Hornblower and the Crisis

Posted on July 20, 2010 by smellincoffee

Hornblower and the Crisis
© 1967 CS Forester
174 pages

Hornblower and the Crisis is the last of CS Forester’s Hornblower books, as Forester died in the midst of writing it. This book collects the first 130 pages of the intended novel, adds a portion from Forester’s notes establishing how he intended to develop the book further and end it, and then tacks on two short stories. The first, “Hornblower’s Temptation”, is set during Hornblower’s lieutenancy aboard the HMS Renoun, where he makes a potentially lucrative discovery when overseeing the execution of an Irish deserter-turned-insurrectionist. “The Last Encounter” takes place in 1848, where an elderly Hornblower receives a late-night visitor — a man claiming to be the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

The death of Forester in the middle of the Crisis is truly a loss for his readers, for the book was shaping up to be one of the better additions to the series. Newly-minted Captain Hornblower is returning to England from his blockade duties as a passenger aboard the Princess, a small utility vessel, when the book begins. His former ship, the Hotspur, is still at sea under a new captain, but Hornblower has been ordered to return to Liverpool for new orders.  After a French brig harasses the lowly Princess, Hornblower urges his fellow passengers — also royal officers — to ambush Boney’s boat. Although they are too few men to take the ship as a prize of war in total, Hornblower fights his way to the brig’s command office and steals the French captain’s orders. They are fixed with the seal of Emperor Bonaparte, and contain orders from the Corsican himself.  When Hornblower dutifully takes them to the Admiralty, they and he contrive a plan of espionage that will draw the French navy into a decisive battle — the monumental battle of Trafalgar.

I tend to enjoy Forester’s books more when they center on diplomatic intrigue, shore adventures, and espionage, so the plot of this naturally drew me in. Although the notes included are short, they do more than relate the rest of the plot.  The two short stories are both far shorter than those in Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, and each was a treat. “The Temptation” shows Hornblower’s humane side, one we don’t often get to see in a series dominated by war, and “The Last Encounter” is both amusing and almost serves as an afternote to the Hornblower series:  1848 is a year beset by revolution, where rail lines and naval steam engines have brought modernity, supplanting Hornblower’s old, familiar world.

Although I read this when I did for its setting (French Revolution and Napoleon), it more than made up for Hornblower and the Hotspur.  While the novel’s opening chapters and the short stories are enjoyable in their own rights, I suspect newcomers to the series would enjoy a more complete work. Still, for Hornblower readers this is certainly worthy.

This is not my last Hornblower read: I still have Admiral Hornblower and the West Indies to read, and there’s one Hornblower-related book I intend to read following that. It’s ah….going to be a bit different.

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Teaser Tuesday (20/7)

Posted on July 20, 2010 by smellincoffee

Tues·day   (tūz’dē, -dā’, tyūz’-)
n. (Abbr. Tues. or Tue. or Tu or T)
The third day of the week. Appropriate for submitting teasers, esp. for books.

[Middle English Tuesdai, from Old English Tīwesdæg, Tiu’s day : Tīwes, genitive of Tīw, Tiu; see Tiu + dæg, day (translation of Latin diēs Mārtis, Mars’ day).]

By tradition, the dark forest is dangerous for innocent pilgrims such as ourselves; we enter at risk. In the myths of Western civilization, the forest represents a place beyond the bounds of the known world, a place where pilgrims and hunters get lost, where you may encounter wild beasts, evil dwarfs, witches, gnomes, and snarling trolls. Magical transformations take place here, bears become princes, fairy courts hold torchlit processions by night, wayward children are captured by witches and become toads, damsels disappear for a hundred years until they are restored to life by the kiss of an adventurous knight.

p. 15, Walking Towards Walden. John Hanson Mitchell.

