get the atom bomb? Why did the confederate states secede from the Union…again? As a Texan I feel I need to inform Mr. Kowalski that when Texans threaten to secede from the union (as we do occasionally) we are not planning on taking the other southern states with us, nor would we let them if they tried, because we hate all of them because they suck. And how did Nevada end up joining the New Confederacy? Was there a geographic rationale for which states went confederate and which ones ended up in Japanese hands? Because I can’t follow it. I’m not saying he should have made his world different, but the audience should be able to follow the events of the story, especially given the book’s length.
There needed to be more Titanic. And also, better Titanic.
I’m not a historian, but I’ve read a few books on the Titanic myself, and even I was able to pick out a few places where Kowalski went wrong. It quickly becomes clear that Kowalski hails from the Anti-Ismay school of thought – I, personally, am of the Anti-Smith side, because, you know, there’s no hard proof that Ismay pushed the Titanic to its doom. This becomes kind of glaring when Kowalski goes so far as to record that Smith ordered an evacuation and then dove off the deck. In actuality, the officer seen diving off the ship’s stern was Officer Lightoller, and one would think Kowalski knows that, given that one of his protagonists is a descendant of Lightoller.
Another thing that particularly rubbed me the wrong way was Kowalski including a bit where a crewman watching Irish steerage passengers board snipes ‘at least this lot speak English’. This is a true anecdote, but Kowalski leaves out the context – the crewman was making a racist comment regarding the steerage passengers who had boarded at Cherbourg earlier – many Lebanese, some east Asians, some Italian (Italian was the English catchall racist term for any Other, and was used so freely at the time that Italy demanded an apology shortly after the sinking. But I digress). Without the context of racism and classism, the remark loses all meaning, and that’s sort of a microcosm of why this book fails. Kowalski wants to tell a dramatic story, but he doesn’t really know who to make the villain of the piece, since he only wants to include his boring white faves in the story at all.
In addition to the historical confusion and Titanic peeves, I have issues with the time travel and the overall writing.
If you haven't figured it out yet, I am a huge fan of the time travel show Timeless. Early on in the show, the team are faced with the choice to save Lincoln and change the course of history, or let him die and keep things as they are. “Our history isn’t perfect but it’s ours.” Says Lucy, the historian. “Your history, maybe. My history sucks.” argues Rufus, a black man. It’s a small moment, but it sets up what become major issues in the show’s two-season run: Can they morally allow a man to die, knowing that it could condemn or save millions in the future? How can they be sure the world they’ll create will be better than the one they leave behind? If they do change something, as they inevitably will, how much change is too much? Don’t they have a moral responsibility to save as many lives as they can? And can they at all, or are there some events that will correct? How much can fate intervene in their travels? These are classic time travel questions that Kowalski doesn’t care about at all because he’d rather drag us through some silly Confederate intrigue. So instead we get some hand-wavy stuff about ghost dancers and a time loop where all the characters get to pat each other on the back in 1947.
It’s lazy. It’s a waste of a time-travel story. Moving on.
The characters are flimsier than cardboard. They are: Lightoller (a bland white man who wants…something?), Kennedy (a bland white man who wants to reunite north and south? I think?), Morgan (a bland white historian who uh…wants to do the right thing?) and Wells (a bland white time traveler who wants to change history). Wells is the most interesting because he’s the only one whose goals are clear through the whole book, and even he’s pretty weak because he accomplishes, uh, none of them. If he got anything done he might be considered the antagonist, but he turns out to be as useless as the others.
So in the end the main characters are all committed to making sure the Titanic goes down the way it’s supposed to, and also to making sure that J.J. Astor definitely dies. If he lives, the future is, well, history.
So once the ship is sinking Kennedy puts Morgan and Patricia in a lifeboat. Why don’t he and Wells also get in? We don’t know. Kennedy just says that ‘we leave in batches’ with no further explanation. Okie dokie. Maybe the ghosts told him. And I know you're thinking, 'what ghosts?'. The answer is that I didn't really get it either, but they're there and they convince Morgan to get out of the lifeboat so he can stay behind with Kennedy and Wells. Why? Because…honor? More on that later.
The result of all of this is that the story ends with the Titanic sinking exactly as it does in history, and none of the characters do a DAMN THING to stop it or save anyone on board. Because our history hinges on everything happening exactly as it always does, the big climax of the book is three dull boy scouts following J.J. Astor around the ship because they definitely need him to die, but Not Killing Him themselves because that would be…bad?
