SUBMERSED: Wonder, Obsession, and Murder in the World of Amateur Submarines, by Matthew Gavin Frank
Matthew Gavin Frank begins “Submersed,” his book about the amateur submersible community, with a confession: “For as long as I can remember, I’ve been afraid of the ocean.”
The fear of drowning may be one of those inherited atavistic survival instincts — all other primates sink like stones. Perhaps that’s why the world’s attention was seized by the disappearance of the private submersible Titan while it was touring the wreck of the Titanic in June 2023. We imagined the final moments of the five passengers, shuddered and tried to think about something else.
Frank, an accomplished author of narrative nonfiction, uses his terror as inspiration for this exploration of personal submersibles — or “p-subs” — and the eccentrics that make, descend and sometimes die in them. The result, though, is not the tale of how he triumphed over his nightmare, although he does eventually submerge in one of these tiny homemade metal air bubbles. Nor is it solely a portrait of the mostly self-taught engineers who spend their days in garages or backyards welding steel and fiddling with control panels.
It is in large part the story, told in excruciating detail, of one particular death on a submarine: the 2017 murder of the Swedish journalist Kim Wall by the Danish amateur submariner Peter Madsen.
Madsen was a world-famous private sub-builder, sometimes compared to Elon Musk, whose mini-sub Nautilus was a legend before it became a crime scene. In his preface, Frank asks: Could there be a link between the kind of obsessive drive and egotism necessary to devote one’s life to building a submarine by hand and the dark compulsion to take a stranger’s life?
There are hints along these lines: Almost all the amateur submariners are men, most have trouble forging lasting connections, and there is a dark strain of bigotry and hatred among some of them; admiration for Nazi efficiency seems uncomfortably common.
(Madsen, as Frank documents, had his own history of sexual paraphilia and a kind of braying self-regard that could have easily masked psychopathology.)
The two strands — a survey of a community of quirky obsessives and a true-crime horror story — don’t quite mesh. It’s as if John Laroche, the titular character of Susan Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief,” also just happened to be a thrill-killer. It would be shocking, and darkly engrossing, but I don’t know how much it would have helped us understand the appeal of orchids.
Frank’s painstaking research (he likens it to a kind of O.C.D.) yields evocative mini-portraits, whatever his subject. It is not enough for him to know that a person walked somewhere on a particular night years ago; he has to know everything that person experienced — the signage, the lights, the band that was playing the music coming from a bar on the corner. This can become almost self-parodic: Kim Wall’s last wave to her boyfriend, before she turned and walked to her death on the submarine, is followed by two solid pages of exegesis of the gesture, including on the biomechanics of a human hand, the significance of hand-waving in Greek myth and the wave’s meaning in different cultures.
But almost all such quibbles can be forgiven because of, well, the sheer depth of Frank’s skill. We can smell the damp wood and tequila in the Alaskan cabin where one Nazi-obsessed submariner builds his vessels, and we instantly admire the endlessly energetic Shanee Stopnitzky, “one of the few ‘non-dudes’ in the p-sub community,” as she lays out her pie-in-the-water plans to build, and then inhabit, a human-friendly underwater habitat.
And Frank is right: It does make a difference to the reader to be able to picture Kim Wall’s last moments with loved ones. His book is a success if only for its ability to conjure so vividly Wall’s character and the tragedy of her death by someone who did not know her at all.
The one real misstep comes toward the end, as the diligent author, who seems to have spoken to everyone involved in Wall’s murder but the convicted killer himself, drives to a Danish prison for that climactic interview. Again, we are given a description of the place in minute detail — Frank tells us he’s researched every aspect of the prison’s interior, leading to a detailed imagined encounter with Madsen as lucid as the nightmares of drowning that open the book. But then, standing in the parking lot, Frank aborts the mission. He never speaks to the central subject of his book.
Frank’s starting thesis — that there must be something connecting the urge to risk one’s own life by building submarines and the urge to take another — remains not only unproven, but frustratingly unprovable. We are left only with the terror he invokes and never quite conquers, and the strange kind of reckless bravery required to risk everything by building your own submarine, or walking aboard somebody else’s.
SUBMERSED: Wonder, Obsession, and Murder in the World of Amateur Submarines | By Matthew Gavin Frank | Pantheon | 309 pp. | $28
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