After the total nuclear war, the captain of a missile destroyer leads
his crew through the irradiated world and towards a new life.
I am going to talk about plot details, so if you care about not
knowing that sort of thing you probably shouldn't read this review.
This book is from 1988, but the immediate comparison it invites
is with Nevil Shute's 1957 novel On the Beach, which I re-read last
year. In this version of the end of the world, at least a tiny bit of
humanity can survive.
The major problem with this book is that it's terribly long-winded. I
haven't met any American destroyer captains, but I should be surprised
if they were as a class so prolix and prone to use of words like
"liquescent" and "caliginous" as this narrator. The result is that
while exciting things happen, they take an awfully long time to do it;
in particular, since the bulk of the action is referred to in the
first section and then told in flashback, this is a book with very few
surprises. Every major plot element is heavily foreshadowed, and can
be seen coming so far in advance that it loses much of its power.
On the other hand, some of the descriptive sections do work well, and
the description of the ship's passage across the equator as a
localised nuclear winter sets in is particularly effective.
The narrator reflects very extensively on the nature of the female
crew and their role on the ship, quite separately from (or at least
prior to) any considerations of "repopulating the world". This may
have been more relevant in 1988 than it is now; it comes over to me as
more creepy and gynolatrous than anything else.
There's also an awful lot of Dune-style annotated conversation:
someone says a sentence of a few words, and the narrator spends a
paragraph mulling over its hidden meanings. This sort of thing is an
easy target for parody (Langford did it well), and while I can see
that Brinkley's trying to portray a captain judging the mood of his
men he never quite pulls it off.
It doesn't help my suspension of disbelief that a significant plot
point deals with the refuelling of the (nuclear-powered) ship (and of
a Soviet missile submarine). Your humble blogger is unfortunately
aware that the refuelling of ships of these types is absolutely not
something that could be conducted by the crew without facilities:
they're full-scale dockyard jobs, involving major surgery to the hull
and taking months or years, and such hard work that more recent
nuclear-powered warships have been deliberately designed never to
undergo refuelling but to have reactors that will last the full
twenty-plus-year life of the ship. A suggestion buried deep in the
book that these ships have been designed in the opposite direction,
for ease of refuelling by unskilled crew, simply breaks plausibility
for me.
Similarly, the author clearly thinks he's been terribly clever in
designing that Soviet submarine to operate through Arctic ice (in
exactly the same way as the Improved Los Angeles that was being built
while this book was being written), whereas this capability had been a
design feature of all Royal Navy submarines for some years before
that.
So although this book carries some of the trappings of the
technothriller, with lots of talk about specific types of missile and
so on, the research is lacking and it all comes out rather thin. This
is far more a psychological study than anything else. Unfortunately,
in the end, it's so protracted and foreshadowed that it forgets to be
engaging.
Apparently there's a television series of this name coming out this
summer. As far as I can see, it shares with this book only the name of
the captain.
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