Listen, I’m not saying I want heroes who enjoy violence or bloodlust, but if the future of the universe hinged on a rich old man dying AND I had a clear shot to off him mercifully while he bids goodbye to his beloved dog, I’d make like Danny Devito and start blasting. Especially when the whole middle of the novel involved these same characters shooting randos and fighting silly battles that led to nothing. Violence is never a problem in this book until it affects the plot somehow.
But they don’t. Our troop of useless heroes stay on the ship, doing nothing, until it’s far too late – again a stupid decision. These characters have had a year to prepare for the sinking, and all of them were knowledgeable about the Titanic before time traveling, so there is no reason at all for them to hang about and do fuck nothing while the ship goes down under them. Anyone who has read survivor accounts has several ideas of how to avoid drowning in the freezing water. Make for one of the last lifeboats? Make a timed jump off the side before it’s too late? Or, failing that, follow in the steps of Baker Joughin to drink and provide flotation devices and position yourself to be the last man on board.
(I digress again to Timeless. While that show never got a Titanic episode, there was one planned and we know enough about the characters to guess exactly what each of them might do were they on the Titanic during it’s sinking. Because the characters have background and are well developed. None of Kowalski’s characters are developed – to the point that even he doesn’t know what they need to be doing in a severe crisis, so he has them stand about and watch the crisis unfold. Garcia Flynn would never.)
Instead of acting, Kennedy and Wells choose to stay on the ship and die in the freezing water like idiots. Morgan, on the other hand, does jump for it. He survives. So if he was going to get off the lifeboat to achieve nothing on board, kill no one, save no one, and then live in the end anyway, why bother getting him out of the lifeboat at all? Why couldn’t he have just stayed on the damn lifeboat with Patricia? Because…honor?
And that’s exactly it. That’s why Kennedy can’t board the lifeboat at all, that’s why none of them can kill Astor, that’s why Morgan has to pointlessly swan around on deck. Because honor demands it, and that is (again) why Kowalski fails to tell a good Titanic story: Because he hasn’t learned anything from the sinking at all. The sinking of the Titanic was inevitable, sure, but the tragedy was exacerbated by purely human factors. The hubris of Smith, the racism and classism inherent in the English upper class, the fact that ‘honor’ achieved nothing and condemned hundreds to an unnecessary death. But Kowalski still believes in all those things. He might as well be a White Star Line employee himself for all his devotion to the ideal of the honorable Anglo-Saxon descended male boldly staring into the dark, drowning out the screams of those he chose not to save because of…honor.
What a waste of the Titanic, and what a waste of a story. There are so many factors to explore, opportunities to change history or show what kind of meaningful change one person could make in the face of certain disaster. But Kowalski still believes in all that racist, classist bullshit so he changes nothing. Apparently our world really is the best possible timeline. Never mind the holocaust and all that.
Oh, and Astor does die. He floats by Wells and Kennedy as they’re drowning. So there’s another writing problem: The whole story hinges on Astor dying, but none of the protagonists kill him. So who is the hero, or the villain? Nature? Time? The water? No idea. The whole story wraps up with the chief aim – Astor’s death – being accomplished off page and revealed to us like an afterthought.
It’s bad writing.
So, in summation: This was bad. As a Titanic story, as a time-travel story, as a story about people, and as a novel. Kowalski doesn’t understand that characters need motivation, that a story needs a villain and a climax needs to be the result of the characters actions and growth. Hell, he doesn’t even understand the difference between chapter breaks and scene breaks, leading to sometimes absurdly short chapters. It's painfully obvious that this is a first novel written by someone who hasn't really studied the medium.
This just isn’t a good book. I’m very disappointed, but on the positive side this experience has made me want to go back and write that Timeless Titanic fanfiction I’ve had bouncing around my head because that show rocked and it’s a travesty that it got canceled.
Anyway.
If you’re going to read this, read only the first 200 and the last 150 pages. But overall, I don’t recommend it.
July 17, 2012
This book needs to be a movie. A dumb, action packed, James Cameron (maybe that's just because he did Titanic) movie. If this thing only took 2 hours and was all Hollywood and action packed, I probably would have liked it. I wouldn't have loved it, but I might have at least liked it.
