A Ship of the Line by C. S. Forester
Nov. 7th, 2022 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeMy next Hornblower—which is to say the second in publication order and the seventh by internal chronology. Having sampled the later, better Hornblower books, the plan is to read in publication order from now on and see what I find...
The descriptively-titled A Ship of the Line (1938; or possibly Ship of the Line, according to the edition on fadedpage.com) follows Captain Hornblower's adventures in his command of a ship of the line, the Sutherland. As these boat books seem to tend to be, it's fairly plotless and episodic in structure. It opens with a fairly leisurely pre-voyage section in Plymouth, where Hornblower deals with the difficulties of a) finding a sufficient crew for his ship, b) stocking up on supplies and c) his love life. Then he sets sail, and after solving his personnel problems by means so astonishingly unethical that I had a moment of thinking 'hmm, we are reading this story from the point of view of the villain'*, starts on a series of adventures in triumphant out-manoeuvres and defeats of the French and almost starts actually feeling good about himself. After that things are complicated a bit by unhelpful admirals and incompetent allies; and the book ends with a disastrous battle against the French and a terrible cliffhanger.
Not expecting too much from this book, I actually ended up enjoying it quite a bit. I feel like by now I understand Hornblower a bit better and can bear with his more harrowing mental tendencies a bit more. There are some endearing moments in this book—we see Hornblower miserable with sea-sickness in the early days of the voyage (as a fellow motion sickness sufferer, I sympathise; I am glad it's not me in all these boats), keeping up that habit of naked showers on deck using the ship's pump (there's a lovely moment where he reassures some new hands reluctant to be washed under the pump by telling them about how he uses it by choice every morning), and a few more good Hornblower-and-Bush bits. Hornblower's relations with women are somewhat better too—here we see him stuck with a wife he doesn't love or really respect but still doing his best to treat her with kindness, while pining over his now-married love interest from the last book, and I thought that was both less unsympathetic and more interesting than the anguished cheating in The Happy Return. And I enjoyed seeing Hornblower's tactical brilliance in action against the French; the details of calculation and imagination are satisfying, and it's fun to see a character just being good at what they do.
...What Hornblower does, of course, does involve quite a lot of senseless violence, death and destruction, and Hornblower's awareness of and distress over this (often in contrast to Bush and other characters, who are cheerfully unconcerned about it all) is a notable feature of this book. In light of what I said of Lieutenant Hornblower about the Navy and where Hornblower's profound messed-up-ness comes from, I thought that was interesting. I think both I and Hornblower could wish there was some better avenue for his mathematical and tactical skill than fighting anyone.
And then that cliffhanger, wow! Hornblower fights a hopeless battle against four French ships, to damage them enough to make a difference by sacrificing the Sutherland; Bush loses a foot (that surprised me! is he going to spend the rest of the series with a dashingly piratical wooden leg???); numbers of the crew are dead and wounded, and at the end Hornblower surrenders to the French and faces the prospect of years as a prisoner. I am very much looking forward to seeing where this is going, especially since according tosanguinity it involves a lot of hurt/comfort.
*We're not, of course; the villain is the Navy itself and the imperial government who command it. But I do feel that somewhere at the back of all these books about heroic captains etc. there's a story about some random lad from Whitby who gets press-ganged, spends years at sea under the command of a competent, decent but evil-because-in-an-evil-system captain, hates it, has philosophical thoughts about the Navy and class and empire and international conflict and how they destroy us all, and eventually returns home for some kind of mutedly happy ending. Sylvia's Lovers disappointed me a while ago by not being that book. Anyway...
The descriptively-titled A Ship of the Line (1938; or possibly Ship of the Line, according to the edition on fadedpage.com) follows Captain Hornblower's adventures in his command of a ship of the line, the Sutherland. As these boat books seem to tend to be, it's fairly plotless and episodic in structure. It opens with a fairly leisurely pre-voyage section in Plymouth, where Hornblower deals with the difficulties of a) finding a sufficient crew for his ship, b) stocking up on supplies and c) his love life. Then he sets sail, and after solving his personnel problems by means so astonishingly unethical that I had a moment of thinking 'hmm, we are reading this story from the point of view of the villain'*, starts on a series of adventures in triumphant out-manoeuvres and defeats of the French and almost starts actually feeling good about himself. After that things are complicated a bit by unhelpful admirals and incompetent allies; and the book ends with a disastrous battle against the French and a terrible cliffhanger.
Not expecting too much from this book, I actually ended up enjoying it quite a bit. I feel like by now I understand Hornblower a bit better and can bear with his more harrowing mental tendencies a bit more. There are some endearing moments in this book—we see Hornblower miserable with sea-sickness in the early days of the voyage (as a fellow motion sickness sufferer, I sympathise; I am glad it's not me in all these boats), keeping up that habit of naked showers on deck using the ship's pump (there's a lovely moment where he reassures some new hands reluctant to be washed under the pump by telling them about how he uses it by choice every morning), and a few more good Hornblower-and-Bush bits. Hornblower's relations with women are somewhat better too—here we see him stuck with a wife he doesn't love or really respect but still doing his best to treat her with kindness, while pining over his now-married love interest from the last book, and I thought that was both less unsympathetic and more interesting than the anguished cheating in The Happy Return. And I enjoyed seeing Hornblower's tactical brilliance in action against the French; the details of calculation and imagination are satisfying, and it's fun to see a character just being good at what they do.
...What Hornblower does, of course, does involve quite a lot of senseless violence, death and destruction, and Hornblower's awareness of and distress over this (often in contrast to Bush and other characters, who are cheerfully unconcerned about it all) is a notable feature of this book. In light of what I said of Lieutenant Hornblower about the Navy and where Hornblower's profound messed-up-ness comes from, I thought that was interesting. I think both I and Hornblower could wish there was some better avenue for his mathematical and tactical skill than fighting anyone.
And then that cliffhanger, wow! Hornblower fights a hopeless battle against four French ships, to damage them enough to make a difference by sacrificing the Sutherland; Bush loses a foot (that surprised me! is he going to spend the rest of the series with a dashingly piratical wooden leg???); numbers of the crew are dead and wounded, and at the end Hornblower surrenders to the French and faces the prospect of years as a prisoner. I am very much looking forward to seeing where this is going, especially since according to
sanguinity it involves a lot of hurt/comfort.*We're not, of course; the villain is the Navy itself and the imperial government who command it. But I do feel that somewhere at the back of all these books about heroic captains etc. there's a story about some random lad from Whitby who gets press-ganged, spends years at sea under the command of a competent, decent but evil-because-in-an-evil-system captain, hates it, has philosophical thoughts about the Navy and class and empire and international conflict and how they destroy us all, and eventually returns home for some kind of mutedly happy ending. Sylvia's Lovers disappointed me a while ago by not being that book. Anyway...
