'Into the Drowning Deep' by Mira Grant, a Review

2/5: a promising plot banged out quick in Microsoft Word

I’m not quite sure what’s prompted me to review this. ‘Into the Drowning Deep’ is, as I’ve only now learned, the follow-up to the author’s previous novella, ‘Rolling in the Deep’ (and I mean, bring on the day when I’m so prolific I don’t mind titling my books things that wouldn’t drag a laugh out of my own mother). It was published in 2017 by Mira Grant and has no enduring popularity that I’m aware of. It got 4/5 stars on goodreads, which really just means that it isn’t atrocious, nor was the author infamously involved in some 2014 tumblr beef that they hoped might’ve been forgiven but hasn’t. Not atrocious is, I find, a fair assessment.

It is a little bad though. ‘Into the Drowning Deep’ has one of the more appealing concepts I’ve come across in recent years, and it endured throughout a book I otherwise wasn’t enamoured with. Maybe that’s why I’m writing about it.

In summary: a bevy of scientists, hired by a large entertainment company and alongside its ambiguously evil staff, voyage to the Mariana Trench in search of whatever massacred the crew of the company’s last project there. The main protagonist is Tory, a young oceanologist whose older sister died in that massacre, but we also travel with a great many reporters, biologists, engineers, hunters, submarine pilots, cryptozoologists, and just enough chemists whose work involves testing the pH of water that you start to notice it.

The intro – following Tory as she gets her invitation and prepares to board – is long. 5 chapters long. But, you know, it’s fine. You’re having a fine time. The book is split into sections, each named (in descending order) for oceanic depth zones in a way that feels far too on-the-nose and yet, to brains like ours that enjoy genre fiction, exciting. We’re in The Pelagic Zone right now; it doesn’t matter that Tory’s sat having pizza with her parents. It doesn’t matter that we’re suddenly with a totally new character as she receives the same invitation and then visits her daughter to chat. Soon we’ll be going places.

And that ‘we’ll be going places’ feeling persists, even when the story is heaving and sputtering with the effort of taking us there. The perfect storm of the eclectic group that can’t come together, the science that can’t comprehend what it’s seeing, the deep sea, the isolation, the inexorability, pulls us along even when we’re snagged on the writing, and that’s to the author’s credit. Because that’s the work the concept puts in. A book built around such a signposted journey promises things to the reader that allow her to dissociate from the present, to look forward to an inevitable future. It’s an advantage more often handed to genre fiction, and wielded badly just as often as not. At some point, we must reach the trench. At some point, we must find the mermaids. But what about right now? Am I enjoying where I am, right now?

I found that I never was.

I started trying to identify ‘the problem’ (always a fun thing to be doing while reading) around when the first characters arrive on the ship, the Melusine. I’d been thus far cohabiting with a general sense of malaise about the story, that I’d put down to a bit of funk with the dialogue.

The funk: students in their mid-20s using words like ‘unsnarling’, or otherwise explaining, in casual talk with friends’ parents, that, ‘we haven’t worn all those ideas and concepts soft around the edges yet’. Or how about, ‘It [seafood] has a very delicate index of ‘done’. Thermodynamically speaking’. One runs aground of a lot of characters in the early book, and from their conversations I had the notion that the author as she typed them heard them all in the voice of Chris Pratt or some other appropriate Hollywood actor. I was constantly, if not always consciously, aware that they were never intended to be read aloud – not outside of a movie theatre, at least. This falseness of voice is something you may accept in blockbuster films, because you accept the characters as artificial representations of real people – and not even real people, really, just hypothetical people; archetypes to ferry the plot for 90 minutes. In a book – and a book of this length most of all – it’s less forgivable.

(I could and should move on with my point, but I must say, for a while no character struggled under this like poor Mr. Blackwell. Every line of dialogue was inflicted on that man like the whip: ‘I see you preparing to contradict me, to cite the loss of your sister as proof that no one has suffered as much as you have’, followed up by, ‘my losses are greater than yours in volume’. Just the kind of unnuanced, unselfconscious wankery that comes to mind when you’re asked to imagine an ExxonMobil executive or something; the author was so sublimely unbothered.)

But the dialogue was not ‘the problem’. Expectations adjusted, it could pass for charming. It didn’t ail the book terminally.

I said earlier that the intro was long, but that this was fine. And it might’ve been fine, were it not for the fact that this excessively long opening act was in retrospect the first symptom of ‘the problem’ – the symptom in full being that, despite the generous word count allotted to it, very little had happened in that first act, nor indeed would go on to happen afterwards. What does happen happens over a great deal of pages.

And how many pages! My copy had nearly 500. Now, the Melusine sets sail on page 119. Mermaids attack the ship in earnest on page 370. That’s 251 pages where the ship sails without being attacked. Across that length, I put it to you that only three major events occur: Heather Wilson the submarine pilot dies, Ray the cameraman dies, and the expedition captures a mermaid and begins to try to communicate with it.