Instead, it is a 750 page monstrosity with little to redeem it except the moral of "don't do time travel, it fucks things up." I'm pretty sure (given the all knowing ghost dancers) that Kowalski would also want me to take it a step further and say that we shouldn't interfere with GOD'S PLAN. If nothing else in this novel made me want to scream and throw something, the idea of divine method would have been enough.
The writing was clear and mostly okay. At times, it was a too expository (especially when first introducing NY in 2012 and trying to get the reader caught up in the new world order), and frequently it was over-the-top dramatic ("It's veil of lies would be torn away, leaving Kennedy's true agenda exposed.") with cliches and embellishments that should have been cut by an editor.
The plot was well thought out (altho I did know that Lightholler was Roswell in 1947 as soon as they left him in the carapace to die and I saw Marie as Patricia a mile away) and attempts to deal with the question that usually bothers me with time travel....that is, how do we ever move forward and get out of a never ending loop? Unfortunately, Kowalski moves his characters around awfully conveniently in trying to solve his loop, creating other issues.
I hated that we were in an almost parallel universe. Kowalski wanted the reader to have familiar names/events and so there are lots of similarities...Anne Frank the novelist, Hitler the artist, JFK killed (with his wife Norma Jean) in Dallas 11/22/63...all of these are to show us that the world is just slightly off. BUT THE JAPANESE CONTROL THE UNION AND USA DOES NOT EXIST. Hitler was a shitty artist (part of the angst that drove his mania) and second, if the world is this different what are the chances that the same people we recognize would be famous? They may not even exist (he touches on this a bit with Kennedy having been not born in our world, but what about all the people that wouldn't have been born in their world?) and if they did, it is possible that they are just nobodies.
Second, the fact that Webster was eagerly helping Kennedy along MADE NO SENSE. Beside the complete impossibility that Reid (after having been held captured for several days) was able to transverse the desert (which was under attack) and reach a phone to call Webster and then convince him that it was worth dealing with Kennedy and then Webster was able to hijack the Patton and arrive (in the middle of a battle) at the cavern when 5 minutes previously they had figured that Kennedy would not make it back in time (and then Kennedy goes back out in battle and has to be rescued just minutes before his death?), why would Webster help him? Even if I bought the ridiculousness of the whole above, I still was not convinced that Webster would do anything other than hijack the carapace. Yes, he didn't have very many agents on the ground..but he controls a huge atomic wielding balloon. And he now knows where the carapace is located. And he eagerly leaves them about their business and blows himself up? WTF?
Third, the convenience of the trip to NY instead of the desert for the second staging made me want to scream. I could see Kowalski grinning and rubbing his hands and thinking "gotcha" when Lightholler's hero turns out to be himself and Kennedy does use his own gun to kill Cooper in the street. But, really? There was no reason they needed to go to NY. Doc could have made them go back 9 days and land in the desert. There was no battle then, they wouldn't have had to worry about the war and they could have re-assured their earlier selves that they did get off the ground soon enough. It just doesn't make sense to send them to NY except to have this great "revealing" so Kowalski can feel all schnazzy.
Finally, the mystic-shimmery quality of the carapace, Stead's influence, and the religious beliefs of the ghost dancers just made me want to vomit. This is supposed to be a sci-fi book; Kowalski takes great pains to establish the credibility of some political and technological outcomes, but ultimately the whole thing hinges on the word of a mystic? Patricia is able to influence the cycle because Tecumseh and Stead make their mark? It just was too "fate will return things to the right path" for me.
Overall not worth the energy. It has potential, but the ultimate product was crap.
Instead, it is a 750 page monstrosity with little to redeem it except the moral of "don't do time travel, it fucks things up." I'm pretty sure (given the all knowing ghost dancers) that Kowalski would also want me to take it a step further and say that we shouldn't interfere with GOD'S PLAN. If nothing else in this novel made me want to scream and throw something, the idea of divine method would have been enough.
The writing was clear and mostly okay. At times, it was a too expository (especially when first introducing NY in 2012 and trying to get the reader caught up in the new world order), and frequently it was over-the-top dramatic ("It's veil of lies would be torn away, leaving Kennedy's true agenda exposed.") with cliches and embellishments that should have been cut by an editor.
The plot was well thought out (altho I did know that Lightholler was Roswell in 1947 as soon as they left him in the carapace to die and I saw Marie as Patricia a mile away) and attempts to deal with the question that usually bothers me with time travel....that is, how do we ever move forward and get out of a never ending loop? Unfortunately, Kowalski moves his characters around awfully conveniently in trying to solve his loop, creating other issues.
