1992 historical naval fiction. In spite of his best efforts,
Linienschiffsleutnant Otto Prohaska of the Austro-Hungarian Navy is
not going to avert the First World War.
This is rather more bitty than the first book, which was largely
held together by Prohaska's submarine commands. He trains as a naval
pilot; gets seconded to the staff of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian
Empire; gets reassigned to a dead-end river monitor posting; falls in
with hopeless anarchists; ends up in China as the war is slowly
gathering pace; tries to get back into Europe across Ottoman
territory… but there's never any real sense of progress, just of being
storm-tossed from one bad situation to another.
It's very much a picaresque, more interested in showing bits of the
world than in developing Prohaska's character. It's fascinating to
visit the German-built town of Tsingtao, or the feud-ridden backwoods
of Montenegro, but I at least always felt that the purpose of all
this was to move the narrator somewhere new and interesting more than
to tell us about the narrator himself by his reactions to his
situations.
"Very well then: you may have your crew and your vessel and the
necessary armament. I shall ask for volunteers tomorrow. Personally
i think that you're just courting death to no purpose, but if
nothing else it'll make something worthwhile to put down in the
official history of the siege. Austria's military annals are largely
a record of heroic futility, I fear, so you'll at least be part of a
long tradition."
It's still great fun, but with a more serious undertone, as war comes
back to a Europe that had thought it outgrown, and various horrible
people who expect to profit from the chaos encourage the rush towards
a short punitive war, because what could possibly go wrong with that.