Lieutenant Hornblower

[watervole]

I've been down with Covid - hence audiobooks are very much the order of the day... 

 

I listened to the audiobook of Lieutenant Hornblower and I cannot praise Christian Rodska too highly as a narrator. He brings the scene vividly to life, clear voices for each different character (including the women), an ease with naval terminology and a story-telling ability that never oversteps the boundary into melodrama.

This book is written from the viewpoint of Lieutenant Bush, which is a good authorial choice as there is a an event which takes place relatively early on in the book and Hornblower knows what happened and Bush does not. This means the reader does not know either and has to try and make his/her own deductions as to what happened.

The books starts in an area familiar from the TV series, with the increasing insanity of Captain Sawyer and the effect of his paranoia on the crew of the Resolution.

But the book goes further, because it shows the crippling effect of Sawyer's remaining presence as a lunatic invalid even after he has been removed from command.

The five lieutenants are often paralysed by indecision, trying to predict how their actions will be viewed by a future court of enquiry. Should the Sawyer's sealed orders be opened or not? They could be wrong in either direction depending on how events pan out.

in the case of the first lieutenant, it impacts on his command decisions as well. He's not thinking things through in detail, just going for simple safe options - in the Navy you can rarely be judged wrong if you attack.

Bush, the 4th lieutenant is a very good seaman, but he doesn't think outside the box. He undergoes a gradual shift throughout the book in his attitude to Hornblower, the 5th lieutenant, moving from initial mistrust to respect and a real friendship.

The story isn't just about naval battles. The writer includes a land battle - with fascinating historical details about the use of heated shot as a weapon; vicious tactical negotiation of a Spanish surrender (Hornblower manages to push them into terms that are far more painful for the Spanish than initially proposed); a glance at slave rebellions on Haiti; life on half pay when there is no war (and the Catch 22 of a promotion at the wrong time...), and the benefits of being a good whist player.

If you like naval/military history in the Napoleonic era, then definitely a recommended read/listen.

Comments

[selenak]

My sympathies - I had it in February, and audiobooks are a good way to pass the time. My Dad was a big Hornblower fan, so I read (some) of the novels (up to when Hornblower is an admiral) as well back in the day, and remember liking them.

[vera_j]

I hope you are not very ill. Get well and recover well and fast. Also I hope your family are all right.

Thank you for that nice review!

[kotturinn]

Oh noes. Is this the second time for you? Hope it's not too bad.

[reapermum]

For anyone who wants to check out the text, it's out of copyright in Canada and the text is here https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20170403

[igenlode]

"Lieutenant Hornblower" was an interesting experiment on Forester's part, as it's the one and only time he tried writing a Hornblower novel from an external point of view -- and Bush was already a fairly well-established character in the Hornblower-narrated novels by that point, having been depicted as a limited but loyal follower, so the author had to work within the existing 'facts'. As a result, we get more of a 'Holmes and Watson' approach, where the narrator is at a loss as to the protagonist's thought processes quite a lot of the time; we also get to see the gradual shift from Hornblower as a junior subordinate to taking a tacitly-acknowledged leading role in the relationship between the two. (I suspect that Forester found the experiment less than entirely successful, because he never repeated it, but it is certainly a change to see Hornblower through Bush's eyes for once instead of vice versa.)

This book I remember as being vaguely uncomfortable reading (some of the Hornblower novels, like "Mr Midshipman Hornblower" or "Lord Hornblower", left a less pleasant taste in my mouth than others, and a lot of Forester's non-Hornblower work is even more nihilistic/masochistic in tone -- I think I'm fonder of happy endings than he was). In this case I think it's partly the shadow of Captain Sawyer hanging over everyone (and the first lieutenant especially) and partly the sort of general Things Going Wrong in cleverly ironic ways, and partly Bush tagging along a confused half-step behind in the consciousness that he doesn't really *understand* the way that Hornblower's mind works. I remember it as not being a very happy novel, but I'd have to reread it to pin the impression down properly... I've never seen the TV adaptations, so I'm used to experiencing the stories entirely from the inside of Hornblower's head.

The heated shot is the one section I always remember first from this book (and duly bring to mind whenever testing a flat-iron for temperature!) And the bridge at the end, despite the fact that my knowledge of bridge, like my knowledge of piquet in Georgette Heyer's novels ("piqued, repiqued, and capotted!"), is largely limited to what I've managed to glean from the books themselves ;-D