Eustace closed his eyes.  After all, this girl had fought lions, tigers, pumas, cannibals, and alligators in her time with a good deal of success.  There might be a sporting chance of victory for her when she moved a step up in the animal kingdom and tackled his mother. 

It's time to cross the Atlantic with a bunch of wealthy goofballs and the women they love!  Yes, it's more P. G. Wodehouse, just what my readers were clamoring for!  Today's subject: The Girl on the Boat, published in book form in 1922 after being serialized in the Woman's Home Companion in late 1921 under the title Three Men and a Maid, which was also the title of American book edition.  I read a scan of a 1978 edition available at the internet archive.

The girl of the title is American Wilhelmina Bennett, a young redhead who loves golf and Tennyson.  Billie, as her friends call her, is in high demand.  In fact, in the space of a few weeks she is engaged to three different young men, Eustace Hignett, Sam Marlowe, and Bream Mortimer.

Englishman Eustace Hignett and Billie bonded over a mutual love of Tennyson; Billie was also impressed by Eustace's singing voice.  But there is a problem, in the form of Eustace's domineering mother, a writer on Theosophy who is in America on a lecture tour.  You see, Mrs. Hignett loves the Hignett country estate, Windles, but she doesn't own it outright--she holds it in trust for Eustace, and it will pass to him as soon as he gets married.  Not wanting to lose the estate, Mrs. Hignett has worked hard to keep Eustace from meeting any young ladies.

The novel begins in New York City, on the day Eustace and Billie are to be secretly married.  Mrs. Hignett learns her son has been meeting Billie behind her back and even gotten engaged to her and sabotages the wedding by hiding all of Eustace's pants; Eustace can't go out without pants, and so poor Billie is left at the altar.  Billie, who wants a husband who is brave and resourceful like Sir Galahad or Sir Lancelot (Tennyson's Idylls of the King is a formative text when it comes to her idea of the ideal man), decides she couldn't ever marry a man who lets his mother dominate him (and couldn't figure out a way to buy, borrow or steal pants on short notice) and dumps Eustace.

A month or so later Eustace, leaving his mother behind, sails back home to England on the liner Atlantic, sharing a cabin with his cousin, Sam Marlowe, son of Mrs. Hignett's brother, Sir Mallaby Marlowe, the successful lawyer.  While Eustace is bookish and weak (he spends almost the entire voyage in bed, green with sea sickness), Sam is a hearty sportsman.  Unknown to Eustace, Billie is also aboard, travelling with her childhood friend, Bream Mortimer.  Bream is in love with Billie, but she is not interested, and treats him like a servant.  

Sam falls in love with Billie immediately upon meeting her, and borrows Eustace's copy of The Idylls of the King and courts her.  She falls for the athletic hunk, but disaster strikes after she convinces him to put on a performance at the Atlantic's amateur talent show--Sam's performance is so terrible, makes him look so ridiculous, that Billie's vision of him as a 20th-century Sir Galahad is dashed, and she declares she would be too embarrassed to be married to him, and dumps him; soon after she accepts Bream's proposal of marriage.  

Eustace has better luck on the ship.  Billie's friend Jane Hubbard, a big game hunter who seems to have spent most of her life in Africa shooting animals, browbeating native bearers and attending "witch dances," is looking for a weak man she can mother, and Eustace is just the man for her.  

Billie's father and Bream's father are good friends, and share a desire to rent Windles, the Hignett estate; Mrs. Hignett has been rejecting their generous offers for ages.  But when Eustace finds himself alone in England, bucked up by the attentions of Jane, he goes against all his mother's wishes and lets the estate to the Bennetts and Mortimers, who bring along Jane, just as Eustace had hoped they would.  At Windles this crew engagee in various hijinks (e.g., Mr. Bennett is a hypochondriac and the most minor of maladies--a piece of lobster shell embedded in his tongue--leads him to think he is dying until Jane, an expert in rough and ready field medicine after her years in Africa, cures him as readily as she cured Eustace of sea sickness.)

Meanwhile, Sam is trying to forget about Billie by studying the law under the tutelage of his father Sir Mallaby.  But events quickly lead to Billie and Sam coming into close proximity again, and Sam launches a series of crazy schemes, working in concert with or at the expense of additional wacky characters whom Wodehouse introduces, to win Billie back.  Sam's efforts, and Eustace's romance with Jane, are complicated when Mrs. Hignett unexpectedly returns to England, having cancelled her tour of America because of a suspicion Eustace might get mixed up with a woman if left on his own.   Luckily for Sam, when Jane, thinking Bream is a burglar, shoots at him with an elephant gun, Bream is so scared Billie loses all respect for him, and her love for Sam is revived.    

The Girl in the Boat has many elements and themes in common with The Luck of the Bodkins, which I read recently.  In that 1930s novel there is a redhead on the Atlantic with a pet alligator that bites people--here we have a redhead on that very vessel with a dog who bites people.  Alfred Lord Tennyson plays a role in both novels.  In The Luck of the Bodkins the male lead gives a Mickey Mouse doll to the redhead, and she returns it to dramatize the ending of their engagement--in The Girl on the Boat Sam (who is the male lead even though I personally find Eustace and Jane more compelling than Sam and Billie) gives Billie a golliwog (link NSFW) and Billie returns it.  And so on.

Whatever the similarities, The Girl on the Boat is, in my opinion, superior to The Luck of the Bodkins.  The paragraphs and chapters seem longer and denser, but this verbosity does not significantly slow down the book--the extra detail is not superfluous gingerbread, but more material for jokes, and I actually laughed more reading The Girl on the Boat than I did The Luck of the Bodkins.  

One reason we read these old books is to learn about the past first hand, from primary sources, and The Girl on the Boat offers some information about the world of one hundred years ago that was new to me as well as elements that demonstrate the differences one hundred years can make.  Perhaps most memorable is Sam's disastrous performance on the Atlantic.  Unable to sing like his pal Eustace, Sam, also unable to escape putting on some kind of performance thanks to Billie, decides to do an imitation of famous comedian Frank Tinney, of whom I had never heard.  Tinney, whose career took a nosedive in 1924 after he was credibly accused of beating up his mistress, Ziegfeld dancer Imogene Wilson (AKA Mary Nolan), was a blackface comedian, and so Sam puts on blackface.  Sam's performance is a fiasco because Bream refuses to play piano for him, and so Eustace is enlisted, and when Sam appears on stage with a cigar as part of his imitation, the smell of it makes the sensitive Eustace sick and drives him to flee the stage, leaving Sam flatfooted--without a straight man to work against, Sam is at a loss and flees himself.  Billie later indicates that because he said nothing she thought Sam was imitating Bert Williams, a pioneering African-American comedian and actor and another person I'd never heard of. 

The novel thus provides grist for the mill of people interested in the depiction of race in popular culture.  But Wodehouse in The Girl on the Boat doesn't neglect all the gender studies types who might read his book a century after he penned it!  A recurring theme of the novel, exemplified by an extended gender-bending allusion to Othello, is how Jane is like a man and Eustace is like a woman.  

Very good; MPorcius Fiction Log, the blog that regularly tries to convince you to read weirdos like A. E. van Vogt and Barry N. Malzberg, gives its enthusiastic endorsement to P. G. Wodehouse's bit of mainstream popular entertainment, The Girl on the Boat.

"Married men don't assert themselves, not if they know what's good for them."

I decided to read the sequel to P. G. Wodehouse's The Luck of the Bodkins while that 1935 novel was still fresh in my mind, and hunted it up on the internet archive.  The best available scan of the book was not of the 1972 British edition, entitled Pearls, Girls, and Monty Bodkin, but the 1973 U. S. printing, which bears the title The Plot That Thickened.  

Monty has worked for Ivor Llewellyn's Hollywood studio for a year as the novel opens.  Thinking this year of labor will satisfy his fiancé Gertrude Butterwick's father (J. G. Butterwick doesn't want his daughter marrying some loafer, even a loafer like Monty who is rich through inheritance) he quits his job and returns home to England.  Alas and alack, Gertrude honors her father to a fault, and told dear old Dad how Monty got his job with Llewellyn: by holding hostage a piece of jewelry Llewellyn was smuggling into America at the behest of his domineering wife Grayce.  J. G. rules that this underhanded method of gaining employment invalidates Monty's year of work as evidence he is not a loafer; if Monty wants to get Butterwick's essential approval for his marriage to Gertrude, he will have to take on another job, and it is not like this goofball has many marketable skills.

