I thought that I would kick this blog off not with what I was intending, which were hard-nosed critiques of sailing and cruising manuals, guides and related "hard" non-fiction, but with a Good Read.
While it is undeniably true that circumstances (see www.alchemy2009.blogspot.com) demand that I spend much of my reading time devouring technical manuals, marine catalogues and weighty tomes on the finer points of galvanic corrosion, I do try to unwind with a nice story now and then. I expect that my fiction to non-fiction reading ratio will return to the 50/50 point I had until my thirties (as opposed to 95:5 in favour of non-fiction now) when we go cruising, as my impression is that most cruisers, who tend to be avid readers, veer toward the lurid paperback over the Booker Prize winners, because if the former feeds the fish in error, it's no great loss.
Now, sailing stories were, apart from Conrad, not on my fictional menu prior to starting with the real thing in the late '90s. In fact, it was some time before I mastered the rather esoteric and often rude-sounding language of the parts of the boat, along with the fifty or so "nautical verbs" one needs to precisely indicate one's desires to crew on a moving boat in heavy air. I am remarkably common in this regard in having part of my education painlessly supplemented by the 20 "Aubrey-Maturin" novels of the late Patrick O'Brian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_O%27Brian), who, along with the even later C.S. Forester's "Hornblower" series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Forester), is put in the top rank of novelists mining the rich and seemingly unexhaustible vein of Napoleonic war plots.
I suspect the vein is so rich because the Napoleonic period extended some 20 years, involved dozens of countries great and small, played out more or less around the world, and at one point involved the young if feisty United States versus Great Britain, a country approaching its apogee of imperial power and political and military influence, despite being severely overextended in the process.
The strong arm of Britain's influence was its large and well-trained navy, which overcame defects both structural (the rigid hierarchy that allowed seniority and not merit to secure promotion) and scientific (appalling food and ignorance of scurvy prevention) to secure victories on an almost regular basis. Controlling the seas meant controlling the trade on it, and that's a dramatic way to establish dominance.
Add to the historical facts of the Napoleonic Wars the ample supply of primary materials from the circa 1800 bureaucratic archives, and the historian-novelist can pad out a cracking good yarn with shovelfuls of jargon and background facts that put the reader squarely, or square-sailedly, in the past. The mark of the well-written historical novel, particularly of this well-documented period, would seem to rest on casual reference to obscure knots, the composition of forgotten soups, the proper way to service a musket, or in-depth descriptions of horrendous medical procedures and treatments we now know to be poisonous. The effect leaves the reader feeling that the characters were very brave, but hopelessly ignorant, which, given for instance the difficulty of co-ordination even the most simple actions on a ship of the line, is somewhat ironic. Knowing how to text rapidly would avail one not during a "hot action" between frigates, and a rapid ability to amputate would be a blessing in a world without anesthetics or antibiotics.
Seaflower, the third entry in a series centered on the adventures of Thomas Kydd, a "landsman" impressed, which is to say legally kidnapped and forced to serve in the British Navy, is by Julian Stockwin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Stockwin), a writer with the appropriate naval background and salty-looking beard. Stockwin has cranked out ten in the Kydd series, with an eleventh on the way, and seems to have started once Patrick O'Brian was safely dead. While that might seem harsh, to say that there are similarities between the two series of novels would be understating the case. While O'Brian's Jack Aubrey was a clever, if somewhat impulsive and uncouth, member of the English landed gentry, Thomas Kydd is of the lower classes, who nonetheless finds both opportunity and abilities beyond expectations in the Royal Navy. The most glaring, to me, attempt to ride the coattails of O'Brian is in the character of Nicholas Renzi, a mysteriously cultured swab with secrets aplenty who, in my eyes, resembled a lower-decks version of the ship's doctor/part-time spy Stephen Maturin, the most interesting character in the O'Brian series thanks to his intelligence and insight to the brave new world of scientific inquiry.
Another cavil is the extensive use of what one might term dialectical orthography...the attempt to reproduce various accents and idioms in print. While the occasional "ye blatherin' swab" or "top o' the mainmast, cap'n" lends a certain Pirates of the Caribbean savour to the text, I found wearing the endless stream of apostrophes indicating various dropped consonants. Reading Kydd's "y'arrr" utterances, I started looking for the accessorizing parrot on the shoulder shouting about pieces of eight. Forester, O'Brian, Kent and Cornwell use this sort of thing sparingly, and the story reads better for it, I think.
As for the story, it's certainly eventful: Kydd is shipped out for political reasons to a "sugar island" in the Caribbean for service on the cutter Seaflower, a small, cramped and minor warship that nonetheless finds the requisite "action". Mixed in with this are interesting descriptions of how the Navy was kept in repair and supplied at a typical depot of the time, a bit of sex, lots of war and intrigue, including episodes showing how the British Army and Navy managed to co-ordinate their actions, and a good description of the sort of actions one must take to avoid death in a hurricane.
Stockwin's no literary stylist: This is a straightforward, large-print page-turner propelled by the regular appearance of something going boom or squish every few pages. It's derivative of its predecessors, and its betters, but not painfully so. The meat of the tale is well-salted with historical oddities and asides, and it's clear homework has been done. Would I read the other Thomas Kydd tales? I would respond with a qualified "probably". The Aubrey-Maturin stories spoiled me, because O'Brian used the Napoleonic Wars to explore questions of comradeship, loyalty, politics and betrayal as much as he banged on about Stockholm tar, the heft of a boarding axe, and the proper way to lash down a spanker (I told you sailing was rude). Stockwin's not in this class, and he's not as good with the somewhat dull Kydd as Alexander Kent is with his Richard Bolitho character or Bernard Cornwell is with the complex and equally "from the ranks" Richard Sharpe.
But with a rum-based beverage at hand, gently swaying in a tropical breeze in a hammock slung over the foredeck of a well-found cruiser? Sure, I would happily consume another Kydd adventure like a Harlequin romance in a haze of twelve-pounder smoke and the crunch of ship's biscuit in my ears.
