Just Finished Reading: The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore (FP: 2016) [357pp] 

New York, 1888. Young lawyer Paul Cravath couldn't quite make up his mind. Was the offer an opportunity of a lifetime or the ultimate poison chalice? On its face it looked simply too good to be true. Paul was barely out of law school and had only just become partner in a very minor law firm with few clients and no reputation, so why was George Westinghouse - THE George Westinghouse so interested in having Paul as his companies' main lawyer? What was more perplexing, and a lot more frightening, was the reason the Westinghouse company needed a lawyer so badly. They were being sued by a man unaccustomed to losing and who had deep pockets and many friends in both high and low places – Thomas Edison. The case seemed to the untrained eye a straightforward one but the result - either way – would not only determine the future of both companies but the technology that would illuminate the whole of the continental United States. Whoever won the case to decide who invented and therefore owned the 'light bulb' would make a considerable amount of money in the coming decades. With stakes that high how far would those involved go to prove their points and just how far would Paul go to combat them and stake his claim as a lawyer of note? 

This was an interesting one. It certainly made a very nice change from my usual historical fiction reads which normally revolved around either crime or conflict. The comment on the front of my cover says "John Grisham meets Edith Wharton" but as I've only read (I think!) one Grisham over 100 years ago and have yet to read any Wharton I couldn't possibly comment! As you might imagine a goodly chunk of the narrative revolves around the legal arguments of Edison's patents for his light bulb as well as the argument between the uses (and dangers) of Direct Current, proposed by Edison, and Alternating Current, proposed by Westinghouse, with Nikola Tesla thrown into the mix. Along the way we also meet Alexander Graham Bell and J P Morgan – it's quite a list of characters!  

I know a little about the events covered in the novel. Usually I'm not a HUGE fan of fictionalisation of actual events. If they play too much with the narrative and stray too much into the fiction side they, at least, muddy the historical waters. If they adhere too closely to the history itself then it really stops being a novel and becomes a questionable work of historical non-fiction. It is, I think, a very hard line to walk which is why I tend to avoid this kind of thing. The saving grace here, however, is that the character of Paul (and indeed his love interest) although he existed is historically hazy enough to be used as an entree into the actual events. Many of the events that make up the substance of the novel actually happened and the author has (apparently) made great efforts to be as accurate as possible including using biographical and private diary entries to make his main (real) characters as truthful as possible. 

Both the story itself - the technological side of things - and the setting of late 19th century New York/America are well handled and there was never a time I was jolted out of the narrative by anything unexpected. It did actually make we want to know much more about what actually happened and to know more about all concerned. Strangely Edison was most definitely the 'baddie' here (and not just because he apparently enjoyed taking people to court). That's definitely something I need to read more about. J P Morgan was an interesting character, so I predict at least one book on HIM in the future as well a deeper look at the US as it transformed into a global power in the run up to and after WW1. Recommended. I noticed that the authors last published work was another fictionalisation this time around the emergence of economic warfare in the early days of WW2. Sounds interesting.....