In Hollywood, Monty had a beautiful blonde secretary, Sandy Miller.  Sandy fell in love with the good-looking Monty, and was shaken when he suddenly left the Left Coast for his old stomping grounds in London.  But Sandy is resourceful; she gets a job as Grayce Llewelyn's assistant right before the Llewellyns leave for a trip to England; she accompanies the power couple and, once in London, quickly tracks down the love of her life.  Sandy immediately does Monty a good turn: Grayce is badgering her husband into writing a history of his film studio, Superba-Llewellyn, and Sandy fixes it up so Grayce orders Ivor to hire Monty as his secretary for this project, which Ivor has no interest in doing and to which Monty has no ability to contribute (in The Luck of the Bodkins he proved unable to spell "inexplicable.")

There is a high volume of odd discrepancies between The Plot that Thickened, which was written at the dawn of the disco era, and The Luck of the Bodkins, written in the Thirties.  The Luck of the Bodkins was very much set in the 1930s--the Depression and Prohibition are mentioned, for example, and Sir Stafford Cripps gets a shout out.  But, even though it takes place just a year later, in The Plot that Thickened, we get mentions of TV studio audiences, Playboy magazine, and the stereotype of the Texas oil millionaire, things which I'm pretty sure did not exist in the 1930s.  It seems crazy for Wodehouse to have set this sequel. in which his characters are only a year older, in the 1970s, but he did it anyway.

Other discrepancies have nothing to do with the date but are changes to the characters which seem to have been made to accommodate the plot Wodehouse wanted to run them through.  In The Luck of the Bodkins, Grayce was described as "young and lovely," but here in The Plot That Thickened we find she has a daughter from a previous marriage who has already graduated from Vassar.  This daughter, Mavis, is even more domineering than Grayce.  In The Luck of the Bodkins, Ivor Llewellyn had never heard of Alfred Lord Tennyson, but in The Plot That Thickened, when describing the customary tyranny of woman, he says he fell in love with a schoolteacher when he was young and she forced him to study English literature.  There are additional jarring incongruities, in particular regarding Monty and Gertrude, that I won't list here. 

Anyway, Ivor and Grayce have rented an English country house, and they take up residence there along with their assistants Monty and Sandy.  Mavis is worried that burglars will steal a pearl necklace (a different necklace from the one smuggled in The Luck of the Bodkins), so Mavis insists her mother hire a private detective to guard them; this detective will pretend to be Ivor's valet and also serve as Grayce's spy, reporting to Grayce if her obese husband goes off his diet.  The private dick Grayce hires is none other than thief Chimp Twist, who appeared in Ice in the Bedroom, a Wodehouse book I read back in 2015.  Ivor and Grayce have also foolishly befriended the other thieves from Ice in the Bedroom, the married couple Soapy and Dolly Molloy, and invited them to come stay in the country house.

One thread of the plot concerns the thieves' efforts to seize the necklace; Monty's life is complicated by the fact that Mavis suspects Monty of being in league with the thieves and Ivor actually hopes the necklace will be stolen, because it is an almost worthless string of "Japanese cultured" pearls, he having sold the real ones given Grayce by her first husband so he might have some ready cash--he needs cash because his bank account is a joint one and Grayce watches it like a hawk and would never approve expenditures on Ivor's hobbies, like gambling and drinking.  And Monty's life is already complicated, because the other main plot thread is how he has fallen in love with Sandy and lost interest in Gertrude, but feels he has to go through with his marriage to Gertrude because a Bodkin must keep his word.  In the end the criminals end up with the almost valueless pearls, Ivor is liberated from his oppressive marriage to Grayce when she demands a divorce (in The Luck of the Bodkins Ivor feared divorce but in The Plot That Thickened he welcomes it) and Gertrude calls off her engagement to Monty and he immediately gets engaged to Sandy.  Don't worry about Mavis and Gertrude; they also get engaged (to offscreen characters.)

The Plot That Thickened is not bad; I laughed and the style is pleasant.  But it is not as good as The Luck of the Bodkins--I am not terribly interested in crime story shenanigans being played for laughs, and Sandy, Mavis, and the three thieves are not nearly as fun as Lotus Blossum and Ambrose Tennyson, and there are none of the silly little touches like the pet alligator and the Mickey Mouse plush toy that enlivened The Luck of the Bodkins.  I also found the changes to the characters and setting kind of annoying.  Oh, well.  I'll probably be sticking to Wodehouse's earlier work in the future.

The revelation of the depths to which women can sink is always a stunning one.  

Looking over the clearance table at Wonderbooks in Frederick, MD, while I waited for the pan-Asian restaurant in the same complex to finish cooking our takeout dinner, I spotted a Penguin paperback of P. G. Wodehouse's The Luck of the Bodkins.  The book's cover illustration was still floating around in my cranium a few days later and so I decided to read the novel.

Wikipedia tells us that The Luck of the Bodkins had a strange publication history.  It was first serialized in Britain in the magazine The Passing Show in 1935, and then serialized in the American magazine Redbook a few months later, but in a version rewritten by Wodehouse to make it shorter.  When the novel was released in book form the British editions presented the longer version, while the U. S. publisher printed the shorter version. I read the 2002 Collector's Wodehouse printing of the book that some generous soul scanned and put up at the internet archive; I believe this is the British version--it is like 350 pages of text, after all, which seems pretty long.  

The Luck of the Bodkins is a light-hearted tale of men being manipulated, dominated, and generally run ragged by women, men doing things that go against their natural inclinations in order to please or appease members of the opposite sex.  There is a pretty large cast of characters, but I think these six are the important ones:    

Montague Bodkin

He worshipped Gertrude Butterwick as no man had worshipped woman before.

Monty is a good-looking Englishman who is a poor speller.  He inherited a pile of money from an aunt and is not interested in working.  He is deeply in love with and engaged to Gertrude Butterwick, daughter of businessman J. G. Butterwick of Butterwick, Price & Mandelbaum, Import and Export Merchants.  Mr. Butterwick refuses to let his daughter marry a man who is not gainfully employed, and so Monty took a series of jobs, promptly being fired from each of them.  Finally, he bribed the head of a detective agency to hire him so he would at least appear to be gainfully employed.  In Chapter 1 Monty is vacationing in Cannes when he receives a devastating telegram from Gertrude back in Blighty: she is breaking off their engagement!

Ivor Llewellyn

Mr. Llewellyn shuddered.  That word 'divorce' had always been a spectre. haunting him.  His attitude towards his young and lovely wife ever since their marriage had been consistently that of a man hanging by his finger-tips to the edge of a precipice.

Mr. Llewellyn is the middle-aged and obese head of a Hollywood film studio.  He has a beautiful young wife, Grayce, whom he goes out of his way to please lest she divorce him.  In the first chapter of the novel he is vacationing in Cannes while Grayce is in Paris, shopping.  The domineering Grayce sends Mabel Spence, her sister, to Cannes to tell the movie mogul that she (Grayce) has purchased a pearl necklace and he (Llewellyn) must smuggle it into America when he sails back across the Atlantic.  Mabel will give it to to him, sewn into a hat, when she boards the Atlantic, the ocean liner which he will board in England, stops to collect passengers, she among them, in France.  Llewellyn is paranoid about getting caught committing this crime, and assumes U. S. Customs spies are everywhere.  When in Chapter 1, Monty, who is hanging around the same hotel as Llewellyn, comes over to ask Llewellyn and Mabel how to spell "sciatica" (a malady with which J. G. Butterwick is afflicted), Llewellyn suspects Monty is a Customs spy who has overheard Grayce's felonious instructions coming out of Mabel's mouth.  

Gertrude Butterwick

'Well, it's about that Blossom girl.  Oh, I know,' said Gertrude, as Monty began to fling his arms heavenwards, 'that there's absolutely nothing between you.  But oh, Monty darling, will you promise me to never speak to her again?'

Monty's on and off again fiancé, Gertrude, comes on screen in Chapter 2.  Gertrude is very jealous; for example, when she and Monty were at the cinema she took offense when she noticed her fiancé admiring the performance up on the silver screen of American actress Lotus Blossom.  We eventually learn that Gertrude called off their engagement because, in a photo of himself bathing he sent to her, Gertrude noticed on Monty's chest a tattoo of the name "Sue" in a heart--this is a souvenir from an earlier, brief, engagement of Monty's.  Gertrude is a top hockey player, and is headed to America on a tour with the All England Ladies Hockey Team; she will also be sailing on the Atlantic.

Reginald Tennyson

'The family are sending you off to Canada to work in an office....Well, it's about time.  Work is what you want.'

'Work is not what I want.  I hate the thought of it.'

