Lord Hornblower, by C.S. Forester
C.S. Forester was just about my most read author as a boy. He's famous for his Hornblower books, but wrote much more, with several being made into films. The best known is probably The African Queen, which was the last Forester book I read until now.
Hornblower is a great character, brave, a leader of men, but also cerebral, sensitive, and with a strong moral core. As part of that he has an enormous streak of self doubt and introspection, which causes him difficulties at times, especially romantic ones, and which can also be off putting for the reader in the later books, of which Lord Hornblower is one. But even in these later volumes, Forester's writing strengths are to the fore: his deep knowledge of history and seafaring, and his knack for writing classic adventure yarns. I lapped up Hornblower as a boy, and any of Forester's other books I could lay my hands on. I'm sure Hornblower fed into my spell as a Royal Navy cadet; indeed, as a Midshipman and then 'Acting Sub-Lieutenant'. In the end, it wasn't the life for me, but I'm still a fan of the Navy.
I digress. In due course I left C.S. Forester behind me; but I was annoyingly aware that I hadn't read all the Hornblower books. My reading of them was all over the place. If the Hornblower stories are placed in chronological order, then I'd read the first three, but then chosen at random. I didn't have a bibliography, so I didn't know which one I'd missed. This year, the year in which I've picked up my reading again, amongst other things I've looked back quite a bit, so it was natural to find the missing Hornblower. Yes, Lord Hornblower was the missing book.
But I found there was another published volume, Hornblower and the Crisis. This consists of his unfinished final Hornblower novel plus a couple of short stories. One of them is a vignette, really, written as a sort of coda, featuring Hornblower as a retired Admiral of the Fleet. The unfinished story is perfectly readable thanks to Forester's natural episodic story method, ie. it's fairly well self contained. I bought this volume as well, and read it first, because I didn't want to have that mournful feeling of 'the end', when I wrapped it up.
Somewhat of a mistake. It turned out that Lord Hornblower is the book with a beaten feeling at the end. Not that the book doesn't pace well, with plenty of adventure. But the tragic personal events towards the end do make a reader familiar with Hornblower feel that the excitement of all that youthful bravura and achievement has been replaced by a painful consciousness of the price that has had to be paid, much of it Hornblower's own responsibility. I still feel deflated as I write this. If anyone I knew was to begin on Hornblower now, I would say don't leave this one to last, try to read them either in chronological order, and read Hornblower in the West Indies last, or maybe more interestingly, in the order Forester wrote them, which would leave six or seven books still to go. Finish with Hornblower and the Hotspur. Alternatively, invent a time machine, and go back to see Forester while he's writing Lord Hornblower, with a threatening manner, saying, 'Are you really sure you want to kill off you-know-who in this one?'
I had an interesting thought, looking up Forester and Hornblower. The series didn't start with Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, not at all, but with three 'mid career' novels written in the late 1930s. He returns to Hornblower at the end of the Second World War with The Commodore and Lord Hornblower, in 1945 and 1946. Then there's another gap, when significantly a big Hollywood film is produced, starring Gregory Peck, based on the first three books. At that point, Forester capitalises on the new wider interest and virtually starts his series all over again, with Hornblower joining the Royal Navy as a Midshipman. He proceeds to exploit gaps in the series up to then, easy to do because of the sheer length of the Napoleonic Wars, despite the fact that Hornblower mostly doesn't take part in the major battles. Forester always wrote him as a 'man alone' such that Trafalgar etc were the wrong settings for his hero.
I can't remember The Commodore after all this time, but it wouldn't surprise me if it had a similar feel to Lord Hornblower. My 'interesting thought' is that the horrible real experience of the Second World War changed everything for a writer of war stories, even of adventure stories. The second half of the book takes place not at sea but on land, as Hornblower fights a desperate guerrilla campaign against Napoleon's forces along the River Loire. There's no sense of glory, and little hope of personal survival, only of a duty that must be done, in support of the wider struggle. It's hard not to see the atmosphere of this novel as reflecting so much of what British people must have felt at the end of the war; they'd won, but did it really feel like a victory, when they looked all around them and saw what had been lost and who was no longer with them?
I digress. In due course I left C.S. Forester behind me; but I was annoyingly aware that I hadn't read all the Hornblower books. My reading of them was all over the place. If the Hornblower stories are placed in chronological order, then I'd read the first three, but then chosen at random. I didn't have a bibliography, so I didn't know which one I'd missed. This year, the year in which I've picked up my reading again, amongst other things I've looked back quite a bit, so it was natural to find the missing Hornblower. Yes, Lord Hornblower was the missing book.
But I found there was another published volume, Hornblower and the Crisis. This consists of his unfinished final Hornblower novel plus a couple of short stories. One of them is a vignette, really, written as a sort of coda, featuring Hornblower as a retired Admiral of the Fleet. The unfinished story is perfectly readable thanks to Forester's natural episodic story method, ie. it's fairly well self contained. I bought this volume as well, and read it first, because I didn't want to have that mournful feeling of 'the end', when I wrapped it up.
Somewhat of a mistake. It turned out that Lord Hornblower is the book with a beaten feeling at the end. Not that the book doesn't pace well, with plenty of adventure. But the tragic personal events towards the end do make a reader familiar with Hornblower feel that the excitement of all that youthful bravura and achievement has been replaced by a painful consciousness of the price that has had to be paid, much of it Hornblower's own responsibility. I still feel deflated as I write this. If anyone I knew was to begin on Hornblower now, I would say don't leave this one to last, try to read them either in chronological order, and read Hornblower in the West Indies last, or maybe more interestingly, in the order Forester wrote them, which would leave six or seven books still to go. Finish with Hornblower and the Hotspur. Alternatively, invent a time machine, and go back to see Forester while he's writing Lord Hornblower, with a threatening manner, saying, 'Are you really sure you want to kill off you-know-who in this one?'
I had an interesting thought, looking up Forester and Hornblower. The series didn't start with Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, not at all, but with three 'mid career' novels written in the late 1930s. He returns to Hornblower at the end of the Second World War with The Commodore and Lord Hornblower, in 1945 and 1946. Then there's another gap, when significantly a big Hollywood film is produced, starring Gregory Peck, based on the first three books. At that point, Forester capitalises on the new wider interest and virtually starts his series all over again, with Hornblower joining the Royal Navy as a Midshipman. He proceeds to exploit gaps in the series up to then, easy to do because of the sheer length of the Napoleonic Wars, despite the fact that Hornblower mostly doesn't take part in the major battles. Forester always wrote him as a 'man alone' such that Trafalgar etc were the wrong settings for his hero.
I can't remember The Commodore after all this time, but it wouldn't surprise me if it had a similar feel to Lord Hornblower. My 'interesting thought' is that the horrible real experience of the Second World War changed everything for a writer of war stories, even of adventure stories. The second half of the book takes place not at sea but on land, as Hornblower fights a desperate guerrilla campaign against Napoleon's forces along the River Loire. There's no sense of glory, and little hope of personal survival, only of a duty that must be done, in support of the wider struggle. It's hard not to see the atmosphere of this novel as reflecting so much of what British people must have felt at the end of the war; they'd won, but did it really feel like a victory, when they looked all around them and saw what had been lost and who was no longer with them?
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