The Last Days of Night: A Novel
By: Graham Moore / Narrated By: Johnathan McClain
Length: 13 hrs
You already know what the outcome is, but it’s still sooo engaging!!!
Based on true events that occurred in the late 1880s, early 1890s, one would think one could just look around and judge the state of our current environment to figure out how this, The Last Days of Night will end. And I s’pose one kinda sorta does… to a certain extent.
I mean, we still know how things turned out for Westinghouse; Thomas Edison is still a name instantly recognizable—only inventor Tesla, at least a bit, and attorney Paul Cravath inspire a bit of initial head scratching.
But seriously! The way Graham Moore wrote each of these characters, the way aspects of their personalities start coming to life, very much cause entertainment and instant and continued engagement. For truly: Edison comes off as a total creep; Westinghouse a rather detached and naive business man; Tesla a troubled, yet oh so humorous dreamer. And Cravath, who was indeed the lawyer for this brouhaha is revealed layer by layer, becoming a person he never meant to become as his hatred for Edison grows.
Based on the lawsuits between Edison and Westinghouse over who exactly invented the lightbulb, the story is part: Whodunnit, part: Who’ll kill for it? During the afterword, Moore says he took a lot of poetic license to shape characters and events so they’d work better for the novel, but enough of it is true so that it leaves the listener doing that whole edge-of-seat thing. There are murder attempts; there are underhanded deals; there are switched allegiances, all in effort to see whose electricity will change night into day (Direct Current v. Alternating Current… and many a dog will die…).
One thing I appreciated was that complex concepts were explained to layman Cravath in basic terms with examples that even I could follow. I wound up learning a thing or two (Ssshh… don’t tell my sister who once worked for the city electric company that maaaybe I wasn’t paying attention as she took me on tours to check out the power and beauty of substations…!). There’s not a whole heckuva lot that’s set up to be hard to understand, but Tesla has sooo many ideas that it was nice that their ins and outs were explained to Cravath.
There’s a bit of a romance that is also thrown in, but I’m happy to say that it in no way turns the book into something sappy. Rather, Cravath’s love interest (A real woman from history) is fleshed-out and given enough to do which has her set up as the strong female lead. She’s a motivator for Paul; she’s a heartbreaker and detractor also.
I have to admit that when I first started listening to the book, I thought: Uh-oh—the narration’s gonna kill me. All because Jonathan McClain has ultra-smooth tones, just a step or two below being an anchorman-kinda guy. But stick with him as his delivery, while not flawless, grows on ya. Plus, I appreciated that he didn’t turn females into breathy caricatures. They’re not the best renditions of women, but they’re certainly not the worst, and their voices came to rather settle down for me. And while Tesla does indeed sound a bit like Dracula’s sidekick Renfield (This being the closest McClain can get to a Serbian accent), McClain still manages to make Tesla quite a lovable character.
Rather serendipitous then that Empires of Light, the nonfiction history written by Jill Jonnes went on sale on Kindle this week.
Why? you ask.
Well because The Last Days of Night is so good that you’ll want to check out more about this time period. And that’s usually quite something to be said for just how good a book is…!
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