The Ship by C.S. Forester
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Cockney Interest in Disaster and Death

Published in the middle of WWII, The Ship is simultaneously an adventure, a philosophy of naval warfare and a statement of a new world order packaged in a short novel. So, while entirely obsolete as topical fiction, it is nevertheless a significant literary document.

There are only a few ways by which to fictionalise military experience. One, used by Forester so successfully in his Hornblower books, is to follow the career of an individual through personal conflict and trials of battle. Another, far more risky and the technique used in The Ship, is to narrate the interactions among men while they work out these interactions during a single engagement. Risky because if the author isn't skilful enough, the result is a sort of stilted psycho-drama without inherent narrative drive or interest.

Forester, of course, is more than skilled enough to pull it off. And he uses this interactive technique to make some essential points about the unique character of naval warfare, at least as far as such warfare used to be carried out. Primary is the fact that while in ground or air combat individual error is regrettable and damaging, at sea the same magnitude of error is most often disastrous. Any failure in the long chain of events carried out in a ship's organisation - from the cooks on the mess deck, to the oiler exiled to the remote shaft alley - means catastrophic failure of the whole not just a portion of the crew.

The mundane details of shipboard life give texture to Forester's depiction of battle. His constant theme is the extreme vulnerability of the ship, and not only from internal error. "The ship was an eggshell," he says, "armed with sledgehammers, and her mission in life was to give without receiving." To be part of the ship is to share its necessary fragility, and to silently accept it. This is the peculiar courage of sailors that is captured in the Nelsonian battle grace for officers as they stood ramrod still awaiting a broadside: “For what we are about to receive let us be truly thankful.”

Sea power today means something different than it did in 1943. Forester knew that the old Royal Navy was disappearing along with the ancien regime of British society. But for that moment "Ships –ships and the men in them –were still deciding the fate of the world."

View all my reviews