The Ghost of the Mary Celeste by Valerie Martin

A book review

The Ghost of the Mary Celeste revolves around a historical mystery, the disappearance of everyone aboard the ship Mary Celeste in 1872. It was discovered drifting and abandoned near the Straits of Gibraltar, drenched but seaworthy, its supplies of food and water undamaged, with no signs of violence. To this day, no one knows what happened to the crew and to the captain's wife and two-year-old daughter, traveling with him.

Although this mystery is central to the novel, it focuses even more on the deeper mystery of death. Long before Benjamin and Sarah Gibbs disappeared from the Mary Celeste, their families had lost loved ones to the sea. Young Sarah writes in her journal, "My sister has dreams she thinks are visions. In the dead of night she sees our cousin Maria wandering and wailing outside her bedroom window. Her hair and skirts are dripping seawater, and she cries out, 'Help me, help me.'" Nineteenth-century Americans were fascinated by mediums who brought - or claimed to bring - messages from the dead to their grieving family members. Above all, the novel is about Sarah's sister Hannah. Does she really see and speak with the dead, or did her loss of her mother when she was a small child leave her with a fragile hold on reality?

Another layer of the novel explores the idea of fiction, another "medium" which brings dead - or imagined - people to life. Before succeeding with his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a short story inspired by the mystery of the Mary Celeste. He changed the names of ship and crew, and he concocted a feverishly violent explanation for the ship's abandonment. Was he wrong to spin fiction out of a real family's tragedy? Although The Ghost of the Mary Celeste suggests he may have been, this novel is itself an absorbing and atmospheric story spun out of the tragedy of the Mary Celeste. Lovers of ghost stories will find it captivating. (2014; 302 pages)