INVISIBLE

During World War II, an officer aboard a submarine embarks on a dangerous mission and gets an uncommon peek into the future in this novel.

Lt. Mike Murphy, the executive officer aboard the Manta Ray, a United States submarine, is a respected seaman and “natural born leader.” But following a bad head injury, he begins to believe he’s someone occupying Murphy’s body, someone with memories of the future: “I’m another person, an invisible man inside.” He knows with certainty that the war will end well; the Japanese will become “one of our staunchest allies”; there will be smartphones; and the Brooklyn Dodgers will relocate to Los Angeles. He also knows classified information to which he couldn’t possibly be privy, and his superiors suspect he is schizophrenic. Meanwhile, the Manta Ray is assigned a perilous mission—using new technology that effectively renders the submarine invisible, Murphy and his crew will mount a stealth attack in Tokyo Harbor. Murphy falls in love with Lucy Charlesworth, an electrical engineer from Cambridge University onboard to steward the technology, a woman whom he seems to remember from a future life. Nyberg displays a remarkable knowledge of life on a submarine in the middle of the 20th century, an expertise that lends the swiftly paced action a considerable measure of authenticity. But the plot is as implausible as it is unfocused—the novel could easily have been 100 pages shorter. And the author’s writing style inclines toward the ponderously leaden and breathlessly melodramatic. At one point, Murphy muses: “Without light there is no form, without form there is no perceivable place. For instance, here, now; the sensation of space, and yes...time, the veneer of time...the coming and going of things, of people, their whispers like prayers, obsequies. Is this whence we come? Where we return? Death merely a gatekeeper?”

A fast-paced but improbable war tale.