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Walking towards Walden

Posted on July 19, 2010 by smellincoffee

Walking towards Walden: A Pilgrimage in Search of Place
© 1995 John Hanson Mitchell
301 pages

Just before he set out on his journey to the netherworld, the great pilgrim Dante Alighieri had to pass through a lion-haunted forest where the straight way was lost. Here in twentieth-century America, there is a gloomy forest of hemlocks just below the summit of Prospect Hill in Westford, Massachusetts. As we descend this fertile slope, the great pilgrim Barkley Mason begins quoting from the Inferno. He touches his breast and, with a grand sweep, spreads his right arm toward the dark wood below us. “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai nella selva oscura –‘” he declaims.

Kata is used to Barkley’s posturing; she interrupts to ask me something about a mutual friend, and in this manner, we three enter the dark forest and enter our journey. (p.11)

While browsing the travel section of my library, I spied Walking Towards Walden, one man’s deeply textured account of his pilgrimage trip to Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau once lived and wrote.  Mitchell, accompanied by two close friends, determines to sojourn to Walden through the wilderness: shunning roads and trails, the talkative trio intend to see a glimpse of Massachusets’ 17th century wilderness. As this trio of intellectuals and romantics cut their way through brambles, wade across swamps, and wander the courses of streams looking for a crossing, Mitchell muses.

A Walk to Walden tells many stories. From the outset, A Walk is steeped in mythology, both classical and native American: Mitchell likens their quest to find Walden to Campell’s “hero’s journey”, imaginatively interpreting the perils along the way as the hero’s challenges a la Don Quixote. As they walk, Mitchell explores inner worlds, pondering the role of nature in mythology and poetry. The trio’s pilgrimage to Walden is also historical, for their path intersects with that marched by the Massachusetts militiamen on their way to face British regulars at Lexington and Concord. As the journey develops, Mitchell tells their story, the story of explorers like Ponce de Leon who traveled through the “New World” looking for the fountain of youth,  and the story of the men and women who were displaced and ruined when Europeans began to colonize the Concord area.  At the same time, he also remembers other trips he has taken with his friends — to the Florida Everglades and Hollywood, with touching and humorous anecdotes.

As the narrative matures, Mitchell compares their journey less to a pilgrimage and more to a quest to find a sense of place, a sense of belonging. He uses a Hopi word, tuwanasaapi, to describe a place where the soul of an individual is “centered”:  where they are truly home. James Howard Kunstler decried the lack of “place” in the United States, criticizing the boundless expanses of subdivided homes and commercial strips. Mitchell and his friends are likewise bothered by this lack of community and place in modern America:  traveling to Walden allows them to connect to Thoreau’s own decision to live deliberately, to find

From the very moment I started reading the book, I wanted to see Concord. Mitchell’s affection for the town and the sense of place and community he derives from it are obvious. The day’s journey there from Prospect Hill is lush, rich with detail and stories, abounding in tales of interesting people. Mitchell links all of his various trails of thought together, which would have been distracting were the stories themselves not so thoughtful and enjoyable.  Most curiously, the trio never seem to reach Walden Pond proper: the book ends with their eating a period meal at the Colonial Inn, the only hint that they might have gone to the pond and Thoreau’s cabin being “So we saunter to the Holy Land…”. (Mitchell periodically paid homage to Thoreau by referencing his “sauntering” walks around Concord.) Walking is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve yet read, and I heartily recommend it — especially to those partial to Thoreau.

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The Life of Elizabeth I

Posted on July 18, 2010 by smellincoffee

The Life of Elizabeth I
© 1998, 2003 Alison Weir
542 pages

“She certainly is a great queen […]. Just look how well she governs! She is only a woman, only mistress of half an island, and yet she makes herself feared by Spain, by France, by the Empire, by all! ” – Pope Sixtus V, p. 399

When I received a bookstore gift card from my place of work as an end-of-the-school-term gift, I put it to use and bought The Life of Elizabeth I.  Weir’s biography of Elizabeth was recommended by Elizabeth’s Facebook “fans”, and Weir’s biographical novel of Elizabeth has been one of the year’s most enjoyable reads. I’ve been meaning to read it, but have been otherwise occupied. Six hours spent accompanying someone to the emergency room and an afternoon without electricity in the wake of a severe thunderstorm gave me ample opportunity to visit Weir’s treatment.

