If there's anything that satisfies body and soul better than really good weather porn, I haven't found it. Hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, tsunamis, mudslides, styrofoam impaling oak trees, low pressure troughs, the Beaufort scale. If you can't be in the middle of it, the next best thing is watching it on the hard-core Weather Channel. Looking for a little tenderness to go with all that jackhammer excitement? There's nothing more erotic than Sebastian Junger's Perfect Storm. Junger struck the perfect balance between good science and great storytelling, weaving characters, lives, rescue efforts, and the molecules of the air and the ocean into a seamless tale, juxtaposing the calm detachment of scientific description with the heart-pounding trauma of danger and death.

I was hoping for more of the same with Isaac's Storm, but it was not to be. I won't go into enormous plot detail because the other reviews have done a good job of that. Suffice it to say that in 1900 the low-lying barrier island of Galveston, Texas was hit head-on by a massive hurricane -- in fact, by two almost simultaneous storm surges, one from the Gulf of Mexico and one from the bay behind Galveston -- that wiped out a good portion of the city and killed between 6,000 and 10,000 men, women and children, and hundreds of horses and cows and other animals.

Erik Larson, the author, chooses to examine the disaster through the eyes of the local Weather Bureau head, Isaac Cline. From a weather porn standpoint, this was not a good choice. It's clear that Larson focuses on Isaac Cline so that he can examine the issues of hubris and human flaws: Isaac's own hubris in failing to predict the storm, and the hubris of the newly modern science of weather and climate prediction. (In fact, the Weather Bureau in Cuba did forecast the hurricane, but it continued on to the Florida coast, and Isaac was blinded by his overconfident pronouncements years earlier that a hurricane could not travel west across the Gulf from Florida.) But Isaac didn't leave very much personal material for the historical record (the main source is his 1945 memoir), and what archival material exists on him is exceedingly dry; thus we are subjected to pages and pages of tedious description of Isaac's early career in the Signal Corps at Fort Myer.

Perhaps to compensate for the aridity of his source material, Larson waxes verbosely in little weather-related asides, as in this valentine to the atmosphere of Cameroon:

The air contained water: haze, steam, vapor; the stench of day-old kill and the greetings of men glad to awaken from the cool mystery of night….An invisible paisley of plumes and counterplumes formed above the earth, the pattern as ephemeral as the copper and bronze veils that appear when water enters whiskey.

Larson tries his darndest to play up the rivalry between Isaac and his younger brother Joseph, who also worked in the Galveston Weather Bureau, describing in detail their disagreements over the storm, their estrangement, the way Joseph never mentions Isaac by name in his autobiography. Since I didn't care about Isaac, I found this story line less than compelling too.

Larson might have redeemed himself with vivid descriptions of the storm hitting Galveston -- which he does, to a degree. But his narrative becomes confusing since he is trying to follow so many separate families and individuals, as well as travel back and forth through time, from early evening to nightfall to morning. The water is knee-high at one time and location, waist high at another, neck high at another -- is the water ebbing and flowing, or are we travelling back in time, or is it that the water is higher in one person's house because it is low-lying? I didn't know, and eventually I didn't care. I could have read 500 million more pages of The Perfect Storm, but Isaac's Storm at 280 seemed about 200 pages too bloated.

The storytelling is also hindered by the absence of photographs. We know they exist, because Larson mentions them, but why weren't they included? Given the tedium of the narrative, they would have provided a welcome distraction.

A final point of irritation is Larson's habit of filling in the gaps where the historical record is incomplete. Junger was faced with the problem of having to create a narrative where none existed, since there were no witnesses or survivors to the sinking of the Andrea Gail. He painted a vivid picture of what the men's last hours and moments must have been like, based on readings and measurements from the closest water buoys, and other scientific data. Larson, on the other hand, has all the important historical verification he needs but, like Al Gore, chooses to embellish the details anyway: Isaac must have gone to this bath house since it was near his house, and must have read books like these. Venomous snakes must have spiralled up into the trees as the floodwaters rose, because we know this happened in later hurricanes. One source cites one name for an orphanage survivor, another source cites another; Larson picks one arbitrarily. Isaac must have checked all the hospitals and morgues looking for his wife, based on the fact that this is what scores of other people were doing, even though what he actually did in the days immediately following the storm is a complete mystery. Isaac must have had happy, blissful dreams, only to awaken to gloom and grief, because Freud's 1900 Interpretation of Dreams states that every dream is a wish fulfillment, and "what survivor of a tragedy has never dreamed that the outcome had been different?"

As a former history major, in particular, this really makes the bile rise in my throat. It's one thing to suggest that something may have happened in such a way because the preponderance of historical evidence suggests so, as long as you're merely suggesting. To assert something as fact that you don't know to be fact is anti-historical. In fact, it's fiction. Larson's modus operandi is to state something as if it were fact in the text, and then to explain in the endnotes that it's not really fact.

For example, when Isaac finally finds his wife's body, Larson writes, "Isaac kept [her wedding ring], had it enlarged, and wore it himself. It was this ring that gleamed like a beacon from his photographic portrait. He wore it also on December 31, 1900, when Galveston prepared to enter the twentieth century." If you bother to read the endnotes (and who does), Larson confesses, "Isaac nowhere states this. It is conjecture, purely, but I base it on…..Isaac's essentially romantic character; his devotion to Cora; his deep knowledge of portraiture and the symbolic messages embedded within by their painters..…"

Too picky? Perhaps. But if Larson's storytelling had captured my interest, maybe I wouldn't have gotten so mired in insignificant details.






Recommended: No