1962 Napoleonic naval fiction, tenth written and third by internal
chronology. It's 1802, and the Peace of Amiens is breaking down;
Commander Hornblower is given a sloop and sent to the blockade of Brest.
There are incidents, but they flow into one another better than
in earlier books; a regular reconnaissance run turns into a fight
(when the French know that war has been declared but word hasn't got
to the British front lines), Hornblower gets restless and goes on a
landing party, he gets irked at what he sees as pointless manoeuvres,
he attacks a troop convoy that tries to break the blockade at night,
and finally he gets sent after a Spanish treasure fleet in the hope of
prize money… only to end up engaging another ship such that he's out
of sight of the main fight, and therefore not eligible for a share.
This is all good solid stuff, though not ground-breaking. What there
isn't is a gimmick, a new sort of naval thing for Hornblower to do,
like the bomb-ketches or the land attacks that earlier books brought
in.
There's also an admixture of the early days of Hornblower's marriage,
which of course works less well because this really isn't Forester's
strong writing mode.
There's a point of hard decision, which is sadly similar to something
that arises in Hornblower in the West Indies, the previous book
written. "Sadly", because if this were really a chronological series,
the older Hornblower ought to have remembered this incident from many
years earlier. Ah well, that's the hazard of writing out of order.
Enjoyable, but it definitely feels like "more of the same" to me, and
that's the end of the novels Forester completed. There's still
Hornblower and the Crisis which he left unfinished, and some short
stories.