I’ve been blogging about Simon Winchester’s book A Crack in the Edge of the World for a week or so now. If you’re late joining this party, you can read my earlier posts here and here.
Now that I’m at the halfway point, the design of the book is becoming clear: the first half sets the stage for the great disaster, and the second half is the great disaster. Winchester has a long chapter explaining the geology of the San Andreas Fault, describing in great detail the motions of the various plates involved, and how exactly California got singled out for all the earthquake activity. It’s interesting stuff, but it also cries out for diagrams. Winchester sometimes spends pages explaining how one plate interacts with the next one, when what we really need is a map with a couple of arrows. There are maps, of course, including two especially beautiful and useful ones in the endpapers. Here’s a detail from the “Map of the North American Tectonic Plate”:
I’m not quite sure what the point of the giant volcano threatening to impede the route of the Exxon Valdez is, but it sure is pretty.
Winchester is more effective when he gives the history of San Francisco leading up to the quake. He gives nearly as vivid a depiction of gold-boom era San Francisco as Frank Norris does in McTeague, that classic horror story about the gold-obsessed dentist in 1899 (indeed, one wonders if Winchester has read McTeague — and if you haven’t, you should!). San Francisco at that time was simultaneously a cosmopolitan center of international culture and a home to a half-million roughnecks and factory workers.
At the end of chapter eight, the scene has been set: San Francisco is a hastily built, massive city, perched atop one of the most volatile faultlines in the world, with an inadequate fire prevention system and a corrupt government (sound familiar, New Orleans?). Chapter nine, which I haven’t read yet, is only 11 pages long, and called “Overture: The Night Before Dark,” and Chapter 10, a nearly 100-page doozy, is “The Savage Interruption.” Hmmmm…. I wonder what that’s all about. I can’t wait to find out.