The Raven

A mystery of nearly a half-century's duration fills the ambitious pages of Landesman's first novel, woven loosely around the apparently real-life case of the Raven, which vanished on June 29, 1941, with 36 passengers and its captain while on a sightseeing cruise off the coast of southern Maine. A central motif of moral turpitude is established when, because of serious misgivings about the Raven's seaworthiness, a prominent Maine banker, without telling his employees of his concerns, withdraws himself and his son from the excursion and sends his secretary and her boyfriend in their place. Meanwhile, the ship's crooked captain, a veteran of maritime fraud, is planning, along with his faithless wife and his treacherous partner, to scuttle the boat to collect the insurance. These dark undercurrents are roiled by the misplaced allegiances of the native lobsterman who first discovers the bodies of the victims and then suppresses vital evidence of foul play. The story line unreels across decades, winding up in 1985 and then twisting back to 1941 to reveal what really happened aboard the Raven. Full of brooding symbolic imagery, the author's elaborate, sometimes overwrought prose conjures well temporal human passions as well as the seemingly timeless, infinite sea. Although Landesman never approaches the introspective resonance of the great sea novels of Conrad and Melville, he has written an intriguing, promising literary debut. (Oct.)