Reggie is another English slacker ("loafer" is the word used in the text), but he lacks the kind of wealth his friend Monty enjoys and his family (lead by his uncle, that strong proponent of gainful employment J. G. Butterwick) is sending him to Montreal to toil in some office; by coincidence he will be on the Atlantic as well; in Chapter 2 he is surprised to run into his hockey-playing cousin Gertrude at the train station where they are both catching the train to the port where they will board the Atlantic.  In Chapter 3 he finds himself in the same train car as his crony Monty--Monty explains that he has booked passage on the Atlantic in hopes of confronting Gertrude and winning her back. 

Ambrose Tennyson

'Have you ever read any of Ambrose's bilge?'

'No.'

'Well, it's absolute drip.  Not a corpse or a mysterious Chinaman in it from beginning to end.  And this fellow Llewelyn is paying him fifteen hundred dollars a week!'

Reggie's brother Ambrose is a writer of serious literature that does not sell and has been holding down a responsible government job--the Tennyson family is always badgering Reggie, telling him to be more like his brother Ambrose.  As the novel starts Ambrose is making a change in his life, however.  He has resigned from the Admiralty and accepted a lucrative job offer from Ivor Llewellyn to write scenarios in Hollywood, and is accompanying Llewellyn on the Atlantic.  Perhaps even more importantly, Ambrose is engaged to American actress Lotus Blossom, who will be travelling along with them.

Lotus Blossom

Life, to be really life for her, had to consist of a series of devastating rows and terrific reconciliations.  Anything milder she considered insipid.

A sexy red-headed film actress, born a Murphy in New Jersey, greatest state in the Union, Lottie is an exuberant type who loves drama and fun; as a publicity stunt she brings with her on the ship a wicker basket containing a pet alligator named Wilfred.  Her engagement to Ambrose has been kept a secret from Reggie--symmetrically, the fact that some years ago she was engaged to Reggie has been kept a secret from Ambrose.

Characters of lesser prominence who nevertheless play pivotal roles in the novel's intricate clockwork mechanisms include Grayce's sister Mabel Spence, an osteopath with whom Reggie falls in love after she provides him some hands-on treatment, and Albert Peasemarch, a long-winded and overly-chummy steward on the ship whose butting in and gossiping adds to everybody's trouble.  Peasemarch is the weakest component of the novel--his scenes slow down the narrative and the jokes featured therein are among the least effective in the book--he mispronounces many words, for example.  When overeducated English goofs like Monty and Reggie or deceptive Hollywood jerks like Llewelyn and Lottie, all of them people who can be selfish and act like they are above society's rules, expose their ignorance it is funny in part because it punctures their pretensions, but when an essentially inoffensive working-class guy mispronounces words and is inordinately proud of his meager accomplishments it is a little sad, and laughing at him feels like, as the social justice types say, "punching down." 

On the voyage there are bouts of jealousy and a series of comic misunderstandings that put everyone's relationship with his or her spouse or fiancé at risk.  Ambrose is jealous when he learns of his brother Reggie's past relationship with Lottie.  Monty convinces Gertrude that Sue is long forgotten, but then Gertrude becomes jealous when she finds Lottie's stateroom is right next to Monty's and she breaks off their engagement again.  Lottie's forward fun-loving nature, which has her kissing Reggie and spending time in Monty's room, is a major source of difficulties.

Llewelyn thinks Monty is a government spy onto his smuggling plans, and so he tries to bribe Monty by offering him a job as an actor; Monty has no interest in being an actor and refuses the offer.  Llewelyn fires Ambrose upon realizing he is not the famous poet Tennyson (the Hollywood mogul missed the news that the author of "Charge of the Light Brigade" died forty years ago), sparking Lottie's descent in Machiavellian ruthlessness.  Lottie kidnaps from Monty's room a plush Mickey Mouse, a gift Monty gave to Gertrude after their reconciliation and which Gertrude returned when she broke off their engagement the second time.  Now that they have reconciled a second time, Gertrude is expecting Mickey back from Monty.  Lottie demands that Monty accept the acting job offer from Llewelyn so he (Monty) will be in a position to force Llewelyn into rehiring Ambrose--otherwise she will parade around the ship clutching the Mickey Mouse, which will no doubt presumably lead to Gertrude again breaking off her engagement to Monty.  Monty's negotiations with Lottie are hampered by the fact that he has promised Gertrude he will never again speak to Lottie.

There is a bracing quality about the streets of New York, and only a very dejected man can fail to be cheered and uplifted by a drive through them in an open taxi on a fine summer afternoon.

The last fifty pages of this epic saga take place in beautiful New York City, where everybody comes to his or her senses and everything works out perfectly for all the young attractive people, with all of them engaged to each other and employed by Llewelyn's studio at exorbitant salaries (in the middle of the Depression, no less!)  Even overweight and middle-aged Ivor Llewelyn and Albert Peasemarch accomplish their goals, though the path to success for them lies through considerable humiliation.   

Like Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin books, Wodehouse's books are all expertly crafted, their narrative structures and each individual sentence skillfully put together, and they are all quite enjoyable, but each one is very much like any other one.  And while you can argue O'Brian's naval adventure stories perhaps say something about male relationships and duty and courage and so forth, it is hard to argue that Wodehouse's books are anything more than frivolous entertainment, albeit in its highest form, wish-fulfillment fantasies for men who covet a life of leisure and respectable irresponsibility.  The Luck of the Bodkins is a smooth read that makes you laugh and inspires admiration for the author for having fashioned such a superior piece of workmanship, but the novel doesn't move you emotionally or challenge you by presenting an idiosyncratic view of the universe or life or morality or by offering speculations about life under different circumstances.  

Of course, like all old books, The Luck of the Bodkins offers a window for those of us living in the 21st century onto another culture--it is a primary source from the world of the past.  The world of Monty and Reggie is one in which everybody smokes cigarettes, people casually mention Greta Garbo and Ronald Colman and say of a generous friend that he is "The whitest man I know," a world in which even men who avoid work like it is a plague are ashamed to marry a woman who has more money than they do.  Wodehouse expects his readers to get jokes about Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Stafford Cripps, to know something about the Crusades, and to find it amusing that almost everybody in the book is familiar with the poem "Casabianca" but confidently misattributes its authorship.

If you are looking for a few laughs and a little of the atmosphere of the 1930s, this novel fits the bill.  Thumbs up for The Luck of the Bodkins; it is likely I will soon read the sequel, which was published over 35 years later, Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin.  

It was uncanny that out of the silent, motionless wastes of desert there should be coming so much noise.  Interspersed with the duller, heavier explosions of the field-guns I could hear the sharper, vicious cracks of the high-velocity guns and the frenzied chatter of machine-guns and rifles.  Gradually over the edge of the horizon there rose a pall of black, billowing smoke, touched here and there with a long tongue of flame. 

Spine of copy I read

Followers of this here blog and of my thrilling twitter feed (have you heard I am collecting glow-in-the-dark dinosaur bones made in China and marketed to cranky seven-year-olds who have been dragged against their will to the supermarket?) may recall that I admire Robert Crisp's memoir of his service in tanks in North Africa, Brazen Chariots, first published in 1959.  In Brazen Chariots Crisp mentions Cyril Joly, a fellow tank officer, and praises Joly's novel, Take These Men.  Via interlibrary loan I borrowed a dilapidated copy of the 357-page novel, published in Great Britain in 1955 and currently owned by the University of Baltimore, and over the last week or so I read it.

Take These Men, which Wikipedia tells us is a "lightly fictionalized" account of Joly's own experiences serving with the 7th Armored Division in North Africa, has six parts.  As the novel begins in Part One it is 1940 as our narrator, a Regular Army officer and veteran of the fighting in France whom other officers call "Tony," arrives in Egypt to take command of a troop (three vehicles) of A9 tanks.  An Italian attack across the Libyan border is expected, and Tony fights in skirmishes on patrol before the attack and major battles after it comes, as well as during the British counterattack which makes up Part Two of the novel and routs the Italian forces.  The British conquest of eastern Libya is short-lived, however, as the Germans arrive in 1941 with their superior equipment (at this point the British Army in Africa is so short of tanks that Tony's regiment is manning captured Italian M13 tanks) and push the Allies back towards the Egyptian border in Part Three.  Tony's M13 is damaged, and he switches to an A9, but this tank is knocked out while Tony is bringing up the rear of the British retreat and he and his crew have to sneak back to Allied lines on foot over a series of days; they hide by day, move at night and steal food and water from poorly guarded Italian camps.  After further fighting in British tanks, at the end of Part Three the commander of Tony's squadron, Kinnaird, is promoted to command of an entire regiment, and brings Tony with him to Cairo as his adjutant.  In Part Four, after helping organize the new regiment, Tony is given command of one of its four squadrons (a squadron is made up of four troops plus a command troop) and heads back into battle, this time in American-built Stuart tanks, called by the British troops "Honeys" due to their superior reliability.

