PositiveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Recounted in moving and vivid detail. With an eye for the human angle, Spencer recounts how the crew, confident that their speedy vessel could catch up with the other ships, whiled away the evening in merry drinking ... While the loss of the White Ship provides the narrative focus for Spencer, he places it in a wider history of the Normans from the Conquest to the succession of Henry II in 1154 ... Deftly using contemporary sources, Spencer writes with pace, and illustrates well how the interconnections of kin and aristocracy bound England to Normandy and the principalities of France, a fact that underpins the politics of this era ... There are times when Spencer could distinguish more clearly between what can be reasonably established from the primary source material and what is likely to be embellished apocrypha, not least in his retelling of the desperate moments of the shipwreck itself ... There is a risk, too, that the narrative arc of the book points to civil war following inevitably from the sinking of the White Ship. But that is not the case ... The White Ship is nonetheless a lively and gripping retelling of the history of Anglo-Norman England through the lens of a very human story of loss and pain. The book succeeds by resurrecting the characters involved in a 900-year-old maritime tragedy from their watery graves.
