Recent reading

[regshoe]

Lord Hornblower by C. S. Forester (1946). The grim conclusion to the original run of Hornblower novels (one more book is set later, but, contrary to my confused mis-osmosis, it's not next in publication order and is in fact very different from this one in tone and style; the rest are all prequels). The early part of the book, in which Hornblower is sent to quash a mutiny off the French coast, has some of the sort of ingenious tactical puzzle-solving that I like about these books, but it's undermined by being about, well, quashing a very understandable mutiny; Forester tries to give Hornblower a sympathetic attitude to mutiny but it comes across as rather trying to eat his cake and have it, especially since Hornblower ends up acting very badly in a way that really wasn't unavoidable. And Bush isn't even there! But then:

spoilers

Bush reappears, only to be rather summarily killed off offstage in a way I am a little bit indignant about. Then the war ends (for now), Hornblower goes about feeling terrible while the peace negotiations, sending Napoleon to Elba etc. are going on, then he cheats on his wife again in a particularly awful and ridiculous way...

In the final part of the book, Hornblower ends up leading a doomed guerrilla campaign against Napoleon during the Hundred Days, which while a bit grim was dramatically enjoyable: Hornblower and his tiny army are trying desperately to evade their much stronger foe, when we get a significant statement that it's the eighteenth of June... and I was on the edge of my seat for (literally) the rest of the book wondering whether the news would reach them in time. (This book is therefore the opposite of The Wounded Name: the battle of Waterloo happens offstage and it's vitally important.) Besides all that, it's very obvious that this book, taking place at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, was written towards the end of the Second World War; it doesn't really help things, and the descriptions of Hornblower felt a lot more Twentieth-Century Manly in their attitudes than similar descriptions in earlier books. Some good bits, then, but on the whole definitely not the high point of the series. But now, on to the prequels: more Bush! better writing! I look forward to it.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson (1879). Besides the NTS Kidnapped relevance, this is a lovely book. Stevenson continues to be a good travel writer, amusingly observant and self-deprecating, and this book also contains a lot of interesting cultural and historical background. As a Protestant-raised agnostic travelling through a majority-Protestant area of an otherwise Catholic country, Stevenson finds that the topic of religion comes up a lot: at one point he stays at a Trappist monastery where the other guests earnestly try to convert him; in another episode he meets a Plymouth Brother (?apparently a thing in France) who mistakenly thinks he is one too. His travels take him through the country of the Camisards, and he says a lot about them, drawing parallels with the Scottish Covenanters. He also mentions the Beast of Gévaudan, an intriguing historical mystery. And the subtextual presence of Fanny in his thoughts throughout is sweet—it's good to read this and know it ended happily.

In other exciting RLS news, I went to a favourite bookshop earlier this week and found a large and beautiful omnibus edition of several of his novels and short stories, which I am very much looking forward to digging into! It excludes his most famous works on the grounds that (paraphrasing) obviously everyone already has a copy of Treasure Island, so it'd be a waste of space; annoyingly, it also doesn't have The Master of Ballantrae, which I was hoping to read next. Never mind, I'll just have to read Prince Otto instead and find TMoB somewhere else...

The Adventures of Caleb Williams; Or, Things as They Are by William Godwin (1794). This book was written as a sort of accompaniment to the author's previous work, a radical political treatise on the ills and injustices of contemporary society, to articulate those principles through fiction. The narrator, Caleb Williams, works as secretary to a rich gentleman, and he discovers a terrible secret: his employer, Mr Falkland, once committed murder! Falkland finds out that Caleb knows his secret and thence persecutes him relentlessly: falsely accusing him of theft so he's sent to jail, having him tracked down when he escapes, blasting his reputation by publishing an account of Caleb's supposed crimes, making sure this comes to the notice of everyone everywhere he might otherwise get a fresh start; and throughout all, the institutions of society support Falkland and make things worse for Caleb. As an indictment of late eighteenth-century society it certainly has power—the sections on the injustice of the justice system, jails and assizes are especially good—but I think it falters in failing to commit to Falkland's character; Godwin doesn't seem quite able to decide whether he's a basically good man driven to do horrible things out of desperation or a total pantomime villain who was only ever faking being decent. Possibly, though, some of this was the result of (self-)censorship: looking the book up on Wikipedia, I find that the ending—which swerves back to the 'Falkland is actually good' side—was changed from Godwin's original manuscript, which is much more to the villain interpretation. The book is written in very overly-verbose late eighteenth-century style, which does not make easy reading; the edition on Gutenberg contains multiple prefaces (including one for a different book?), and Godwin here sets out in punctilious and earnest detail the specifics of his writing process, which was kind of cute and historically interesting.

Comments

[sanguinity]

Aha! I stand corrected! :-D