Joly does a terrific job of describing both the routines of daily life of the tankers in the desert and their harrowing experiences of battle.  There are vivid descriptions of varied types of engagements, and the author also touches upon the roles played in the campaign by armored cars, anti-tank guns, infantry, supply units, artillery, etc.  We learn all about the physical conditions and psychological stresses endured by the fighting men, and about their relationships with each other; those between officers, and between officers and enlisted men.  Deep friendships can quickly grow among personnel who spend their time crammed together, travelling in, maintaining and fighting in the same tank.

The links of discipline, though strong, were tempered as nowhere else by a degree of tolerance, compassion or mutual esteem which bound the crew together as a small but complete family.  There were liberties which I expected and accepted from my crew which I would not have countenanced from any other man, except perhaps my batman.  

Just as quickly these deep relationships can dissolve when the crew is split up after the tank commander is promoted or transferred, or each crew member is of sent to a different tank after their own is incapacitated.  Tony commands many different crews over the course of the three-year war, as his tanks are often damaged or knocked out, in which event he commandeers the tank of some inferior officer and leaves behind his former mates.  There is also the fact that people are getting killed left and right, and Tony learns not to become too closely attached to fellow officers because they have a tendency to get blown to pieces.

The term "batman" brings up class issues, and those interested in such issues may find much to chew on in Take These Men.  The way Joly, an officer and an educated man who is writing in the voice of a man much like himself, describes the men who serve under Tony and his efforts to portray working class men (trying to reproduce their accents via phonetic spellings, for example) are worthy of scrutiny. This early description of some enlisted men, one of Tony's first crews, hints at Tony's background and the author's experiences and perspectives back in England:

My crew were all old soldiers with a keenness and sense of humour which amused and encouraged me.  They reminded me of my father's workers at home: men who knew their jobs and who were as capable of deciding what was to be done as my father was himself, but who nevertheless never resented the show of authority inherent in each instruction that was given. 

This passage foreshadows how, again and again in tight spots, Tony, who at times is at a loss how to proceed, seriously considers the advice and suggestions of his crewmen, and often seizes upon their solutions.

Presumably the copy I read once had a charming jacket like this

Take These Men is a valuable record of the fighting in North Africa prior to El Alamein; I feel like I know much more about the experiences of the participating soldiers in than I did before.  But does Take These Men work as a novel?  The book is definitely vulnerable to the charge that it reads more like a war memoir than a conventional piece of fiction.  Obviously, there is not a lot of suspense or surprise about big issues--we know ahead of time that Tony doesn't get killed and that the Allies win the war, and Joly exacerbates this issue by giving the chapters titles that spoil the fates of many of the characters, titles like "Templeton Dies," "Peters is Killed" and "Posted to Brigade Headquarters." However, individual scenes do achieve suspense of the "how will he get out of this one?" sort, and there are many exciting adventure-type episodes whose ending I could not predict.  In one such episode, during a withdrawal as the sun is setting, Tony's tank is immobilized and its radio knocked out.  Will Tony and crew bale out and sneak back to Allied lines on foot, or try to repair the track under cover of darkness?  Will the noise of using sledgehammers to fix the track attract a German patrol, or a British patrol which might shoot them down before identifying them?  In another scene Tony acts in the finest Nelsonian  tradition, pretending to not have heard a radio signal from Kinnaird ordering him to withdraw so he can instead strike out on his own to wipe out two dozen defenseless German trucks ("lorries") and a battery of anti-tank guns which is hooked up behind the trucks for transport.  Will our narrator be punished for his insubordination?  Will his refusal to return to his commander when ordered to do so put some other plan in jeopardy or some of his comrades in danger?

Joly's emphasis on the characters' psychologies, I think, also has some literary merit and provides compelling reading for those not fascinated by military equipment and battle tactics.  As the novel and the war wear on, Tony, and those around him, are changed by their terrible experiences.  In one memorably horrible episode in late 1941 fourteen hapless Italian soldiers surrender to Tony's tank, and to the shock of all concerned Tony's gunner massacres them with the Stuart's machine gun.  When upbraided by our appalled narrator, the gunner explains, "They killed me Mum and Dad with a bomb.  They deserved it....Ities or Jerries, it's just the same--they're as bad as each other."

Another such scene of horror grounded in psychology and human relationships is the final monologue of a troop commander who didn't get along well with his fellow officers.  When he and his troop are outflanked by the Germans and his tank is destroyed in a hail of fire, the misfit suffers an agonizing and lingering death, and his bitter and pathetic dying words, in which he curses the other members of the squadron ("Oh God, if they've deserted us, we haven't a hope in hell....the bastards have deserted me....They all hated me, and now they have left me....") are heard over the radio by the rest of the squadron, who have been ordered to escape without him.  The sensitive reader will have difficulty avoiding imagining himself in the place of the dying man, and in the shoes of the officers who do nothing to save him--chilling!

It is not all horror, though.  Our narrator and Kinnaird, who is a sort of role model and father figure to Tony, grow as people over the course of the book, learning to manage the weighty responsibilities and face the dreadful challenges presented to them by the war.  "Through it all I had gained a degree of self-confidence which I could not have acquired in any other way.  I had had responsibilities thrust upon me which before the war I would never have dreamnt of."  In the nightmare of war, Tony (and Joly?) found what the shrinks call self-actualization.

At the end of Part Four, on Christmas Eve, 1941, Tony suffers a head wound and is sent back to Cairo to recuperate for two months.  When he is done convalescing his squadron is equipped with American-built Grant tanks armed with a 75mm gun that can fire the kind of high explosive shells needed to deal with the famously effective German anti-tank guns.  (The A9 carried a 40mm gun, and the Stuart a 37mm.)  Part Five covers famous events like the fall of Tobruk and the Battles of Gazala and Alam Halfa, and is the least interesting and entertaining part of the book because much of it reads like a conventional military history--this division went here and fought that division and took this point after suffering so many hundred casualties and then the next day was reinforced by this other division zzzzzzzzzzzz--with fewer of the adventurous capers and intimate details about daily life of front line soldiers that made the earlier chapters so interesting and entertaining.  (Though there are still some good scenes about fighting in the Grant tanks and Tony's relationships with his fellow officers, including a working class noncom who gets a commission.)  The theme of Part Five is that under Auchinleck the Allied forces face setbacks because of a lack of a coherent plan and because the British armored units are dispersed throughout the Allied army-- in contrast, Rommel concentrates the Afrika Korps' tanks and thus achieves local superiorities which enable him to defeat the British tanks piecemeal.  As Joly tells it, the arrival of Montgomery, of whom Joly apparently heartily approves, vastly improves morale and paves the way for victory. as the Allied forces "were now controlled by a strong hand...there was no vacillation or indefiniteness in our plans."  (Joly doesn't actually name Auchinleck or Montgomery, just says things like "...the commander of the Army was changed...." but looking at the dates involved makes it clear who he is talking about.)

The comparatively brief Part Six sees Kinnaird promoted to brigadier (commander of three regiments), and Tony accompanies him as his right-hand man.  From this relatively lofty perch Tony observes the climactic (Second) Battle of El Alamein in October of 1942 and the British pursuit of the defeated Axis forces through Egypt, Libya, and into Tunisia where they finally surrender in May 1943.  Of interest in this section is the comparison of Tony's veteran force, the British Eighth Army, with the fresh British force which landed with the Americans in French North Africa, the British First Army.

A few years ago I read novels about World War II naval warfare by Royal Navy combat veterans Alistair Maclean and Nicholas Monsarrat, and these books were in my mind as I read Joly's Take These Men.  MacLean's novel, H.M.S. Ulysses, was an extravagant tragedy, portraying the Germans as superior to the Allies and the sailors of the Royal Navy as victims of an incompetent British government and high command, while Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea was full of criticism of British civilians, suggesting that unionized workers, unfaithful wives and smothering mothers were failing to do their part in the war effort and undeserving of the sacrifices and heroism of the Royal Navy's servicemen.

Epigraph from the title page

Joly's project, signaled by his choice of title page epigraph, a quote from Pericles which suggests the people of the British Commonwealth deserve freedom and prosperity because their men have had the courage to fight for them, is a different one from MacLean's or Monsarrat's.  In his intro Joly provides two reasons for writing his book: firstly, as a response to the incessant talk about the Afrika Korps ("...we have heard and read so much of Rommel and the Germans that we may perhaps forget that they originally learnt the foundations of their armoured doctrine from us and that we beat them soundly in the end.")  Reflecting this aim of the author's, Joly's characters, during Part Five, insist that German success is a result not of any peculiar genius on Rommel's part, but because the Germans have superior equipment.  Secondly, Joly tells us that most writing about the Desert War has been focused on the movements of entire armies and divisions, and Joly believes the "gallantry" of the ordinary Allied soldiers, the ways they lived, fought and died in North Africa, has not been but deserves to be recorded. While Joly talks at length about the psychological stresses suffered by the Allied servicemen, and almost all of the many characters we meet get maimed or killed, in contrast to MacLean, Joly is not cynical or bitter, and the soldiers he writes about are not the pitiful victims of higher powers but heroes who are fighting for freedom and justice.