I hated that we were in an almost parallel universe. Kowalski wanted the reader to have familiar names/events and so there are lots of similarities...Anne Frank the novelist, Hitler the artist, JFK killed (with his wife Norma Jean) in Dallas 11/22/63...all of these are to show us that the world is just slightly off. BUT THE JAPANESE CONTROL THE UNION AND USA DOES NOT EXIST. Hitler was a shitty artist (part of the angst that drove his mania) and second, if the world is this different what are the chances that the same people we recognize would be famous? They may not even exist (he touches on this a bit with Kennedy having been not born in our world, but what about all the people that wouldn't have been born in their world?) and if they did, it is possible that they are just nobodies.
Second, the fact that Webster was eagerly helping Kennedy along MADE NO SENSE. Beside the complete impossibility that Reid (after having been held captured for several days) was able to transverse the desert (which was under attack) and reach a phone to call Webster and then convince him that it was worth dealing with Kennedy and then Webster was able to hijack the Patton and arrive (in the middle of a battle) at the cavern when 5 minutes previously they had figured that Kennedy would not make it back in time (and then Kennedy goes back out in battle and has to be rescued just minutes before his death?), why would Webster help him? Even if I bought the ridiculousness of the whole above, I still was not convinced that Webster would do anything other than hijack the carapace. Yes, he didn't have very many agents on the ground..but he controls a huge atomic wielding balloon. And he now knows where the carapace is located. And he eagerly leaves them about their business and blows himself up? WTF?
Third, the convenience of the trip to NY instead of the desert for the second staging made me want to scream. I could see Kowalski grinning and rubbing his hands and thinking "gotcha" when Lightholler's hero turns out to be himself and Kennedy does use his own gun to kill Cooper in the street. But, really? There was no reason they needed to go to NY. Doc could have made them go back 9 days and land in the desert. There was no battle then, they wouldn't have had to worry about the war and they could have re-assured their earlier selves that they did get off the ground soon enough. It just doesn't make sense to send them to NY except to have this great "revealing" so Kowalski can feel all schnazzy.
Finally, the mystic-shimmery quality of the carapace, Stead's influence, and the religious beliefs of the ghost dancers just made me want to vomit. This is supposed to be a sci-fi book; Kowalski takes great pains to establish the credibility of some political and technological outcomes, but ultimately the whole thing hinges on the word of a mystic? Patricia is able to influence the cycle because Tecumseh and Stead make their mark? It just was too "fate will return things to the right path" for me.
Overall not worth the energy. It has potential, but the ultimate product was crap.
June 24, 2013
David Kowalski's "The Company of the Dead" is perhaps the most complicated alternate history story in the history of the genre & yet it's more than that & then some. The story begins with the premise that the Titanic doesn't sink when it's supposed to on April 15, 1912 due to the interference of Jonathan Wells who changes the when & leaves one rather important person alive after the sinking. Fast forward a century into a world where the US didn't enter WWI thus causing the Confederacy to be re-created during the Depression, the Germans have most of Europe, the Japanese have a demilitarized zone on the west coast & some of the great empires never entirely fell. Enter Joseph Kennedy the great nephew of JFK who works for the CBI. He's part of project Camelot whose simple goal is to re-unite the USA & CSA with a southern leader via an invasion of the north with help from both the Germans & the Japanese. Kennedy himself though has other ideas when he learns of a diary from the Titanic which describes an alternate version of history that he believes is the correct one.
Kowalski's story is complicated in a lot of ways between trying to understand this version of 2012 & the reasons why Kennedy & the people around him believe that they have to go back in time to make history correct. It's part modern day spy novel, part love story, part vendetta & part science fiction rolled into one. The characters themselves are extremely well developed & the chapters are short enough to keep we the reader from getting bogged down in the details which is very, very easy to do. The time travel device itself is never fully explained which isn't a bad thing although the tie-in to Roswell is a nice twist in the book. Also the political maneuvering done in the book by all the characters from the Confederate government of President Tom Clancy to the German Kaiser & Japanese emperor make this version of events seem plausible.
Granted at times Kowalski does spend a bit too much time on the details especially toward the final scenes where the world in this 2012 pretty much ends due to atomic war & the chase of Wells aboard the Titanic in 1912, but it doesn't detract from this very unusual story. At over 700 pages, "The Company of the Dead" may cause people to pass it up, but my advice is stick with this book & don't get bogged down in the details as this one is for fans of everything from the Titanic to the Kennedy family to alternate history in general. This is one ride that despite some flaws is actually one worth taking.
