Peter Fergus

Book Review

I had assumed from the title Silver Bubbles that this book would be a fey, dolphin-hugging novel. I could hardly have been more wrong. This is one of the grittiest novels based around diving that I've come across (that's not saying much, admittedly).

In fact, it includes enough graphic content to have set me wondering whether 'silver bubbles' was some sort of sexual term I hadn't encountered before. The book is based not on leisure diving but on a trio of rufty-tufty salvage divers who acquire their own boat and seem unable to do a dive without turning up valuable cargoes.

They fin, fight, feast and other things beginning with 'f' around England's East Coast, and while the sum total of their exploits over the space of a few weeks wanders wildly off the believability scale, there is still an underlying sense of real people at work. The writer, Peter Fergus, is a sport diver and operates the dive-charter boat Venture out of Plymouth.

After service in 2 Para, he worked as a professional diver for 25 years, so I'm assuming that the content is based on personal and received experience, whipped up by a lively imagination and topped with wishful thinking. Or perhaps he always gets such exceptional service from female flight attendants! There is no real dramatic sweep to the book. Instead, it is as episodic as the post-watershed TV series Peter would no doubt like it to be.

He clearly enjoyed writing it, I enjoyed reading it, and I'm looking forward to the follow-ups.

Steve Weinman (appeared in DIVER July 2007)

Other books available are 'Invincible Defeat'ISBN: 978-0-9570041-0-8

Out soon 'Deep Deceit' 'Gold'n Bubbles' a Sequel to Silver Bubbles