1937 Napoleonic naval fiction, first written but sixth by internal
chronology. Hornblower, commanding the frigate Lydia, is sent to the
Pacific coast of Nicaragua to aid a local insurgency against the
Spanish.
It's true: I have never previously read these books. They have of
course been hugely influential, not only on their direct followers
such as O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, Reeman's Bolitho and
Pope's Ramage, but on the SF they
inspired; most
blatant are the early Honor Harrington books that go out of their
way to have starships firing broadsides at each other, but elements
are readily discernable in a vast range of post-war SF.
So it's perhaps unsurprising that one of the things which struck me
most was something not readily imitated in a high-tech setting, the
way in which a ship of this era can "live off the land", can be
repaired from a state of heavy battle damage and limited provisions to
being fully fit for making a multi-month non-stop voyage given only a
reasonably safe anchorage and no interference with her crew's
scavenging. The reader knows that to patch up a damaged modern ship,
never mind a spaceship, takes precision machines not readily carried
aboard, and (pace the Spacehounds of IPC) this isn't something you
get to do on a random uninhabited planet, even if the science is soft
enough that the planet doesn't just kill you.
And of course while everyone talks about the loneliness of command,
most writers want their protagonists to have a good time. I imagine
Forester did foresee this as the start of a series, but it's also a
story complete in itself, and nobody gets a particularly happy ending;
Hornblower in particular is so convinced that he is worthless that
even when he wins a battle over a vastly superior enemy his main
thoughts are for the butcher's bill and the likelihood that he will be
excoriated for his own casualties. He takes no particular pleasure in
his skills; they're just what a commander ought to be able to do.
(It reminds me of the sort of Christian humility that says that
anything you do well is God working through you, and anything you do
badly is your own fault.)
I do rather like one central point, that a treaty can easily be made
without a lone ship's captain being informed of it: so no sooner has
Hornblower captured a Spanish ship and turned her over to aid the
insurgency than he learns that the Spanish have changed sides and are
now England's allies. (Not that they'll let him use their ports or
anything like that, because England is still regarded as an intruder
in the Spanish colonial possessions.)
Rather less nuanced is the portrayal of the insurgents' leader, "El
Supremo", who claims descent from Pedro de Alvarado and Moctezuma and
is a parody of the absolute leader who thrives primarily by causing
others to believe his own egotistical view of himself (though the slow
execution of anyone who appears to be disloyal surely doesn't hurt).
Given the date, one can't help seeing a certain amount of the
posturing of senior Fascists here.
But the central battle is solid, and loses nothing even if one spots
the imitations in later works. Yes, all right, it's all about how the
small ship can still beat the bigger one given a better commander, but
it's about how that happens, how all the little effects of the
better commander add up to advantage, rather than simply assuming it's
the natural way of things.
I don't love the writing – I listened to this as an audio book, which
with a good reader can often glide over infelicities of style – but
past that there's plenty of technical detail (better-researched than
in some of the later books) and a protagonist who at least gives some
slight impression of complexity even if he's not particularly likable.
I doubt I'll become a rabid Hornblower fan; had I read them as an
adolescent that might have happened, but I don't froth over many
things these days. But I enjoyed this rather better than I did Master
and Commander or whichever Ramage it was that someone lent me.
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