Kowalski's story is complicated in a lot of ways between trying to understand this version of 2012 & the reasons why Kennedy & the people around him believe that they have to go back in time to make history correct. It's part modern day spy novel, part love story, part vendetta & part science fiction rolled into one. The characters themselves are extremely well developed & the chapters are short enough to keep we the reader from getting bogged down in the details which is very, very easy to do. The time travel device itself is never fully explained which isn't a bad thing although the tie-in to Roswell is a nice twist in the book. Also the political maneuvering done in the book by all the characters from the Confederate government of President Tom Clancy to the German Kaiser & Japanese emperor make this version of events seem plausible.
Granted at times Kowalski does spend a bit too much time on the details especially toward the final scenes where the world in this 2012 pretty much ends due to atomic war & the chase of Wells aboard the Titanic in 1912, but it doesn't detract from this very unusual story. At over 700 pages, "The Company of the Dead" may cause people to pass it up, but my advice is stick with this book & don't get bogged down in the details as this one is for fans of everything from the Titanic to the Kennedy family to alternate history in general. This is one ride that despite some flaws is actually one worth taking.
February 14, 2012
What if it wasn’t a flying saucer that crashed in the desert in Roswell, New Mexico back in 1947? What if it was actually a time machine? That’s the idea behind The Company of the Dead. In 2012, Dr, Jonathan Wells accidentally learns about the time machine while treating a patient at Area 51 and in order to save his life gets transported back to 1911. Once in 1911 with nothing to do, Wells decides to change history and make the world a better place. First on the list, save the Titanic, but as we soon discover, that’s easier said then done. Rather then save the Titanic, Wells merely postpones the inevitable for a few hours. This small change allows some passengers to live that would have died and causes some to die that would have lived. And so the butterfly flaps its wings. If you have any intention of reading this book, I would recommend you stop reading this review as there be spoilers ahead. Make sure you come back and finish this review once you have read the book, I’ll be waiting.
In 2012 2.0, the world is a vastly different place with Greater Germany and Imperial Japan as the two leading superpowers with the United States divided and partly occupied. A small group led by Confederate Bureau of Intelligence agent Joseph Kennedy have learned about the time machine and Wells’ changing of history. They’ve decided they like the original version better and set out to prevent Wells from changing the past. Here’s where the story gets a little murky. Apparently there is some type of time loop in which Kennedy continually tries to stop Wells and continually fails in one way or another, this is his last chance. I found this to be unnecessary and somewhat bothersome; the story gets all mystical for awhile. One other small issue was the explanation of how the time loop started. Rather then address the paradox in any meaningful way, it got one or two throw away lines. Otherwise I found this to be a quite enjoyable book. At 832 pages it was a bit long and there were some areas that probably could have been trimmed down a bit. This might not be the book to bring on a cruise.
I received this book as an ARC from Titan Books.
In 2012 2.0, the world is a vastly different place with Greater Germany and Imperial Japan as the two leading superpowers with the United States divided and partly occupied. A small group led by Confederate Bureau of Intelligence agent Joseph Kennedy have learned about the time machine and Wells’ changing of history. They’ve decided they like the original version better and set out to prevent Wells from changing the past. Here’s where the story gets a little murky. Apparently there is some type of time loop in which Kennedy continually tries to stop Wells and continually fails in one way or another, this is his last chance. I found this to be unnecessary and somewhat bothersome; the story gets all mystical for awhile. One other small issue was the explanation of how the time loop started. Rather then address the paradox in any meaningful way, it got one or two throw away lines. Otherwise I found this to be a quite enjoyable book. At 832 pages it was a bit long and there were some areas that probably could have been trimmed down a bit. This might not be the book to bring on a cruise.
I received this book as an ARC from Titan Books.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 31, 2012
I'm hovering somewhere between 3 and 4 stars on this, so I guess it's a solid 3.5. Overall, I enjoyed it, but it had some definite pacing/editing issues. It could easily have been at least 200 pages shorter, and would have been a better novel for it. You figure out fairly early on where everything is headed, but it takes 500+ pages of meandering to get there. Instead of a tense climax and big payoff once you do get there, the pacing slows way down and stalls out for another 50+ pages. Someone somewhere along the line needed to help him fix that.