When all was done and still no orders had come, I asked and obtained permission to visit the grave.  The burial party had long since gone, so that I was alone as I stood, beret in hand, in silent homage to the dead.  I felt no sorrow.  I knew that Peters had died in a just cause, as many more would die.  Rather, his death had steeled my determination for ever.     

Even though the whole novel takes place in Africa, in contrast to Monsarrat's criticisms of people on the home front, Joly finds a way to shoehorn in some mentions of the bravery of English civilians, and the officer's wives Tony meets in Cairo are all devoted to their husbands and the war effort.

When you read books from the past you gain insight into the thinking of an earlier age, thinking which, perhaps, is anathema to today's moral arbiters, an offense to our sensibilities.  Is there anything in this 60-year-old book that might stand out to readers in our politically correct age?  Reading Bill Mauldin's very interesting 1945 book Up Front a few weeks ago (I paid two bucks for a copy of the fourth printing at the Upper Arlington Library's huge book sale, where I got a stack of books and which I recommend to all in Central Ohio) I was surprised at how low an opinion Mauldin expressed of Italian civilians--the women and children are all entitled beggars and the men are all thieves, apparently--and in Take These Men I was a bit taken aback by Joly's harsh commentary on the Egyptians and Arabs native to the region where the Allies and Axis powers fought the titanic struggle he describes.

We saw the Egyptians as a craven and crooked nation, hiding behind the shield of our protection.  To us all it seemed natural that a race who would not move in self-defence even when the enemy had actually crossed their borders should be reviled in word and deed whenever need or opportunity arose.  We could have no respect for them, no sympathy with their sufferings, no hesitation in thinking of them as "Wogs" or "Gyppos" or "Gyppies."  The only words of their language which we bothered to learn were the more offensive and shorter epithets to summon or dismiss them.

In a scene late in the book the British tank crews and their vehicles are riding a train from Cairo to the front lines, and Tony and his comrades cannot sleep while en route, because the train must stop frequently and when it does "we had immediately to guard the whole length against a swarm of thieves and pilferers who emerged mysteriously from the shadows...." Later, when the narrator arrives at a battlefield in Tunisia he finds that the bodies of the German dead have "been denuded during the night by swarms of thieving Arabs."

(No doubt the people of North Africa would have equally choice words for the European interlopers who highhandedly dominated their region for ages, and as for looting German bodies, Joly makes no secret of the fact that individual Allied soldiers and the formal military apparatus are constantly appropriating the supplies and equipment of defeated Axis troops.)

Also noteworthy (to me at least), is what Joly's characters say about the Soviet Union. It is normal when people talk about World War II to hear a lot about the great sacrifices of the Russian people and how such and such high percentage of German divisions or casualties suffered were on the Eastern Front, but we don't get any of that from Tony and his subordinates.  When the British troops in Africa hear of the German invasion of Russia, Joly relates: "There was no sympathy with Russia, after her dealings in the summer of 1939 and the rape of Poland.  Indeed, I felt the situation could not have been better put than by my driver, who remarked tersely, 'Thieves always fall out.'"  When the United States is dragged directly into the war by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a lorry driver cheerily announces "We've got friends besides them twisty Ruskies now."  It seems likely that Joly had the same attitude about revolutionary communism expressed so memorably by Bertie Wooster in that immortal classic of literature, "Comrade Bingo": "...as far as I can make out, the whole hub of the scheme seems to be to massacre coves like me; and I don't mind owning I'm not frightfully keen on the idea."

Though it has flaws when taken as a whole and considered solely as a work of modern fiction, Take These Men is full of very entertaining battle and adventure anecdotes and is a great source of knowledge about the lives of British soldiers serving in North Africa in the Second World War.  Highly recommended for WWII buffs and for fans of realistic adventure fiction.

"I order you!" exclaimed Elfane.  This was fantastic, insane--contrary to the axioms of her existence. 

Joe shook his head, watching warily.  "Sorry." 

Elfane dismissed the paradox from her mind.  She turned to Manaolo. "Kill him here then.  His corpse, at least, will provoke no speculation." 

Manaolo grinned regretfully.  "I'm afraid the clobberclaw is aiming a gun at us.  He will refuse to let me kill him." 

Elfane tightened her lips.  "This is ridiculous." 

April, famously the cruelest of months, has been Ace Double Month here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and here is our final Ace Double (for the time being, at least), Son of the Tree by Jack Vance, half of my battered copy of 1964's F-265.  The other side of F-265 is The Houses of Iszm, and both novels are adorned with a Jack Gaughan cover highlighting energy pistols and a small charming interior illo, also by Gaughan. Son of the Tree first appeared in 1951 in Thrilling Wonder Stories, where it was lead story, and has been reprinted numerous times.  In the period before I started this blog I read lots of Vance, but I never got to Son of the Tree, so I am looking forward to this.  isfdb says Son of the Tree is part of the Nopalgarth Series, along with Houses of Iszm and Nopalgarth; I know I read Houses of Iszm but suspect that, like Son of the Tree, I never read Nopalgarth (AKA Brains of Earth.)

Joe Smith is travelling across the galaxy on passenger starships.  At each planetfall he works for a while to accumulate enough money to take the next leg of the trip, hypnotized and shipped practically dead as cargo in the hold with scores of other such lower ranked passengers.  Thusly he has journeyed so far from his home planet of Earth that the people he meets think Earth is a mere myth.

Whoa!  This sounds a lot like the premise of E. C. Tubb's Dumarest of Terra series!  Is it possible Tubb was influenced by Son of the Tree?  I feel like a detective!

As the 111-page novel (novella?) begins, Joe arrives on planet Kyril, where two million aristocratic priests (called "Druids") lord it over five billion impoverished serfs (the "Laity.")  At the center of the planet's capitol city and its culture is a tree bigger than a skyscraper that the people worship--they think that when industrious workers die they become one of the three-foot leaves on the tree (slackers become "rootlets" mired in the "slime.")  One of the strategies the Druids employ to maintain control of the Laity is to keep the planet at a low technological level, so Joe, who has a technical background, easily finds a job as a chauffeur among the elite because he is able to improve on the shoddily cobbled-together aircars used by the Druids.

Like a lot of Vance books, Son of the Tree takes place in a future in which mankind has spread throughout the universe, and enough isolation, mutation and evolution has taken place that new races or subspecies of humans have developed. One of the first people Joe meets on Kyril is Hableyat, a Mang, one of the yellow-skinned people of planet Mangste.  Kyril is involved in a sort of Cold War with Mangste, a modern industrial world, and the Druids assume all Mangs on Kyril are spies. Working in the household of an important Druid, and being friendly with Hableyat, Joe quickly gets embroiled in life-threatening intrigue between different ruthless factions of Druids and Mangs.  Complicating matters is the fact that Joe falls in love with one of the callous aristocratic Druids, the Priestess Elfane, even though she is willing to kill the Earthman to pursue her goals and is involved in some kind of relationship with the equally ruthless Eccleasiarch Manaolo.

Joe, Hableyat, Elfane and Manaolo all take passage (not in the hold, but awake) on a starship headed for the planet Ballenkarch.  The people of Ballenkarch are politically and economically primitive, but rapidly developing and a source of raw materials and manpower, and both Kyril and Mangste hope to manipulate the planet to aid their side in the cold war (perhaps Vance is referring here to the role in the real-life Cold War played by places like Africa and the Middle East.)  Elfane and Manaolo have with them a shoot from their divine Tree (the "Son" of the title), and hope to plant it on Ballenkarch and convince the natives to worship it and join Kyril in a kind of religious union.  Hableyat's faction of Mangs and another, perhaps more influential, faction of Mangs disagree on how to respond to this Druid scheme, and both parties are willing to go to any length to enact their policy.  Joe is right in the middle of this multi-sided conflict among cold-blooded killers, not really caring about the Kyril-Mangste struggle but instead hoping he can convince the alluring Elfane to be his lover and the clever Hableyat to be his friend and that the three of them can leave all this murderous intrigue behind and go together to an easy life on the peaceful Earth.

