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| Mass market paperback, 306 pages Published 1977 (originally 1951) Acquired 2006(?) Previously read May 2007 Reread March 2019 |
1800-03
Though I've read this before, my original read of it predates the point in my life where I started putting reviews on my blog, so I don't have a specific sense of what I actually thought. My suspicion is, though, that the book reads better in publication order than in chronological. In term of chronology, it's odd that the first Hornblower novel is not a novel, and then the second is not told from the perspective of Hornblower; the first proper Hornblower novel is actually the third! But reading in publication order, this is the seventh Hornblower book, and so telling the story from the point of view of Lieutenant Bush provides a nice change of pace and prevents the series (just as the jump backward did) from being stagnant.
Bush is great, a straightforward, unpretentious officer, not a witty thinker, but a great seaman and a great judge of character. It does create some continuity errors to have him serving with Hornblower so early in both men's careers (Bush was clearly not used to Hornblower when posted as his first lieutenant some five years after this in Beat to Quarters), but I liked Bush, and it's neat to see what Hornblower looks like from outside his own head. Hornblower in Mr. Midshipman was a pretty ordinary guy if somewhat tightly wound, but here we see the beginning of the kind-of-neurotic Captain Hornblower of the earlier novels. It's a good plot for an outside perspective, too, since there's a significant mutiny component, and Forester uses the shift in perspective to create some ambiguity about Hornblower's actions.
This is one of my favorite Hornblower novels. You might view the long bit at the end regarding Hornblower's card-playing as extraneous, but if you do, you've misjudged the plot. The plot isn't the adventures of HMS Renown; the plot is these two men becoming life-long friends in an entirely understated way. It's gloriously reserved but utterly true, one of the best friendships in literature. Even if before this book it didn't exist in books set later!
(Side note: David Warner is such good casting as Captain Sawyer in the tv adaptation that ten-plus years after I last saw that episode, I could still imagine him saying all of Sawyer's lines as I read the book! The literary Hornblower is not quite Ioan Gruffudd, and the literary Bush not quite Paul McGann, so I never imagine those actors reading the lines, but David Warner is the character as written.)
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