There were also significant problems with clarity. When creating 100 years of alternate history, it needs to be explained clearly, especially because it informs so much of the "present." In a novel 750 pages in length, there's really no excuse for having things be that ambiguous. Frankly, even creating a timeline for an appendix section a reader could refer to would have helped out a lot. I'm honestly still not exactly sure what actually happened in that timeline or when the events I do have a grasp on occured.
I could see people having a problem being connected to and caring about the characters. I liked most of them, but I only had an attachment to a few. Patricia Malcolm seemed totally pointless for most of the book, and a lot of things surrounding her felt forced. I think maybe if there hadn't been quite so many characters, they could have been better developed and made more of an impact, instead of most of them getting lost in the crowd. Even Kennedy, who would probably be considered the "hero" of the story, wasn't incredibly well developed and only occupied a fraction of the overall screen-time.
All that aside, I did like the book. It was a really interesting premise and I think he executed it fairly well, problems aside. I loved the first 65 pages, but I feel like the rest of the book failed to live up to them (though I did basically like how the whole thing was resolved). The author does have some really interesting ideas and I'd read something else by him, with the hope that as he continues he's able to fix some of the issues that take away from his work.
There were also significant problems with clarity. When creating 100 years of alternate history, it needs to be explained clearly, especially because it informs so much of the "present." In a novel 750 pages in length, there's really no excuse for having things be that ambiguous. Frankly, even creating a timeline for an appendix section a reader could refer to would have helped out a lot. I'm honestly still not exactly sure what actually happened in that timeline or when the events I do have a grasp on occured.
I could see people having a problem being connected to and caring about the characters. I liked most of them, but I only had an attachment to a few. Patricia Malcolm seemed totally pointless for most of the book, and a lot of things surrounding her felt forced. I think maybe if there hadn't been quite so many characters, they could have been better developed and made more of an impact, instead of most of them getting lost in the crowd. Even Kennedy, who would probably be considered the "hero" of the story, wasn't incredibly well developed and only occupied a fraction of the overall screen-time.
All that aside, I did like the book. It was a really interesting premise and I think he executed it fairly well, problems aside. I loved the first 65 pages, but I feel like the rest of the book failed to live up to them (though I did basically like how the whole thing was resolved). The author does have some really interesting ideas and I'd read something else by him, with the hope that as he continues he's able to fix some of the issues that take away from his work.
October 31, 2012
This book was long. To be honest, this book was the kind of long that makes me think that this book did not want to be a book. Possibly it wanted to be a film, but really I think Kowalski wanted it to be a TV series - like an HBO mini series or perhaps something slightly more long running. Kowalski is an obstetrician in his spare time and he spent ten years on this thing and it shows. I always respect effort and whatever the faults of this book, you can't say that Kowalski slipped up on the detail.
The premise of this book is the Titanic - one man finds himself sent back in time and while he's there he thinks he may as well try and stop the Titanic from sinking. Flash forward a century and the world is in total chaos and six people set out to put things right. You might say that the publication was kind of opportunistic with the centenary having come up this year but to be fair, the world has always been fascinated with The Big Ship That Couldn't so I'm not so sure. The first film about the Titanic was made four weeks after the sinking and starred one of the survivors (she had a nervous breakdown during the filming, small wonder). Kowalski very vividly describes Wells' experience as an interloper on board - we know so much about that evening and yet we know hardly anything at all. The parts on the ship were the best parts of the book - I did laugh when Wells watched Bruce Ismay climb into a lifeboat and made a gesture which his companion did not recognise but 'did not think could be misinterpreted as Bon Voyage'. There are things many people would like to say to the key players on Titanic. I also thought it was eerie watching the main characters watch the anecdotes that have been retold so often - like when John Astor stuffed a bonnet on a boy's head saying "Now he's a girl and he can go" - we don't know for certain if any of this happened but we want to believe.
For my full review:
http://girlwithherheadinabook.blogspo...
