Review: The Last Days of Night

The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If I were an acquiring editor, I’d have swooped this one up in a heartbeat. The premise is compelling and tight, and it seems to have a built-in market. Paul Cravath is a young attorney in the late 19th century when he gets hired to represent George Westinghouse in his patent war with Thomas Edison over the future of the nationwide electrical grid. From Paul’s vantage, we get to see how this complicated chapter of American history played out, a chapter that bounced between legal, scientific, political, and financial venues before resolving itself in a network of power (literal and metaphorical) so familiar today that it seems it must always have been as it is.

On top of that, Moore does two other striking things. First, he reminds us that the clash between Edison and Westinghouse prefigured the technology clash of our own lifetime – most famously played out between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs – and, second, he adds a sustained romance.

On the surface, then, there’s something for everything.

So, yes, I’d have published this if I could, and, yes, I read and mostly enjoyed it. Still, as instructive as this is – as compelling as it sometimes becomes when some detail of a patent seems likely to sway the battle away from DC current to the AC we know today – it has flaws that keep it from the level of the other recent historical fiction I’ve read. This falls short of the fully realized characters of David Liss’s The Whiskey Rebels and, as does almost everything else, it falls well short of Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winning Bring Up the Bodies.

The characters here have a lot of interesting things to say, but they say them as historical personages rather than as real people. The dialogue, that is, is generally stiff, stentorian in the old word. Characters make grand pronouncements, clarifying intellectual elements of the plot, but growing flatter as they do so. Paul and others are shaped by the events around them rather than by their own distinctive identities. Paul is strong and clever when need be, and he makes foolish professional and personal mistakes when that’s what the story demands. He’s simply not consistently realized.

All that undermines the effectiveness of the love affair here. I root for Paul to win, but, as the romance takes more and more of the spotlight the longer the book goes on, his happiness seems pro-forma. Agnes is too good to be true, so much so that it becomes increasingly unclear why she falls in love with him. She too becomes flat, and – SPOILER – while I might have admired the affair if it didn’t end happily (as it looks to go for a stretch there) it feels too conventional in the end.

Above all, though, I feel a bit cheated that Moore has taken so many liberties with the history here. As the afterword makes clear, the big picture is authentic to what we know, but many of the day-to-day scenes and characters are presented in an invented chronology or are the product of multiple separate characters. The result is that this is, by admission, only marginally accurate history. (Moore himself generously acknowledges the sources from which he’s drawn.)

So, while I do enjoy having read this, I can’t help thinking that, in its inability to develop fully realized characters, it falls a bit short as a novel. At the same time, in the way it tweaks its own sources so routinely, it falls a bit short as history.


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