In 1971 Ace rereleased the Son of the Tree/Houses of Iszm Double with a different cover and a higher price

As the Druid-Mang-Ballenkarch plot progresses Vance fills in the blanks of Joe's past and we slowly learn why Joe is crossing the galaxy, leading us readers to wonder if perhaps Joe in his own way is as fanatical as Elfane and as manipulative as Hableyat. On Ballenkarch the plot threads reach their violent conclusions, Joe learns the true natures of the elites of the three planets, and the main characters make decisions about how they want to live the rest of their lives.

Son of the Tree is a great thriller set in a vivid alien environment, full of Vance's signature witty dialogue.  Vance's style is often compared to that of the great P. G. Wodehouse, and the comparison is very appropriate: Son of the Tree, like so much of Vance's work, is a pleasure to read, almost regardless of the plot.  Not to criticize the plot of Son of the Tree; the story moves smoothly, all the twists and revelations are perfectly paced to maintain reader interest and all the characters' motivations and interactions with each other are interesting and entertaining.  A fun book that gets my enthusiastic endorsement.  I suggest you overcome your love of Jack Gaughan, however, and get a 21st-century edition of the novel that uses the Vance Integral text--my 1964 copy is full of typos.

God, the craziness, the futile insanity of war.  Damn that German cruiser, damn those German gunners, damn them, damn them, damn them!...But why should he?  They, too, were only doing a job--and doing it terribly well.

I don't really read much bestselling mainstream popular fiction, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, that sort of thing.  Maybe P. G, Wodehouse, W. Somerset Maugham and James Dickey (I read Deliverance right before I moved to the Middle West) qualify as mainstream popular fiction, though I like to think of those writers as "literary figures." When I worked at a bookstore in northern New Jersey in the mid-90s all the bestsellers seemed to be either about lawyers and serial killers chasing each other, or knock-offs of Bridges of Madison County.  Those sorts of things do not interest me. What does interest me is British military history, and so the obvious exceptions to my aversion from popular mainstream fiction would be all those Sharpe books by Bernard Cornwell I read as a teen, and the 15 or so Aubrey and Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian I read in my thirties.  It was also my interest in British military history that led me to dip my toe again into the mainstream fiction pool this week with a novel by Alistair MacLean, author of The Guns of Navarone.

I never thought about reading anything by Alistair MacLean until, at the Des Moines Salvation Army earlier this month, I stumbled on a crumbling 1957 paperback edition of H.M.S. Ulysses, its cover adorned with a sturm und drang depiction of British sailors manning Oerlikon and pom-pom guns in defense against what I guess are He-111s.  Informed by the advertising text on the first page that Scotsman MacLean actually served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, I decided to read H.M.S. Ulysses in the same spirit in which I read Sapper's No Man's Land, with the presumption that reading fiction about a military campaign by a person who actually served in that very campaign would be worthwhile.  

H.M.S. Ulysses, first published in 1956, starts off with 15 lines from one of those poems everybody likes, Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Ulysses," a cool map of the voyage described in the novel, and a cool diagram of the fictional light cruiser on which the novel takes place.  Then we get down to the novel, all 319 pages of it.

H.M.S. Ulysses chronicles the week-long voyage between Scotland and Russia of a convoy bringing to the Soviet Union Canadian-built tanks, fighters, fuel and ammunition for use on the Eastern Front; nearly all scenes take place on the flagship, the light cruiser Ulysses.  MacLean seems to be the kind of writer who deals in superlatives.  Ulysses is the best ship in the world ("She was the first completely equipped radar ship in the world"), with the best captain in the world ("Among naval captains--indeed, among men--he was unique. In his charity, in his humility, Captain Richard Vallery walked alone"), and its crew have been charged with the toughest duty faced by any servicemen anywhere in the world ("The Russian convoys, sir, are something entirely new and quite unique in the experience of mankind.")  Because she is indispensible, Ulysses has been going on more convoy missions than any other ship in the Royal Navy, and under the strain some members of the crew, just before the novel began, staged a little mutiny.  As a result, Ulysses has to redeem itself on its next trip from Scapa Flow to Murmansk.

A theme in military fiction is that those officers superior in the hierarchy to the main characters are stupid and corrupt.  (In fiction in which the main characters are top commanders, it is the politicians above them who are stupid and corrupt.)  I haven't served in the armed services myself, but I suppose it is possible that real military personnel think their superiors are all unethical jerks--everybody I meet in civilian life thinks his or her boss is a corrupt idiot who is running the organization into the ground and doesn't appreciate all the hard work he or she does.

Novels and movies about military men often have a scene in which one of the guys who has been in the trenches doing the real fighting gives a speech to one of the guys who has been maxing and relaxing back at HQ, a speech about how hard the real fighting men have it, and how the jerks in HQ do not appreciate them.  MacLean fits one of those scenes into the very first of the novel's 18 chapters when the ship's doctor yells at the Admiral sent from London to investigate the mutiny.

Military (and police) fiction is also full of scenes in which some officer has to tell somebody his or her spouse or father or brother or whoever got killed in action. MacLean also fits one of those scenes into the first chapter.  Talk about efficiency!

You may recall that I interpreted Sapper, in his book about the Western Front in World War One, to be praising the British soldier, denouncing the German people, and arguing that the rigors of war could have beneficial effects on individuals and societies.  MacLean in H.M.S. Ulysses takes the opposite tack; far from glorifying war, the novel is one grisly horror scene after another.  And it doesn't glorify the British people or their institutions, or condemn Nazi Germany or its citizens, either.  Sure, there are brave and skillful and decent British characters, but there are also evil British characters and British blunderers, and the Germans (who are only ever seen at a distance, from the deck of the Ulysses) are universally depicted as courageous and clever.  In fact, the Germans outwit the British again and again over the course of the book, and if the National Socialist German Worker's Party's genocidal racism and monstrous tyranny are ever mentioned, I missed it.  Instead Maclean tells us that German flying is "magnificent," German gunnery is "fantastic" and the like.

When I started the book I expected the convoy to suffer some losses, of course, but I thought Ulysses and most of the convoy would get to Murmansk and drop off a big shipment of war material to the grateful Bolshies.  Instead, the mission is a disaster! Of 32 ships that left Scotland and the New World, only five get to Russia, and the Ulysses is not among them.  Only a handful of people from the Ulysses, which starts with a crew of over 700, even survive the mission!  This is partly because the sub rosa purpose of the convoy is to lure the German battleship Tirpitz out into the open sea so a Royal Navy battlefleet can attack it, but the Tirpitz doesn't take the bait!  The Ulysses, and with it over two dozen other British, Canadian and American ships, is sunk for nothing!

Four topics fill up the lengthy narrative as the Ulysses and the rest of the convoy travel for 18 chapters through Arctic waters, enroute to Uncle Joe's worker's paradise in the teeth of German resistance.  These topics all reinforce MacLean's themes of the horror and futility of war and redemption through suffering and death.

1) The weather: MacLean spends lots of time talking about how cold it is, how windy it is, how the seas are rough, and how this can incapacitate the ships and the men. Several ships get damaged by storms and sent back to Britain, and people regularly freeze to death or have the skin ripped off their bodies when they touch cold metal.  In Chapter 6 the Allied sailors face the most severe storm in human history!  ("It was the worst storm of the war.  Beyond all doubt, had the records been preserved for Admiralty inspection, that would have proved to be incomparably the greatest storm, the most tremendous convulsion of nature since these recordings began.")  I didn't keep track of how many pages were devoted to the weather, but I felt like maybe the Weather Channel was sponsoring this novel.  Enough with the weather already!

2) The captain is sick: Captain Vallery, the world's finest captain, is always tired, always coughing up blood, etc.  This reminded me of the captain of the Space Battleship Yamato.  Maybe I'm supposed to feel bad because this dude is on his deathbed, but MacLean doesn't make him realistic or interesting enough for me to feel bad; besides, this is the middle of the most devastating war in history, in which are participating two of the most evil regimes in history--people are getting murdered in death camps and blown up in battles all over the place, why should I cry over this particular guy?  Hell, this very book is full of people getting killed in a dozen horrible ways!

Vallery, it turns out, is a Christ figure.  In the middle of the book he staggers through the ship, giving everybody a pep talk that raises their spirits as if magically, and in the end of the book he gives a speech over the PA system and dies a moment later.  Vallery's speech and death energize the British sailors, giving them the strength to fight on and redeem themselves.  I'm not a Christian so I might have missed this if a character on page 318 hadn't thought, "Vallery would have said, 'Do not judge them, for they do not understand.'"  I don't mind when the author makes it easy for us dummies in the audience.

3) Morale and mutiny: The stress faced by the crew, who are, after all, on the most stressful endeavour in human history, leads to trouble.  Most of the trouble is triggered by misbehavior by cruel officers, but there is also a rating, a career criminal, who is the ringleader of the mutinous sailors.