Weir chooses to focus on Elizabeth in her role as queen in this novel, beginning with her coronation and ending with her death: Elizabeth’s early years were covered in The Children of Henry VIII. She places general emphasis on foreign affairs and life at court, which are tangentially related: more than a few members of her court are involved in urging her to marry one European prince or another, and in an age where nations’ destinies were decided by members of interrelated royal families, marriage and politics were conjoined. The Spanish and French empires are Elizabeth’s most powerful adversaries, and she spends much of her life delicately arranging the protection of one while avoiding the wrath of the other. This is not always possible: her reign reaches its greatest when Spain’s “Grand Armada”, intending on delivering an invasion fleet, is destroyed. Scandals among Elizabeth’s court constitute most of the text dedicated to domestic affairs, with religious strife occupying the rest. Elizabeth has inherited her father’s role as governor of the English church, now formally divided from the Catholic church, but not moving too much in the direction of the Protestants. Religion and politics are closely linked in this age:  her cousin Mary Stuart, a rival to the throne, relies on Catholic resentment  to continually scheme to overthrown the Queen,

Weir’s treatment is one grand chronologically-arranged narrative, divided into sections but ever moving forward. Thus we gain a picture of Elizabeth maturing from giddy youth to graceful age, supported by an ever-changing court.  Elizabeth’s marriage prospects dominate the opening of the book: as she ages and loses childbearing potential, her rivals and foes choose to attempt to bend England to their will through force: religious insurrections become a constant threat, particularly from Catholic quarters. Although Elizabeth is generally well-liked, both Puritans and Catholics give her cause to grief.  Weir occasionally breaks from the constant stream of stories to offer general assessments of Elizabeth as a person: these segments interested me most. I am particularly interested in Elizabeth as a free-spirited intellectual who loved dancing and who resorted to translating classical orders into English to maintain control of her temper.

The recommendation from Elizabeth’s fans was warranted. The narrative is easily digestible and Weir offers plenty of background for fully understanding some of the episodes in her life. I look forward to reading more from this author.

Related:

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DS9 #6: Betrayal

Posted on July 16, 2010 by smellincoffee

Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Betrayal
© 1994  Lois Tilton
280 pages

I recently acquired a box of thirty-odd Star Trek: Deep Space Nine paperbacks, and after excitedly pawing through them, Betrayal appeared of immediate interest for its cover, which depicted Marc Alaimo as Gul Macet. Alaimo later played Gul Dukat, one of Trek’s more developed villains.  Number six of the numbered DS9 novels, Betrayal, places the entire station in jeopardy. While ambassadors from various Federation worlds gather on DS9 for a conference that may open up economic opportunities for both Bajor and worlds throughout the Alpha Quadrant, the station becomes the target of multiple terrorists attacks that imperil the post and its crew as well as scuttling Bajor’s hopes for a bright future in the Federation family. Meanwhile, a belligerent and comically-villainous Cardassian gul who demands that Sisko formally cede the station and the newly-discovered Wormhole to the Cardassian Union causes a stir when his troops begin shaking down the merchants of the promenade while looking for a deserter.

As the book takes place early in the DS9 canon, it contains a few anachronistic quirks in violating canon-yet-to-be-written. Quark and Garak are interpreted differently from the show’s eventual treatment of them, for instance. Kira, Sisko, and the aforementioned Cardassian deserter are the primary voices in this tale, which proved interesting. While the primary plot tended toward the predictable, it did lead into DS9’s second season and overall characterization pursues paths somewhat ignored by the television show until much later. I enjoyed the book most for the deserter’s story. I like Cardassians, and his depiction was a welcome relief from the usual “Cardassians = Nazis in Space” treatment.

Nice light reading for a DS9 fan at any rate.