The premise of this book is the Titanic - one man finds himself sent back in time and while he's there he thinks he may as well try and stop the Titanic from sinking. Flash forward a century and the world is in total chaos and six people set out to put things right. You might say that the publication was kind of opportunistic with the centenary having come up this year but to be fair, the world has always been fascinated with The Big Ship That Couldn't so I'm not so sure. The first film about the Titanic was made four weeks after the sinking and starred one of the survivors (she had a nervous breakdown during the filming, small wonder). Kowalski very vividly describes Wells' experience as an interloper on board - we know so much about that evening and yet we know hardly anything at all. The parts on the ship were the best parts of the book - I did laugh when Wells watched Bruce Ismay climb into a lifeboat and made a gesture which his companion did not recognise but 'did not think could be misinterpreted as Bon Voyage'. There are things many people would like to say to the key players on Titanic. I also thought it was eerie watching the main characters watch the anecdotes that have been retold so often - like when John Astor stuffed a bonnet on a boy's head saying "Now he's a girl and he can go" - we don't know for certain if any of this happened but we want to believe.
For my full review:
http://girlwithherheadinabook.blogspo...
May 5, 2012
Wow! What an epic adventure.
This is a truly satisfying read by first-time novelist David Kowalski, a rich alternate-history/time-travel tapestry sandwiched between a bloody war story.
One man from the future ends up on the Titanic on April 14, 1912 the night of her disastrous sinking. This man (named Wells in a literary in-joke)hands Lookout Frederick Fleet a pair of 21st Century binoculars to aid his watch.
These help Fleet sight an iceberg, warn the bridge, and help avoid disaster. But Titanic hits another one four hours later, thus tearing a new 20th Century reality. Many things change after that - American millionaire John Jacob Astor survives the sinking instead of his wife.
And because he survives, Astor eventually becomes the U.S. President who prevents his nation from joining The Great War.
So many ripples ensue that the 2012 of this novel is ruled by the Japanese and German empires, America is again split along the Mason-Dixon Line and a Kennedy must try to correct History.
Whew! There's enough stuff in here to satisfy any hard-core alt-history or time travel fan. And it's full of historical nods and cultural in-jokes.
Thriller author Tom Clancy is now President of the new Confederate States of America. Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader who fought with the British in the War of 1812, is a key soldier under Joseph Kennedy the man who is trying to put history right.
Ira Hayes, the most decorated American Indian soldier in WW II, is also a Kennedy soldier.
The plot is complex, engaging and engrossing.
Having said that, I do agree with my fellow readers that the editor could've shaved a couple hundred pages and tightened the pacing.
But don't let that stop you from reading one of the most satisfying sci-fi novels of the year.
This is a truly satisfying read by first-time novelist David Kowalski, a rich alternate-history/time-travel tapestry sandwiched between a bloody war story.
One man from the future ends up on the Titanic on April 14, 1912 the night of her disastrous sinking. This man (named Wells in a literary in-joke)hands Lookout Frederick Fleet a pair of 21st Century binoculars to aid his watch.
These help Fleet sight an iceberg, warn the bridge, and help avoid disaster. But Titanic hits another one four hours later, thus tearing a new 20th Century reality. Many things change after that - American millionaire John Jacob Astor survives the sinking instead of his wife.
And because he survives, Astor eventually becomes the U.S. President who prevents his nation from joining The Great War.
So many ripples ensue that the 2012 of this novel is ruled by the Japanese and German empires, America is again split along the Mason-Dixon Line and a Kennedy must try to correct History.
Whew! There's enough stuff in here to satisfy any hard-core alt-history or time travel fan. And it's full of historical nods and cultural in-jokes.
Thriller author Tom Clancy is now President of the new Confederate States of America. Tecumseh, the Shawnee leader who fought with the British in the War of 1812, is a key soldier under Joseph Kennedy the man who is trying to put history right.
Ira Hayes, the most decorated American Indian soldier in WW II, is also a Kennedy soldier.
The plot is complex, engaging and engrossing.
Having said that, I do agree with my fellow readers that the editor could've shaved a couple hundred pages and tightened the pacing.
But don't let that stop you from reading one of the most satisfying sci-fi novels of the year.
February 15, 2013
What if all the millionaires who perished on the Titanic didn’t perish? What if some survived – what sort of future would they have wrought, and would we be any better off.
In The Company of the Dead author David Kowalski has amassed a cast of illustrious descendants of some of those people and sends them back in time to correct a past that was, itself, altered to the detriment of their own timeline.
There are some familiar names inhabiting past and present – Kennedy, Lightholler, Morgan and Wells to name a few. The world of their present is one in which the United States is a divided country, in which the Cold War was waged between a Greater Germany and Imperial Japan.
However, it is headed in a direction that will result in ultimate destruction – all because of someone who survived the loss of Titanic who was meant to go down with the ship.
