Garth Walpole

Of the dead, nil nisi bonum. Of the editor -- it's your fault.

Garth Walpole, the author of this book, clearly had an obsession with John Franklin's lost Northwest Passage expedition -- or, rather, with the search for it, and with the relics that came back. He wanted to do the best he could to identify the source and history of each claimed relic, feeling -- like any good archaeologist -- that only by knowing their provenance could they usefully be used in reconstructing the history. This is, without doubt, the most comprehensive study I've every seen of the history of the relics.

But Garth Walpole died before his work was ready to go. He asked Russell Potter to finish it off. Potter claims that the manuscript was almost in publishable state. Which raises the genuine questions, Did Potter even read this thing? Incomplete sentences, dangling references, pure and simple nonsense -- at key points, it's often incoherent. This is not a surprise; I know from my own writing that first drafts leave loose ends all over the place. A revised draft is supposed to fix that. If the author can't do it, then it's the editor's job. It was not done here; this is one of the most error-marred books I've ever seen.

And that is particularly troublesome given that it is so dense and so obscure. I know a lot about the Franklin Expedition, and even so, I often found myself lost. Yes, it was clear that the relics that made it back to the United Kingdom and Canada and the United States often had custody issues. But I often lost track of where the chain broke, simply because this book is so specialized -- in a text with no redundancy, you can't afford errors, and yet they're there.

It's really sad. There is a lot of information here, and I expect that there is much to be learned from the appendices at least. But unless you're an absolute Franklin fanatic, you're likely to find this dry as powdered milk and unclear as black housepaint. I hope someone can take this book, re-edit it, and expand it. It's a book we need, but we need to be able to understand it.

[Addendum 1/28/2018: Russell Potter contacted me about this review, and told me that he had sent a draft manuscript off to the publisher, expecting it to be copy edited -- and they published it without copy editing or consulting about the final copy. This certainly explains a lot. Potter is working on an errata list. If I hear about that list becoming available, I will add the link here. This is a useful book, but it needs someone more knowledgeable than I to work out all the details that make a book into what it should be. A sad story.]… (mere)