Review: Hornblower: Beat to Quarters by C. S. Forester

Trade paperback, 324 pages
Published 1966 (originally 1937)
Acquired May 2007 
Previously read March 2008 
Reread January 2019

Beat to Quarters by C. S. Forester

1808
I originally read the Horatio Hornblower novels about a decade ago now, but since I didn't own the last three novels at the time, I didn't finish the series. Now I've sat down to read those last three, but I decided I ought to reread the first several. Only, last time I read them in internal chronological order, so to switch it up, this time I decided to do publication order.

Thus we start here, with what is certainly the best of the Hornblower novels, and is probably a better entry point than the first book chronologically if you're a Hornblower novice. (If you've already seen the tv show, though, go ahead and start with Mr. Midshipman Hornblower.) Beat to Quarters is an astounding achievement in naval fiction. Most of the novels are good, but this one is something else. It's taut, focused, and tense. You completely inhabit the world and the way of thinking of the Royal Navy. You don't know what a lot of the words mean, but you love it anyway, because they feel true. It's a harsh world, but it's another world, and it's hard to judge by our own standards. I suspect there are a lot of sf fans who are also Hornblower fans, because they scratch very similar itches: the depiction of an alternate world related to our own, but also a focus on intellect and cleverness. Hornblower is a problem-solver like one of those Golden Age sf heroes.

The book is very well constructed. Hornblower is sent to make overtures of alliance to El Supremo, a Spanish rebel on the Pacific coast of South America, because Spain is ally to Bonaparte. He captures with ease a Spanish ship of the line and turns it over to El Supremo-- and then when he goes to report in to the local British authorities, learns that before he had even done this, Spain had broken off its alliance with France, and is now allied with Britain. And so he has to go back to sea to capture the ship back from El Supremo. It's a beautifully done reversal; when Hornblower captures the Natividad so easily you almost think the author has rigged things in his favor, but recapturing it is a much more difficult prospect. The reversal is simultaneously sort of tragic and hilarious. The final battle with Natividad is amazing, gripping; it goes on for chapters but never gets old. You feel every gust of wind, every broadside, as the crew of the Lydia must fight to reclaim the Natividad with all they've got. A lot of the Hornblower novels are good, and they're all worth your time, but Forester perfected the character here, to be honest.

In my original review, I wrote:

The sixth Hornblower book chronologically, this was actually the first written, which results in some rather bizarre discontinuities as you might expect. Oh, bits of Hornblower's history don't match up-- he's probably never served with Bush before, and Bush certainly wasn't first mate on his first command as depicted in Hornblower and the Hotspur-- but Hornblower's character is a little off as well. This man's need for emotional detachment comes across as almost insane at times, though the death of Hornblower's children at the end of the previous installment sort of explains that. If you squint a bit. [...] Surprisingly, the romance with Lady Barbara was even almost palatable here, thanks to our ability to get Hornblower's inner thoughts regarding it. (I think it would be better in writing order, where we wouldn't have had the opportunity to meet Maria first.)

Indeed, if you read it in publication sequence, it's clear that Bush hasn't served with Hornblower before. Part of the trajectory of the novel is Bush coming to like and respect this odd captain. (And, somewhere by the end of the second book, you realize Hornblower has come to like and respect Bush in his own way.) You don't find Hornblower's character to be off-- because this is Hornblower's character. Everything else was a later imposition. Hornblower might be almost insane, but Beat to Quarters makes it clear that such detachment is required to be successful on a mission like this, the sole outpost of British authority on the far side of the world. I was right about the romance with Lady Barbara; with Maria but an intellectual abstraction, I could enjoy the Hornblower/Barbara romance, though Hornblower's infidelity is the one thing I never quite came to terms with. (I'll discuss that more in my reviews of the later books.)

One thing I noticed I hadn't the first time around is the narrator. It's a close third-person perspective, but not a limited one, as the narrator occasionally tells us things that other characters are thinking, or that Hornblower doesn't realize about his own self. The narrator is clearly from the time of publication, as he occasionally breaks in with acknowledged anachronisms (like, he says the word "globetrotter" didn't exist yet, but if it did, it would be how Hornblower would think of Lady Barbara), something that stuck out to me because as far as I noticed, Forester never used such a device in the rest of the series.