I became aware of Graham Moore’s book, “The Last Days of Night,” through what I thought was the ambiguously and poorly named film version of it (The film in question turned out to be based on a different book about Tesla and Edison). I had intended to use my normal process of watching the movie first, then reading the book as I find that a good movie (or sometimes even a mediocre one) can lead one to a better book, but the reverse is rarely possible. Books give the author so much more room than a typical movie that the reader is usually a disappointed viewer as scenes are removed or compressed, and casting choices can rob us of our own imagined characters. (Tom Cruise is a perfectly acceptable Jack Reacher unless you’ve read any of the books.)
As it happens, I read the first few pages of Moore’s novel and was too hooked to stop. It’s a rare opening sentence that is enough for me, but, “On the day he would first meet Thomas Edison, Paul watched a man burn alive in the sky above Broadway,” is quite the hook. I was vaguely familiar with the outlines of the Edison/Westinghouse feud in which Tesla was a pivotal figure, but not in any detail, and some of what I “knew” is wrong. I am greatly impressed by the Author’s Note at the end, where Moore lays out what is true, what is conjecture on his part, what the real timeline was, and what facts he moved or enhanced for dramatic purposes. That impresses even more than just naming the list of biographies, contemporary news sources, and diaries he researched to try to get as many of the facts straight as possible. As a writer, I was blown away by his clever rendering of Tesla’s speech by mangling his syntax rather than attempting a phonetic rendering of his accent.
Even more astounding is Moore’s ability to sympathetically and, I believe, realistically portray the varying labor and perspectives of inventors, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and businessmen. One of the highlights for me, is his rendering of what it is like to work with a genius. I have worked with a couple over the course of my career and heard many second-hand tales of a few others. Though none match Tesla in his eccentricities, I couldn’t help but smile in recognition at the difficulties and rewards of working with a genius.
As a novel, it has the readability, plot twists, hidden conspiracies, and clever heroics that would make any thriller writer proud.
The parallels between the early days of the electrification wars and the Gates/Jobs rivalry and internet revolution that I lived and worked through were made explicit by some of the quotations with which he introduces each chapter, and I couldn’t help but think of that when I read his imagined conversation between Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla, and his main character at the end of the book:
“Our age of invention,” explained Edison. “These days of handcrafted miracles…they won’t last much longer. Does that ever worry any of you? Light bulbs. Electricity. It seems likely that ours will be the last generation to ever gaze, wide-eyed, at something truly novel. That our kind will be the last to ever stare in disbelief at a man-made thing that could not possibly exist. We made wonders, boys. I only wonder how many of them are left to make.”
Yet, I lived during the transition of esoteric, room-sized, number-crunching machines to desktop, laptop, and hand-held devices that contain or have access to almost everything ever written. I was even the equivalent of a spear-carrier at Marathon during our own monumental battle to transform the world into an online marvel that only the wildest of Science Fiction writers imagined. Reading “The Last Days of Night’ made me feel like my own life had refuted Edison’s worry, and there’s no better reason for a book to exist.
Musings of a Restless Mind 