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Travels with Charley

Posted on July 16, 2010 by smellincoffee

Travels with Charley in Search of America
© 1962 John Steinbeck
246 pages

Author John Steinbeck is perhaps most famous for The Grapes of Wrath, the story of the displaced Joad family who travel to California from their home in  Oklahoma in search of work, experiencing the land and its people as they do. In the early sixties, Steinbeck felt that he ought to make a journey of his own — to truly experience the North American continent and the people of the United States. Since becoming an established author, his travels amounted to air trips between metropolises. Seeking a more familiar perspective, he set out in his camper-truck Rocinante, accompanied by his French bleu poodle Charley, and set forth. Starting in New York, he travels first to Maine, then across the midwest to the Pacific northwest, then down through California, across Texas, and curves upward through the south until he’s in New York once more.

Steinbeck writes here with an intentional conversational tone. He often addresses the reader directly, as he does in the beginning when he informs the reader that we should imagine him talking to us while he drives or cooks at night. His reflections about his experiences sometimes take the form of a conversation with his dog, Charley — and sometimes, Charley talks back.  Steinbeck is gifted at describing the scenery he not only sees, but in the case of wonders like the Redwoods, experiences.  Although he appears to enjoy his conversations with the people he visits,  visiting the South — in the throes of the Civil Rights movement, where a band of middle-aged women delight in yelling racial slurs at young black children who have won admittance into a whites-only public school —  sours his mood as he returns home.

A recurring theme in Steinbeck’s observations is the increasing homogeneity and staleness of American culture. National television and radio outlets have created a standard American language, and he despairs the loss of regional dialects. He has little love for the increasing role of plastic in everyday lives, and what it represents: mass-produced artificiality.

Although the trip ends on a poor note and Steinbeck does not like all of what he sees, he tempers his grumbling with the knowledge that is the nature of people to resist change in their old age. Perhaps America has lost some of its wild vivaciousness, but he doesn’t take his complaints as withering criticisms. Travels abounds with humor,  benefiting from Steinbeck’s dry wit and some of the conversations he has themselves.  I read this first in 2005, and it has lingered with me since:  this was the first work I ever read that grappled with changing culture in a real way. For its story, Steinbeck’s musings, and his humor, I would recommend Travels with Charley.

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Teaser Tuesday (13-7)

Posted on July 13, 2010 by smellincoffee
Patriots and citizens, we are ready for Teaser Tuesday — to the barricades!

In their own persons, Lafayette and Talleyrand embodied the split personality of the French Revolution. For while it is commonplace to recognize that the Revolution gave birth to a new kind of political world, it is less often understood that that world was the product of two irreconcilable interests — the creation of a potent state and the creation of a community of free citizens. The fiction of the Revolution was to imagine that one might be served without damaging the other and its history amounts to the realization of that impossibility. 

Citizens: a Chronicle of the French Revolution. p. 15, author Simon Schama.

Discarded Teaser:
“The rat problem became so serious that local residents found their own houses colonized by the raiding parties sent out from the elephant.” – p. 4

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Stargazer: Three

Posted on July 12, 2010 by smellincoffee

Stargazer: Three
© 2003 Michael Jan Friedman
247 pages

In addition to beginning the TNG relaunch this year, I also intend to pick up on loose threads in Trek literature that I have either left undone or never examined in the first place.  Encountering Picard’s former shipmates from the Stargazer in Death in Winter left me thinking about the Stargazer series by Michael Jan Friedman, telling the stories of Picard’s first command as a young 20-something. The first two novels in this series rank among my favorite works of Trek literature, but I’ve read the series through to completion despite having most of the books. I decided to remdy that, although I did not intend to do so today. I picked up the book at lunch, and…didn’t put it down for the duration of the afternoon.

Stargazer: Three is third in the series, if the deceptively dull name is not too big a hint. The title initially disappointed me, but as I progressed deeper into the plot I realized Friedman had more in mind when titling the book than it simply following the second novel, Progenitor. As the story opens, Jean-Luc Picard is young man still in his twenties, commanding the Constellation-class ship Stargazer. Picard is the youngest man in Starfleet history to captain a vessel, an achievement that followed his taking command of the vessel during a crisis that saw the ship’s former captain and first officer killed.  Not everyone appreciates Picard’s accomplishment, chiefly his commanding officer: Admiral McAteer. McAteer wants to strip the young whippersnapper of his command, but cannot do so without proving him incompetent. In an effort to ruin Picard’s name, McAteer routinely gives Picard missions beyond his experience, hoping to see the young man fail. Unfortunately for McAteer, the crew of the Stargazer prove worthy of the challenge time after time.