History has been altered, and to redress that wrong and avert catastrophe it is imperative it be altered again. So once more Titanic sails into history… but which history will it be, and who will survive to see it?
Fascinating, exhausting and overly long – and VERY convoluted, The Company of the Dead is a mammoth read. Is it worth the effort? It very much depends if you can go the distance. The author admits it started as a short story. While he has certainly amassed enough threads to fill a book, I just wish it were half of the size of this massive tome.
I'm afraid I lost interest half way through, and skipped to the climax chapters. Even though we know the outcome - or one of them, at least in this instance, the last hours of Titanic still make compelling reading.
Review by Kerry Hennigan
Feb 9, 2013
In The Company of the Dead author David Kowalski has amassed a cast of illustrious descendants of some of those people and sends them back in time to correct a past that was, itself, altered to the detriment of their own timeline.
There are some familiar names inhabiting past and present – Kennedy, Lightholler, Morgan and Wells to name a few. The world of their present is one in which the United States is a divided country, in which the Cold War was waged between a Greater Germany and Imperial Japan.
However, it is headed in a direction that will result in ultimate destruction – all because of someone who survived the loss of Titanic who was meant to go down with the ship.
History has been altered, and to redress that wrong and avert catastrophe it is imperative it be altered again. So once more Titanic sails into history… but which history will it be, and who will survive to see it?
Fascinating, exhausting and overly long – and VERY convoluted, The Company of the Dead is a mammoth read. Is it worth the effort? It very much depends if you can go the distance. The author admits it started as a short story. While he has certainly amassed enough threads to fill a book, I just wish it were half of the size of this massive tome.
I'm afraid I lost interest half way through, and skipped to the climax chapters. Even though we know the outcome - or one of them, at least in this instance, the last hours of Titanic still make compelling reading.
Review by Kerry Hennigan
Feb 9, 2013
March 17, 2013
Ugh, I really tried to like this book, I really did but I just had to give up!
The Company of the Dead has a really interesting and exciting premise - what would have happened had the Titanic not sunk? Or at least, not sunk where and when she did? It leads to a very different 21st century world, one created by Kowalski but no doubt based on extrapolating the politics of the time to their logical expression a century later.
Whilst I found those politics and this world's technology a little hard to take credibly (an odd mix of 19th century and 21st century if that makes sense?), the problem with The Company of the Dead is that it just goes on and on and on. The middle of the book seems to spend an interminable time describing in often monotonous detail the long and arduous journey the bewildering large cast of characters (both central and peripheral) seem to have to take to reach the time travel apparatus that will enable our protagonists to travel back in time and restore history to its proper course.
In short, I found myself saying "come on already, let's get there and head back to the Titanic!!!!". When we just didn't seem to be making any progress in that direction in this 750 page book (yikes!) and when I got to this pretentious passage "A map of the night skies had been worked into the weaving. Its filigree of cerulean and emerald luminaries rippled portentously!!" I rolled my eyes, gave up and moved onto Jojo Moyes.
It's a real shame - as I said, I thought it was a great and engaging premise that really lost something in the telling. This could have been a sharp, fast moving and engrossing story at 350 pages, but at 750, it was a slow, bloated and disappointingly frustrating experience.
The Company of the Dead has a really interesting and exciting premise - what would have happened had the Titanic not sunk? Or at least, not sunk where and when she did? It leads to a very different 21st century world, one created by Kowalski but no doubt based on extrapolating the politics of the time to their logical expression a century later.
Whilst I found those politics and this world's technology a little hard to take credibly (an odd mix of 19th century and 21st century if that makes sense?), the problem with The Company of the Dead is that it just goes on and on and on. The middle of the book seems to spend an interminable time describing in often monotonous detail the long and arduous journey the bewildering large cast of characters (both central and peripheral) seem to have to take to reach the time travel apparatus that will enable our protagonists to travel back in time and restore history to its proper course.
In short, I found myself saying "come on already, let's get there and head back to the Titanic!!!!". When we just didn't seem to be making any progress in that direction in this 750 page book (yikes!) and when I got to this pretentious passage "A map of the night skies had been worked into the weaving. Its filigree of cerulean and emerald luminaries rippled portentously!!" I rolled my eyes, gave up and moved onto Jojo Moyes.
It's a real shame - as I said, I thought it was a great and engaging premise that really lost something in the telling. This could have been a sharp, fast moving and engrossing story at 350 pages, but at 750, it was a slow, bloated and disappointingly frustrating experience.
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