The Raven [Hardcover]

Peter Landesman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1995

On a foggy summer day in 1941, 36 people set out in a boat for a pleasure cruise off the coast of Maine. They are never seen alive again, and their vessel, "The Raven", is never found. Landesman uses this true story as a basis for his eerie, intriguing first novel, telling the tale of a community torn apart by mistrust and tragedy.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

A long-anticipated company outing turns tragic when the charter boat Raven, with 36 passengers, casts off in Casco Bay, Maine, on a June day in 1941 and is never seen again. When the bodies recovered the next day by lobsterman Clayt Johnson and his nine-year-old son, Ezra, are only those of the women aboard and the scantily clad captain, mystery shrouds the incident and rumors abound: that the Raven was both unseaworthy and well insured, that it fell prey to a German U-2 boat, and that the men were somehow spirited off. Forty-four years later, after individual lives and whole communities have been irrevocably changed by the event, three generations of Johnson lobstermen make a discovery and piece together what occurred, which is revealed in its entirety in the final chapter. Although his prose can veer toward being pretentious, first-novelist Landesman does a fine job of depicting men who work the sea, and his descriptions of the sea and its cruel consequences are masterful. Not a book for beach reading, but a worthy addition to fiction collections. Michele Leber

Product Details

• Hardcover: 356 pages
• Publisher: Baskerville Publishers Inc.; First Edition edition (October 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1880909375
• ISBN-13: 978-1880909379
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,318,015 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A hidden treasure, February 11, 2003

By 

Steve (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Raven (Paperback)

(More like four-and-a-half stars) It's a shame that this book has not received the exposure it deserves. Peter Landesman has crafted a careful exploration of small-town tragedy and loss, set against the backdrop of the rugged coast of Maine. Having lived in the Orr's/Bailey Island region in the past, I was already well-familiar with the area (though not with the real historical events on which the book is based); Landesman does a phenomenal job capturing the landscape and its people without sounding too much like an outsider looking in. The prose is, at times, astounding--it's remarkable to think "The Raven" is Landesman's first novel; there are subtle echoes here of Faulkner and Joyce, but the style is uniquely the author's own. Most impressive is his ability to draw with painstaking detail the inner lives of his characters, from brooding Ezra to ghost-plagued Mavis, while maintaining an intricate, fascinating plot. This book combines the haunting atmosphere of David Guterson's "Snow Falling on Cedars" and the quiet dignity of Russell Banks' tale of small-town tragedy, "The Sweet Hereafter," and is every bit as good as either of those books. I strongly recommend "The Raven."

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Truth Has a Price, August 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Raven (Paperback)

Life in Rehoboth and the surrounding islands off of southern Maine has always been difficult and tenuous at best. The islands are peopled by those who are used to working hard for a living, taking their livelihood from the sea during days and nights of long and difficult labor. But for the people of Rehoboth, 1941 is the year that everything changes-- for the worse.

The Raven (1995) by Peter Landesman focuses upon the mystery of the Raven and the impact its mysterious disappearance has on a town and a number of lives, especially that of Ezra Johnson who, at the age of nine helps his father fish so many of the drowned bodies out of the sea like so many lobster. For the town, the unknown fate of the Raven is like a curse. For Ezra who was "there and handled those bodies" and was "a part of it," eleven year later he has to face the fact that the event has had an impact upon him whether he knows it or not. The Raven is more than a well researched, well written mystery. Among his accomplishments with the novel, Landesman brings to life the sea in a brutally de-romanticized fashion. Landesman paints for us a harsh, uncaring environment in which men labor a lifetime only to see tragedy dog their footsteps and to die poor and worn out-- if they live that long.

With The Raven, first-time author Peter Landesman has created a tantalizing puzzle which won him the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction in 1996 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The final chapter of The Raven brings the novel to a chilling conclusion filled with all sorts of irony: for the skipper of the boat, for the passengers, for the friends and family left behind, for those who have so long held secrets and suffered dearly for it, and for the reader. It is to Landesman's credit as an effectual writer that, as they begin the final chapter, readers will feel a real conflict of emotions: eager to finally have the mystery revealed, but not really wanting to know the truth because, as we have learned along the way, with the truth there comes a price. The Raven ends with a vivid, unforgettable finale that will haunt readers well after they have put the book down.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good novel for all who "must go down to the seas again.", May 28, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Raven (Hardcover)

I liked this book right from the start, with its description of the Oxford Paper Company plunked in the middle of the Androscoggin River. When, as a teenager, I lived in the town next to "Rehoboth," the mill would send its sulfurous smell over our way if the wind was right, and then you knew a storm was brewing. I confess that while I lived in Maine, I never learned very much about the much-earlier events fictionalized in "The Raven" except that my beloved English teacher had lost both her parents in that disaster. The novel thus evokes a lot of nostalgia.

This is a very good first novel. Landesman offers bright images and crafts descriptions and settings well. He shows the skill to be a topnotch writer, although this work falls short in the end--literally. I found his proposal for the cause of the disaster rather contrived and unconvincing. That, together with the occasional flat passage and lapse in the plot, ultimately left me disappointed. But I look forward to reading more of Landesman, and I am grateful for "The Raven."--Jim Ruark.