In Three, the Stargazer is sent to investigate a curious anamoloy on the Federation border with an aggressive, hostile race while its chief weapons officer, Lieutenant Vigo, is attending a security conference unveiling a new disrupter. When the Stargazer draws near the anamoly, a familar but alien face arrives in its transporter — a woman who appears identical to two of Picard’s officers, the Lieutenants Gerda and Idun Asmund. The stranger claims to be a Lieutenant Asmund from a Stargazer in another universe. She has arrived on Picard’s Stargazer unexpectedly via a transporter curiosity. Picard must investigate the woman’s claims, and find a way to send her back to her proper time while not provoking a nearby alien flotilla which has claimed the anamoly as its own.  Meanwhile, rebels intending to start a revolution on their home planet ambush the Federation conference and attempt to steal the new weapon: aiding them is Lieutenant Vigo’s old friend and mentor.

Three develops the backstory for the Asmund lieutenants, who serve as navigator and helm officer respectively. Although biologically human, the two were orphaned as children and rescued by a Klingon captain who took pity on them. He and his wife later adopted the two, and raised them as Klingons — a story mirrored by one of Picard’s officers in the future, Commander Worf — who is Klingon, but raised on Earth by humans.  The Asmund sisters see themselves as a pair, and Gerda is thrown off her stride by the appearance of this third Asmund, who claims her twin sister died in childbirth. While Idun immediately embraces the third Asmund, Gerda is suspicious and jealous: she does not believe the stranger to be who she says she is.

While providing both action and mystery, Friedman also continues developing his main characters. The crew of the Stargazer had immediate appeal for me when I read the first novel so many years ago, and I appreciate his continuing to spend time on them apart from the main plot. The plot itself isn’t quite as interesting as the first novel, but then again it set a high standard for me. There are a few hat-tips made to the Next Generation show, as when Picard — moving around his cramped ready room — muses that one day he will have a room big enough for him to display personal items, keep fish, and maybe have a couch for visitors. Trek-lit readers will enjoy this, although newcomers should probably start with the first novel before leaping into this plot.

Related:

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The Andromeda Strain

Posted on July 11, 2010 by smellincoffee

The Andromeda Strain
© 1969 Michael Crichton
295 pages

Hours after an American space probe crash-landed in the Nevada desert, the entire populace of a small town nearby deserted their homes to die in the streets, where they were noticed by a US air pilot performing a flyover of the scene. There’s something rotten in Piedmont.

The US Army is not entirely surprised to find the city a necropolis. They did, after all, design the probe to gather potential microorganisms in Earth orbit for use in biological warfare. In a way, the outbreak is a success: they’ve got a genuine killer on their hands. Too bad it’s out of their control for the moment — but that won’t be the case for long, Moving swiftly, they isolate the area and quarantine suspected contagions. Agents dressed in hazard suits survey the wasted town, and find two survivors: a crying baby and old man spitting up blood. While most of the victims appeared to have died instantly, others appear to have killed themselves in fits of insanity. The scientists and government officials associated with the “Wildfire” project must discern what agent caused these deaths, from where it originated, and how it might be stopped.

Although I expected a The Stand-type horror novel, Crichton’s work is altogether different. It reads as a technical documentary, Crichton employing a framing device that cites official reports and includes graphs. The exposition is extremely detailed, describing the whole of the Wildfire installation — a hidden, underground base used for isolating and containing bio-warfare specimens — elaborating on possible sources for the virus, its structure,  and detailing the ways the scientists’ and government officials’ thinking and plans went wrong.  The narrative voice assures us from the start that things will go to hell, although the reader is left to anticipate to what degree the outbreak will ravage the United States and the world. I can’t say I expected the ending: I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it did — somewhat.