4) Attacks by the Germans: This is why we are reading this book, right?  The human and technological struggle between the RAF and the RN on one side, and the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine on the other, is one of the great dramas of human history!  Since I was a kid I've been fascinated and thrilled by radar, asdic, depth charges, hedgehog, torpedoes, the Hurricane, the Spitfire, the Bf-109, the Wellington, the Bismark, Window, Flak towers, the Dambusters, all that business.  When I read about this stuff I cheer on the British and their allies, and groan when something bad happens to them.  And I never feel any sympathy or guilt when I read about a U-boat being lost with all hands or an entire German city being reduced to ashes--my attitude is, "Take that you bastards!"

(Maybe that is the kind of thing about myself I shouldn't be putting on the internet for all to read.)

Anyway, the attraction of a book like this, for me at least, isn't hearing about the way ice on the deck can overbalance a ship or how some guy is coughing up blood from TB, it is hearing about naval warfare.  I have already suggested that MacLean's project in H.M.S. Ulysses is not to express patriotic sentiments or denounce Nazi Germany and celebrate its destruction, so I was doing a lot more groaning than cheering over the course of this novel.  When it comes to portraying the variety of naval actions experienced by sailors in the Second World War, however, MacLean really delivers--he unleashes on the poor doomed convoy and on us readers just about every type of German attack you can think of.  A midget submarine.  A drifting mine.  Condor reconnaissance planes.  A Hipper-class heavy cruiser.  The "largest concentration of U-boats encountered in the Arctic during the entire course of the war."  Bombers that drop all matter of ordnance: flares, glider bombs, torpedoes, and just garden variety bombs.  The fighting is so prolonged that for the first time in the history of the Arctic convoys the naval vessels run out of depth charges.

The fighting doesn't get that repetitive, because MacLean presents a variety of scenarios, many different problems the British sailors have to try to solve.  They fight in the dark, they fight with radar , they fight without radar, they hide in a smoke screen, they have to figure out what to do when a burning oil tanker is illuminating the convoy, etc.  

There are over thirty ships in the Allied convoy when it gets underway, crewed by thousands of sailors, and MacLean describes in graphic detail all the horrible things that can happen to them, all the different ways a ship can be crippled, sink or explode, and all the horrible ways people can be burned up or drowned or frozen to death or blown to pieces.  MacLean's dwells on the horror of war: the horror of men floating on the surface of the icy ocean amid a burning oil slick or paddling for their lives away from the murderous propellers of an approaching ship, and the horror of the men on intact ships who have to watch helplessly as these men, in their hundreds, perish.  We hear all about people being burned to skeletons, frozen solid, blasted to shreds, shot full of holes.  There are lots of mistakes and friendly fire incidents, and plenty of euthanasia, and lots of guilt-ridden men who commit suicide or sacrifice themselves to assuage their guilt.  Several ships and airplanes are destroyed crashing directly into enemy vessels, so that the bodies of Allied and German servicemen are intermingled.

Did I enjoy this novel?  Can I recommend it?

On the one hand I was surprised that the mission described in the novel was a tragic disaster instead of a triumph for justice and democracy.  Even though I was a little disappointed, I have to admire a book that holds genuine surprises.  We are used to adventure stories that start with some guy saying "It's a suicide mission!" and end with our heroes coming home safe after accomplishing the mission, so it was interesting to have a story in which the characters go on a suicide mission and it turns out to really be suicidal.

I learned some things I hadn't known about Royal Navy vessels: for example, I had never even head of the Kent screen, and I also had not know the Boulton Paul gun turret was mounted on ships.  That was good.  Hearing about the multitude of ways things can go wrong on a ship was also interesting.

On the other hand, there are some problems with the book.  It is too long, for one thing.  How many pages of weather do we need?  And how many guys who sacrifice themselves?  This happens again and again.  There are also so many characters and so many ships that it is not easy to keep track of them, and MacLean will not talk about some of them for a hundred pages, then they suddenly take center stage while they are getting killed.  It is hard to care about people you've never really been introduced to until they are getting immolated or disintegrated just like a bunch of other guys did a few pages ago.  This reminded me a little of the Iliad.  It's been a long time since I read the Iliad, but I seem to recall guys we never heard of before getting extravagant death scenes in which Homer laments that they will never see their wives or participate in their favorite hobbies again.

Another of the problems with H.M.S. Ulysses is that MacLean doesn't let you decide, and doesn't require you to figure out, how to feel about the characters; he tells you how to feel about them on the first page you meet them.  Captain Vallery is a unique man, an authority on music and literature who is deeply religious, hates war, volunteered to come out of retirement the first day of the war, but never brags about any of this (we readers know he is the best thing since sliced hard tack because of the omniscient narrator.)  Sublieutenant Carslake "was the quintessence of the worst by-product of the English public-school system....he was a complete ass."  Chief Petty Officer Hartley "was the Royal Navy at its best."  The mutinous stoker Riley "had at a very early age, indeed, decided upon a career of crime...his intelligence barely cleared the moron level."          

In my last blog post I talked about Mikhail Lermontov's novella "Princess Mary." Because "Princess Mary" has a first-person narrator who is deserving of skepticism, and all the characters act irrationally and are driven by their emotions, we have to figure out how to feel about every character based on their words or actions and our own moral and ethical sensibilities.  This generates a level of mystery and tension for the reader, and forces the reader to think, and means different readers will have different reactions to the novella, some identifying with or sympathizing with characters that other readers might condemn or dismiss out of hand.  The characters in "Princess Mary" also change as the story progresses, which may force readers to rethink their earlier assessments.

H.M.S. Ulysses lacks that mystery and tension, and does not provide the reader space to think and decide, because MacLean tells you immediately how to feel about each character.  With a minor exception, I don't think the characters in MacLean's novel evolve, either.  

Despite these problems, its vivid depiction of the world of the Arctic convoys, its gruesome catalog of horrors and the wide variety of naval engagements it presents make reading H.M.S. Ulysses a worthwhile experience.  Fans of military and nautical fiction, especially fiction that eschews patriotism, unrealistic heroics and happy endings, should check it out.

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The final three pages of my edition of  H.M.S. Ulysses contain ads.  Two indicate that the people at Permabooks expected MacLean's novel to appeal to history buffs.  I often see the advertised hardcover American Heritage volumes in used bookstores and antique stores.

If I'm going to read Veus Eruopesnl or Olnuzle, I'd prefer to read the original unabridged texts

The third ad is for Reader's Digest Condensed Books.  My mother's mother, whom we kids called "Nana" and whom we saw often (multiple times a week before I started school, then every weekend when I was older) had a bunch of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, and piles and piles of the Reader's Digest magazine.  (The magazine is actually mentioned in passing in H.M.S. Ulysses.)  I would often look at the pictures in the books and magazines, and read the little jokes in the magazines, but I don't think I found them very funny (perhaps just because I was too young to get the jokes.)

I do find something funny about this ad-- the drawing that accompanies it. For whatever reason, the people that put the ad together decided, instead of showcasing one of their most popular or exciting volumes, bursting with real life bestsellers, to include a picture of a book so generic that the titles on the spine are not real, and in fact are not even real English words.  I'm not even sure all the characters are real English letters!  A strange choice whose rationale I am unable to conjecture.

You can blame P. G. Wodehouse for getting me interested in late Victorian novelist George Gissing.  A guy who writes about "gray squalor" and whose books "don't sell?"  Sign me up!  I liked "The Prize Lodger," published in 1896 and collected in the 1898 volume Human Odds and Ends: Sketches and Stories, so I decided to read some more of the book's 29 stories.  Neither the college library in the little town where I am currently residing nor the Des Moines Public Library seem to have any fiction by Gissing, so I turned for succor to the folks at Google, who have scanned an 1898 edition of Human Odds and Ends held by Harvard University; the PDF is freely available (along with scans of other editions) via Google Books.

If you have some beef with Google, you can read the stories in Human Odds and Ends as e-texts at a webpage dedicated to Gissing maintained by Mitsu Matsuoka of Nagoya University.  Personally, I like old typefaces, while my career as a subaltern in the academic ranks (duties included scanning and copy-editing hundreds of pages of mind-numbingly lame social science articles which would never be peer-reviewed) has made me preternaturally suspicious about scanning errors, so I stuck with the Google scans.

Last week, I read the first five stories from Human Odds and Ends.  The website victorianresearch.org indicates that these stories all first appeared in The English Illustrated Magazine, a fact I confirmed by taking a look at issues of the magazine from the collection of the University of Michigan, also digitized by the tireless people at Google.  These PDFs preserve for posterity the illustrations adorning each story (samples below.)

