Really an excellent piece of work, this. A ocean-focused microbiologist and a deep-cover spy meet and tryst and return to the difficulties and marvels of their further lives. The whole book is thoughtfully structured with some fantastically-turned phrases and use of language. The chronology is pleasantly wobbly and the ending satisfyingly open. (I am increasingly sensitive to lazy or overly-neat endings: it's a peeve, I admit.)

Anyhow, I picked Submergence up because it was linked from a screed (which was probably, let's be fair, trolling) about why adults should be embarassed if they're reading too many YA novels, and this was cited as an epitome of an ADULT book, which okay, let's be fair, it probably is. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/06/against_ya_adults_should_be_emb...

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Submergence is two stories woven together that only briefly touch. Through alternating passages we learn about Danny, who studies the ocean through math, and James, a British spy captured by the Somalis. Danny's tale is all about her studies in the deep ocean. The passages with James are largely about the lack of water and his captivity in the dry desert. Sometimes it is unclear if you are in the past or the present, it can be disorientating, but at times you feel that Danny and James are disorientated too. If you only like linear story telling, you should stay away. I like a bit more resolution in my fiction so I wasn't thrilled with this how this one petered out. It left me mostly feeling Meh. ( )

Unbearably pretentious, with occasional passages of great elegance and insight. I was kind of hoping the Somali captors would somehow end up storming that disgusting old world French hotel. ( )

A British spy and a scientist-mathematician fall in love over Christmas at a Ritz in the French countryside, and then must go their separate ways. From there they each submerge into depths beyond their previous experience. In this simple framework bloom meditations of a challenging scientific and philosophical nature, such that they pretty well dominate the narrative. This is a contemplative novel, but it sustains a suspense in which life fences with death; and it is a scientific novel in which nevertheless two souls meet and complete each other. It accomplishes all these ends completely and gratifyingly. Deep, thought-provoking, excellent stuff.

We meet James and Danielle independently as they check into the same exclusive hotel on the Atlantic coast of France. We already know however that later on, James, a British intelligence operative, is captured by jihadists in Somalia, and begins many months of a nightmarish existence. Danielle for her part believes the key to life on the planet, and maybe answers to some of the more intractable social and scientific challenges, lie in the deep ocean, where life is chemosynthetic instead of photosynthetic, and where we, as a world and scientific community, have just now begun to scratch the surface of knowledge.

As the story progresses, James wages a constant private battle to keep his life and his identity as he’s shoved from place to place, beaten, kicked, poisoned, and alternately hectored and ignored. Danielle prepares for immersion into the depths beneath the Greenland Sea, sending letters - written out in felt tip on pages from her notebook - to her lover James. Along the way each story poses its issues and challenges. For James, the immediate imperative of keeping his life leads to thoughts of faith - he’s a British Catholic - and a modern world where young men and boys are radicalized to jihadism by clerical Muslims. These thoughts find expression in some of the worst conditions in the world - water-starved wadis in East Africa, ruined Italian villas where the water has stagnated, inhospitable jungles where insects rule.

Danielle’s challenges encompass the broader but no less pressing survival issues for the race as a whole. She believes the deep has lessons for surface-dwelling species that could hold the key to accommodating humanity in the narrow band of the surface biosphere. They - the secrets yet to be discovered - could help humankind build and maintain habitable outposts on other worlds, for example, and may hold clues for next steps in evolution that may have to be hurried along with biotechnological advances.

Mr. Ledgard leaves these questions, particularly the planetary-scope questions, open, as of course he must. But herein lies his agenda: the posing of the day’s most topical and pressing quandaries for consideration. However, I fear I may have sold the visual and fictional effects short here, because, make no mistake, each step of the way they impress, convince, and compel. This is exceptional: ambitious, deep, heartfelt, magisterial, accomplished. Take it up by all means!

http://bassoprofundo1.blogspot.com/2016/07/submergence-by-jm-ledgard.html ( )

Submergence is a book obsessed with the ocean. This, given the title, is entirely appropriate. But it's a book where time does not quite have the meaning we might otherwise believe, where people are benevolent and violent in the same breath, where philosophies can contradict practice and still produce the same results. In short, the characters, so far, represent the ocean in the same way that they are obsessed with its characteristics, with the movement of the Hadal deep and the way that fresh water works. It opens with violence enacted against human flesh, much in the way that storms batter vessels, and continues to show the softness of the sea, the sex and life that teems there. It is, to be fair, also a history of modern violence in Somalia, and in being this, serves as the most brutal and honest to the ground portrait of Al Qaeda in the Horn of Africa that I have ever encountered. This is unsurprising, given Ledgard's background as one of the Economist's African War Correspondents. And yes, all capitals because I do think he covers the continent, and War Correspondent just feels like one of those jobs which deserves a great deal of capitalization to make sense of.
The plot moves between two or three views, the authorial voice and the minds of the two main characters. The shifts are jarring, and sometimes feel like knowledge dumped on the reader for context. But that's because, like its topics, Submergence works in many ways. It serves as education in the ocean and Somalia, as a romance, a story of freedom. The depths of the book are quite impressive, evoking the best possible feelings of isolation and fear, while reminding us of the joys of being human. The characters feel dangerously close to real, and thinking of a world with them in it scares me just a little bit, in the best ways possible. A masterful book, and one that anyone with an interest in the 21st century should seek out. ( )