Although the book succeeded in keeping me wondering how the plot would be resolved, what fascinated me most was the origin story for the organism brought down to Earth. The Andromeda Strain  is probably worth your while, especially if you enjoy medical and scientific thrillers.

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A Walk Across America

Posted on July 8, 2010 by smellincoffee

A Walk Across America
© 1979 Peter Jenkins
288 pages

We walked straight west. I had everything I needed in the world resting comfortably on my shoulders, and the entire country waiting to be discovered.  (p.55)

In the late spring of 1973, Peter Jenkins decided to go for a walk. The increasingly jaded college graduate, still recovering from a divorce, was willing to quit America all together. War and government corruption rendered him a cynic about the country’s worth and promise, and a growing sense of wanderlust urged him to drop off the grid altogether. Urged by family members to see first-hand the country he was willing to leave on foot, Jenkins and his Alaskan Malamute Cooper set off on a journey to meet the land and people. The whole of the journey is not contained within this book, for he stops in New Orleans to chronicle the first great part of the story. Beginning in Connecticut, Jenkins hikes to D.C, then through the Carolinas and Virginia, across part of Tennessee, down through Alabama, and then west across the Gulf Coast until he stops to rest in New Orleans.

The road between Connecticut and Louisiana connects Jenkins’ story with the lives of others — an old mountain man with a reputation for shooting intruders,  grizzled lumberyard workers, ranchers, hippies, evangelists,  the Alabamian governor, paranoid drunks, and murderous lawmen. He meets friends and foes as he hikes through the mountains and down to the Gulf Coast, braving the Appalachian winter and the Deep South’s humid, scorching summers. Although few photographs depict the surroundings, their beauty is made clear through Jenkins’ descriptions, and the stories he tells about the characters he meets are almost too hard to believe — particularly one in which he was literally run out of town by a lynch mob, keen on doing him in for looking like a hippie. Jenkin’s stories are set in a different time: when he walks through Selma, Alabama, for instance, the massacre at the town’s bridge during the Civil Rights movement is only a few years in the past. Segregationist George Wallace still reigns supreme in Montgomery, and in Tennessee, Stephen Gaskin’s “Farm” is growing in size.  Jenkins spends the better part of a year navigating from Connecticut to Orleans, occasionally stopping to work in order to save up money for another leg of the journey. He spends a few weeks at The Farm, noting that its emphasis on simplicity seems contrived next to the simplicity of life he’s found on the road: he moves on when the cultish atmosphere spooks him.

Jenkins is an enjoyable writer, communicating the humor, terror, despondency, and hope that his walk stirs in him. I identified with him immediately, being a restless college graduate who also wants to retreat from modern society. His tone made it clear that between starting the journey and writing the novel, he’s converted to something: he introduces his Connecticut self in the same way Bill O’Reilly might introduce a guest he despises.  That tone makes him hard to take seriously, but once he hits the road his experiences take first priority. Although many of the stories are hilarious in themselves, he often sets up jokes. In the final section, for instance, he writes that he looked forward to staying at the seminary in New Orleans for a while: there would be no girls, there, no distractions. Naturally he meets his second wife. Sections are headed off by illustrations that overlay scenes from his travels across a map of his route: I particularly enjoyed these illustrations.

A sectional illustration, depicting a revival scene in Mobile (where Jenkins was “saved”, one of Mobile’s great trees (which he fawned over), a farmhouse he stayed at for a week or so, and the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a Civil Rights monument. 

A Walk Across America will remain one of the more interesting books I’ve read, I think. Although I enjoyed reading a book about life on the road — something I’ve been looking for for a while now — Jenkins’ story resonated with me not only because of our similar stations in life when he started this walk, but for the places he walked through. While Americans — and particularly those who live along the eastern and southeastern coasts of America — will enjoy this most, I would recommend it to  general audiences for the stories alone. Jenkins has written other books, which I will be reading.

Related:

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