The Franklin Conspiracy: Cover-up, Betrayal, and the Astonishing Secret Behind the Lost Arctic Expedition (Jeffrey B. Latta)

The Franklin Conspiracy: Cover-up, Betrayal, and the Astonishing Secret Behind the Lost Arctic Expedition by Jeffrey B. Latta

Book Review

Reviewed June 21, 2007
Rating: 1 star

I guess I should have known from the title that this book was going to be a bit—how shall I say this?—out there. I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next girl; sadly, this isn’t a good conspiracy theory. In fact, it’s not even a theory at all. The book consists mainly of well-researched facts (give the author props, he does do his homework) paired with rhetorical questions—tons and tons and tons of rhetorical questions, which are never answered and are apparently included merely to give an appropriately spooky, paranoid feeling to the text. I kept waiting for the author to produce his theory and answer the barrage of unanswered questions… but he never did. Aside from a few unconnected tales of mythical northern monsters and a tentative speculation on radiation poisoning (which seemed to be heading towards a flying saucer theory, but fell short of the connection), the author is apparently lacking in any sort of theory or answer to his own questions—that, or he’s keeping his ideas under wraps because he fears public ridicule or a powerful backlash from the conspirators (whoever they are). Whatever his theory may or may not be, it seems to involve the entire British Admiralty of the early 1800s, most of the explorers who sought the Northwest Passage, and probably a few polar bears; the plot (what there is of it) is not entirely dissimilar to Dan Simmon’s novel The Terror, which makes for compelling fiction but is decidedly less compelling when presented as fact. It’s a technically well-written book (aside from all the obnoxious hanging questions) which left me a little sad, wishing that the author had just played it straight and written a “normal” book—despite his wilder musings, he seems neither dismissably stupid nor totally unhinged, and struck me as being genuinely curious about the fate of the Franklin expedition. Unfortunately, he couldn’t convince me to share his doubts about the generally-accepted views on the subject. Give Latta credit for keeping an open mind, but take everything in this book with a heavy dose of salt.