Carl Berg

I was excited to read The Wager, with its great reviews. However, it fell thoroughly short with me. Some comments: I never understood why the book revealed pretty much the entire plot on the book's cover and in the prolog; why not keep the reader more excited/surprised? Secondly, the author never succeeds in finding a convincing person to relay the story through, and jumps around between different persons, and to the author's perspective himself. Thirdly, when the author 'talks' it is with a 2020s academia mind set. Altogether, this reveals more about the author than the story, with his thinly disguised attempts to project liberal 2020s values onto a mid-18th century world-canvas. Some examples: “..Europeans tried to pretend that their brutal mission of conquest was somehow righteous and heroic.” p69; “..the castaways’ accounts betrayed their inherent racism” p223. Not that the author is wrong, but this sort of language belongs seemingly better in the Opinion pages of the NY Times, I think. Finally, while the attempts to educate the reader with explaining all the sea-faring metaphors is well intended ('learning the ropes', speed 'knots', 'under the weather') together with history (Spain and Portugal divided up the world, hence we have Brazil, etc), this eventually becomes tiresome and almost felt belittling. I, for one, knew probably 80% of all that stuff anyway. For historic fiction, I'd say Robert Harris ancient Rome trilogy is vastly better.