As I have mentioned elsewhere, I am currently passing the time during a period of mild ill health by re-reading the Horatio Hornblower novels by C. S. Forester. As fans of nautical adventure series go, I'm a bit casual. I read the books, and re-read them, but I have never bothered to study seamanship. I can't tell you authoritatively the difference between a sloop of war and a frigate, and I can't be bothered to look up the difference between the mizzenmast, the foremast, and the foretopgallants. I treat the technical nautical terms in Hornblower much as I treat the technobabble in Star Trek: The Next Generation. When Hornblower tells Lieutenant Bush to call all hands, reef the main tops'l, and get the ship close-hauled on the starboard tack, I process it with the same part of my brain that processes Giordi LaForge telling Captain Picard that he can defeat the enemy tractor beam if he reverses the polarity of the sub-space emitters and recalibrates the forward deflector array to emit a positron burst: someone, my brain translates for me, is about do something that will Get The Job Done. More than that, I need not trouble myself with.
I also have generally resisted the temptation to get into the kind of nitpicking that characterizes the true lover of any adventure series. For instance, I am currently re-reading Beat to Quarters, the fifth book in the series chronologically, though the first to be written and published. Inevitably, since Forester wrote about Hornblower's past after he had written Hornblower's future, there are discrepancies, and the sharp-eyed reader who has been through the books a dozen times cannot help but notice that in Ship of the Line, Hornblower's unsuitable wife Maria is described as a friend of his childhood, while from Lieutenant Hornblower we know that she was actually the daughter of his landlady when he was on the beach at half-pay during peace time. Also, we keep hearing in BtQ that Hornblower is taciturn with his first lieutenant, the phlegmatic Bush, because in his first command he was overly garrulous and his lieutenant took advantage of it. Unfortunately, we know from Hornblower and the Hotspur that on Hornblower's first command, the ever-loyal Bush was his first lieutenant. Also, BtQ takes place in 1808, and Hornblower has supposedly been in the service twenty years. But he took his first post as midshipman in the Justinian at the advanced age of seventeen; since he was born on July 4, 1776, in 1808 he could only be 32 years old, not the 37 he would have to be to have been at sea twenty years.
As a non-maniacal fan, I do not trouble myself with matters like these, as you can see. I just like to read about Hornblower's plucky little ships (getting bigger all the time as he moves up the ranks), dismasted, in the lee of an enemy who outguns him two-to-one, half the hands reduced to a bloody gel on the for'ard deck, cannonballs whizzing through what's left of the rigging, and the enemy captain calling out, "For God's sake, surrender! You have done all that brave men can do!"
After which, of course, good ol' Horny wins the battle.
Good ol' Horny is a calculating and crafty man. A masterful whist player, he brings the same objective calculating of odds to everything he does. Although I am frustrated with his bitterness and self-recrimination, I love him because he is not a physically strong man, but one who succeeds through the application of his intellect. This is why I like him better than Jack Aubrey, the hero of Patrick O'Brian's series of nautical adventure tales.
Oh, I tried the Aubrey/Maturin novels, having enjoyed Hornblower so much, and looking for more of the same. But I have only gotten through two of them. I dislike them for the very reasons that some of their fans dislike Hornblower: written years after the Hornblower books, they are more realistic in their depictions of the profanity, the debauchery, the buggery, and the drunkenness that were so much a part of life in Nelson's navy. I find them crude. I am content to hear that Lt. Bush "unleashed a string of blasphemies": I do not need to hear the blasphemies. I am content to know that the sailors have brought their "wives" on board while in port, and that the expected debauchery has ensued belowedecks; I do not need anyone to draw me a mental picture of the debauch.
I find Aubrey himself crude. He is not a clever man, and his advancement through the ranks, it seemed to me when I read the books, came more through luck than through, as in Hornblower's case, the application of his special talents. Yet I am happy to acknowledge the rightness of anyone who prefers Aubrey, in all his frat-boyishness, to Hornblower, in his splendid seclusion. The preference does not seem incomprehensible to me. And I am looking foward with relish to the release of Master and Commander, in which Russell Crowe plays Jack Aubrey. I expect that the film will do away with niceties of characterization in favor of a whole lot of awesome swashbuckling, and I expect I'll see it twice. I plan to ignore the debates among Aubrey/Maturin fans about whether Crowe packed on enough weight to play the portly Aubrey, or whether it is an unspeakable blasphemy that the plot of the film is not the plot of the book with the same name, but a combination of that book's plot and the plot of another book in the series. It's all one to me; I just love to visit the film's website and hear Russell Crowe intone: "Our enemy has more than twice our guns, more than twice our numbers...but we are supposed to stop them." More popcorn, please, and no talking, or I'll scratch your back for you.
Posted by Su Penn at September 12, 2003 05:38 PM | TrackBack