Boys at sea

From my beachcombing days, I've written extensively about buoys on shore. This is something completely different. When the family came home for Christmas, it was decided [plebiscite] that we'd sit in a row on the sofa and watch Master & Commander again. Part of this was to induct a 3rd generation into what-the-family-knows . . . about bowsprits and halyards. Most of us know Withnail & I by heart of course he's the fucking farmer etc. not to mention Kenneth Branagh doing Crispin Crispian. If you haven't watched, M&C is the 2 hour distillation of a multi-year friendship between the Jack Aubrey, Captain of a Napoleonic era British man-o'-war, and his supernumerary surgeon-naturalist Stephen Maturin. Distillation because Patrick O'Brien developed the relationship over 20 volumes and 7,000 pages of text.

Their friendship is based on complementary virtues, epitomized by Aubrey playing the fiddle to Maturin's the cello. They tick a few boxes on the multiple intelligence score sheet: Maturin more cerebral; Aubrey better with people. But the bottom line is that the Captain always makes the final call "subject to the exigencies of the service" etc. etc. There is a fundamental imbalance in power between the two parties. That's partly because, as my Ship's Captain father always maintained, with great power aboard goes great responsibility; especially in adverse conditions. 

Last week, on a whim, I started re-reading, after a gap of 50 years, The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat. It's another love story: between Captain Ericson and Lieutenant "Number One" Lockhart [more or less Monsarrat] set in another brutal [mid 20thC] war at sea. Because they are British their respect and mutual admiration is super-undemonstrative. Here again, the buck stops with the Captain and that drives a power inequity into the relationship. The film, starring Jack Hawkins and Donald Sinden, like M&C compresses and elides a long book into 2 hours. Which makes it altogether too exciting. The book by being so long better captures the idea that War is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of terror.  

The Cruel Sea, the book, is about 25% too long. After their first ship is sunk, halfway through the war, the structure of the book changes from a begin-middle-end narrative into a hotch-potch of vignettes and scraps which takes the book up to May 1945 and VE day.