Of course, many stories when teased apart bone-by-bone like this can seem sparse, but it was my experience that the bones sustained no meat. Heather Wilson gets mermaid-ed early on, in her submarine, and then whole eras seem to pass where nothing happens and nobody is possessed by any urgency. Ray the cameraman’s death is itself very understated, barely a whisper in the night. Pages turn and turn in their dozens and we’re no closer to the end of the story, until we’ve got this modest slip of book left and huge arcs still to cover. I wasn’t sure how the author would manage it, and alas there was no miracle: it wasn’t possible, and she didn’t. The last quarter is breathlessly frenetic and stops with the suddenness of rear-ending a lorry. Here, the author clearly feels (or is) beholden to a page count that she is already pushing.

So what’s actually filling the apparent vacuum? The answer is ‘thinking’, and this, to me, is ‘the problem’. See, in all of that bloated middle I noticed that the author seems most comfortable when no action or dialogue is taking place and she can just have the character’s mind wander – over the ship, the science, the personal history. In these vast sections she worldbuilds, explains, reminds, describes and exposits. It is a very wide style of narration, not quite omniscient but floating, zooming in and out of close third-person between the many different characters, groups, and occasionally species. Sometimes it’s not clear who is monologuing; sometimes it’s not clear if we are ‘with’ a character at all, or simply in the sky looking down. Sometimes parentheses are used to denote exceptional irrelevance. Sometimes one bracket will close and another will open, two full off-topic paragraphs in a row. A lot of the book is this way.

In a destructive relationship with the above is the fact that very few characters have defined voices, inside or outside of their heads. With the exception of Dr. Toth, the ones that do carve out a distinctiveness for themselves test the very limits of caricature. Still, better than the alternative, and I can honestly say that the strongest emotion I felt when reading was when Michi Abney (one half of the evil hunter couple that has horny pre-hunting sex on a bed of guns twice within 50 pages) dies. The rest are all possessed by this neutral narrator voice that comes out when they speak, so that all their speech becomes narration too, so that even dialogue is really just thinking. A good example of this is a half-page where Hallie Wilson talks about Signing Exact English vs American Sign Language and why the former is founded on ableism. I mean, she sounds right, and it’s nice that the author feels a responsibility to the Deaf community, but it’s a total departure from the scene and exposes how Grant uses dialogue as a means to further explain things, which is what she would rather be doing (I understand – I write essays). Most characters are the narrator, so in truth there are few characters, though there appears many.

(Special mention to the scene when Tory and Olivia are talking about their feelings for each other, and Tory has a little think about how many lesbians won’t date bisexual women, and how she’s been called a slut and a fence-sitter and so on. Then, on top of this, there’s a bracketed aside about how she imagines men have this dynamic too, but she’s never been apart of that. I love and mention it because it’s so exemplary of like, this should have been a twitter post. Character thoughts are not a space for the author, heretofore shut out of some imagined conversation, to finally butt in and say her piece. Everything a character thinks says something about them – what they know, what they’re like, what they care about. What is this meant to say about Tory? That she spends a lot of time online? That she likes to comment on the tensions between other groups – gay and bi men – but feels the need to soften it; perhaps a paranoid fear of backlash? No. It’s simply the author, thinking.)

(Here’s a second set of brackets for you – yes, there is a relationship between two women. I think this generated some interest for the book at the time, and is definitely part of why it was gifted to me, but I wouldn’t market it as gay romance or ‘sapphic’ or anything. The characters’ sexualities are minimally relevant to their personalities and their wholeness in that way that people like, but more to the point, the romance itself is very small and quiet. I’m not criticising this – it’s just not a particularly romantic or erotic book, and I don’t think it intends to be.)

This narrative situation – flitting between everyone, characterising no one – seems no more intentional than a diary entry’s. Rather, it feels like what the author retreats to naturally. She is happiest when she is detailing the research she did for the book, and what she knows about the setting, and what she has laid out as a character’s backstory (a staccato succession of event beats that have no bearing on the fullness of the character or the actions she will take), but far less happy when someone dies, or lives. The book feels like an exercise in procrastinating. The author/the characters think until she and they can think no more, and then, reluctantly, things happen.

Perhaps I’m ascribing an internal struggle to what is a deadline struggle, or some other. The author knows how to turn a sentence. She has moments of being funny and astute. I’ve heard her other books compared favourably to this by readers who enjoy her. But this book has the air of being stream-of-consciousness in the way all National Novel Writing Month participants will recognise – writing under duress, to meet the deadline, to hit the word count; writing something like, ‘and then she sat on a chair and then she ate an apple and then she thought about what if a chair was an apple and she was just a little worm’, and trusting that you’ll edit it out later. Distinct phrases are repeated carelessly (‘the lovely ladies of the sea’ rear their heads a frankly unpleasant number of times) and sometimes descriptions don’t make sense no matter how much secret finesse I attribute to the author (‘the fluid was thin and viscous’). This gets notably worse as we speed towards the end.

I will note here that the author defended the abrupt ending with the fact that she thought she’d be able to write a sequel. An ending is too precious to play with like that, I fear. To me, there’s no excuse for a book that could be a standalone not to read as a standalone.

All in all, ‘Into the Drowning Deep’ would have been pleasant airport fare had it been written and paced more methodically, like one of those thrillers in the last-chance Terminal 2 WHSmith called like, ‘Cold Dead Winter: Dead Girl in Birmingham’. As it was, and given the greater problem that led to the pacing, I’d mark it slightly worse. A 2/5, for me. If you’re reading this Mira Grant, please don’t be angry. I’m just a little hater who believes in you.