"Comrades in Arms" (1894)

At a restaurant a successful young novelist, Wilfrid Langley, is sought out by a friend, Bertha Childerstone, a woman ten or so years older, who writes articles for periodicals and lives on the edge of poverty.  She falls ill, and is incapacitated for over a month, during which time Langley pays her bills, gives her money, writes articles published under her name, and visits her daily.  He has been hoping to get married (on the first page of the story Gissing suggests that his freedom is not enough to satisfy him: "No one was dependent upon him; no one restrained his liberty....And for all that... something seemed to him amiss in the bounty of the gods") and falls in love with Childerstone during her sickness.  When Childerstone is nearly recovered he makes his feelings known, but she rejects his proposal of marriage and warns him that he should not get married, that it would "spoil" him.  After she is fully recovered Langley gets over his love for Childerstone and their relationship returns to its former, platonic, character.

To me, this story seems to be about how clever women can manipulate those around them.  Much is made of Childerstone's younger sister Cissy, and how big sister Bertha guided her into marrying a man Bertha thought suitable, even manipulating events to make sure Cissy did not marry Langley.  Gissing suggests that such manipulation is not necessarily wholly selfish or malicious; Childerstone is the self-sacrificing type, and one reason for her illness and poverty is that she "worked herself to death to provide" for her younger sister, among other things financing Cissy's trip to South Africa to be with her betrothed.  Childerstone also seems to be manipulating Langley, for her own benefit--he pays her bills and does her work while she is ill--and for what she sees as his--discouraging his inclination to marry her, or marry anybody.

Which brings us to the issue of marriage in the story.  Langley's success feels hollow because he does not have anyone to share his life with; this feels like Gissing advocating marriage.  But Childerstone strongly argues against marriage--she doesn't want to get married, she "prefers the freedom of loneliness," and she urges Langley to follow the same course.  Perhaps in the same way that Proust tells us in the second volume of In Search of Lost Time that friendship is a waste of an artist's time and energy, Gissing is arguing that marriage is an impediment to a creative person, that a writer should be willing to sacrifice happiness in order to pursue his (or her) art.

"The Justice and the Vagabond" (1896)

Like "The Prize Lodger," this story tells of a man dominated by his wife.  (Marriage is getting a bad rap in these Gissing stories.)  As it did in "Comrades in Arms," illness plays a prominent role in the plot.

Dick Rutland and Henry Goodeve were close friends at boarding school, in their early teens; both wanted to travel the world.  As an adult Rutland, who is quite rich, has no opportunity to travel because his provincial wife ("a woman of narrow mind and strong will; she ruled him in every detail of his life") does not care to do so, and is always pushing him to do this or that (running for electoral office, performing highly visible charitable works, opening flower shows and presiding over public lectures) in order to maintain her status among the other country ladies.


By chance, when they are in their forties, Rutland and Goodeve meet again.  Goodeve has travelled all over the globe, working his passage on ships, painting houses, doing plumbing or carpentry, and other odd jobs.  Rutland laments that Goodeve has lived the life of a man, while he has lived the life of a "slave" and a "vegetable."  "I mean, what a glorious life! I envy you, Goodeve; with heart and soul I envy you!"

Rutland's wife is away for a few days, and he comes up with the scheme of running away to Latin America with his old chum.  He will skip town before his wife gets back, leaving her a note--he knows he hasn't got the nerve to disobey her to her face. Goodeve makes the arrangements, getting steam ship berths and so forth, but Rutland (who has been under the weather since the story's first line) gets seriously sick and dies in his sleep, leaving poor Goodeve at the docks to assume the wife got to his hen-pecked buddy before he could escape.

"The Firebrand" (1896)

In his youth, I am told, Gissing was a socialist, but after a few years got better.  He really burnishes his conservative bona fides in "The Firebrand," a portrait of a left-wing agitator who doesn't espouse radical beliefs and stir up trouble because of a sincere concern for the working classes, but out of selfish desires to be a big man and further his own career.  (Or does he?)

At age eighteen, Andrew Mowbray Catterick, considered by some "an idle dog...given to self-praise," leaves the North Country town of Mapplebeck for London.  Five years later he returns; he's had a difficult time, years of little sleep and little food (one of Gissing's recurring themes is how physically taxing the life of a professional writer is), but is now a journalist for two London papers.  His "revolutionary opinions" embarass his Conservative family (Mom has "a comfortable four hundred per annum"--on her death half of it will go to Andrew) and Catterick flaunts these opinions, as well as his contempt for the people of the small town he grew up in.  He starts giving vitriolic speeches to the local miners, urging them to strike.  "A strike there undoubtedly would be, sooner or later, and how could he more profitably occupy his leisure than in helping to bring it about? The public eye would at once be fixed on him; with care and skill he might achieve more than local distinction...."

The more trouble Andrew stirs up the worse things get socially for his family ("Respectable Mapplebeck talked indignantly of his reckless and wicked meddling....")  There is even talk of postponing sister Bertha's wedding to the Dickensianly-named Robert Holdsworth, a solicitor.  Bertha lets slip that her brother is a coward, and Holdsworth forges a threatening letter to him; ostensibly it is from miners opposed to a strike, who warn that if a strike occurs, they will beat Catterick up.  This threat is all too believable (Catterick is well aware that the strike will hurt the miners financially, and that many are prone to violence), and when the strike begins, Catterick, making various excuses, flees to London.


Gissing certainly seems skeptical of the wisdom of the strike, and portrays Andrew Catterick as a selfish, hypocritical coward.  But Gissing also points out that, having lived in poverty himself in London, Catterick has some sincere sympathy for the workers.  While Holdsworth and the female Cattericks are the victors in the story, they win by trickery and are as selfish, or more selfish, than Andrew: like Andrew (who wants to become a famous journalist) they are driven by a desire for the approval of their social peers and a low opinion of their social inferiors.  Nobody in the story has pure motives, and nobody is particularly sympathetic, with the possible exception of the miners, whom their social betters callously disregard and use as pawns in their status games.

"The Inspiration" (1895)

On a whim, a wealthy man invites a pathetic door-to-door salesman in for dinner.  The pedlar is honest and intelligent, but also lazy:

"I'm one of those men, sir, that weren't made to get on in the world. As a lad, I couldn't stick to anything—couldn't seem to put my heart into any sort of work, and that was the ruin of me—for I had chances to begin with. I've never done anything to be ashamed of—unless it's idleness."

I know how you feel, buddy!

The wealthy guy feeds him a hearty meal and gives him a pep talk, invigorating the pedlar, who runs out and convinces his childhood sweetheart, now a wealthy widow, to marry him.  He could never have done it without the rich guy's support:

"Do you suppose," continued the other, gravely, "that I could ever have done that if it hadn't been for your dinner ? Never! Never! I should have crept on through my miserable life, and died at last in the workhouse...."

I think this is the only of the six Gissing stories I have read in which marriage is not looked upon as some kind of mistake or (as in "The Firebrand") the impetus to some kind of misbehavior.

On the face of it, this is a story with a happy ending.  But when we consider how narrow a margin (a single meal!) lies between a life of lonely misery and one of joy and comfort, and that it was only by the merest luck that the pedlar got on the right side of that line, Gissing seems to be leading us to think that our lives are governed by chance, or a whimsical Fate or God.  (The pedlar directly compares his benefactor to "the finger of Providence.")

On the other hand, maybe Gissing is suggesting that while the universe appears chaotic, in fact Providence metes out justice.  The pedlar, being lazy, suffered loneliness and a crummy job for years, but after this period of penance was given a second chance.  (Being essentially honest and decent, he was not sentenced to Hell, only to Purgatory, where he was cleansed of the sin of idleness.)  This interpretation is bolstered by the character of the widow, an innocent person who is rescued from a life of loneliness and the clutches of legacy hunters by the pedlar's unexpected arrival.

"The Poet's Portmanteau" (1895)

I've heard that Gissing's work is full of creative people who struggle to make ends meet and create their art, and here we have an example.  In this story a young poet, having spent ten months in the country writing a long poem, The Hermit of the Tor, returns to London to try to sell the piece.  At a lodging house he meets an attractive, educated young woman, Miss Rowe, who has fallen on hard times; each makes a powerful impression on the other. Rowe, a starving artist, driven to desperation, tricks the poet out of eight shillings and steals the portmanteau which holds the only copy of The Hermit of the Tor. She sells the luggage and all its contents, save the poem.  The money is the difference between life and death for her; she is able to leave London and get a crummy job (her art career is abandoned) which keeps body and soul together, and then marry a rich man she does not love.

Eight years after his manuscript was stolen the poet has abandoned his poetry career and taken up the lucrative trade of writing sentimental novels.  A mysterious woman, an aficionado of his novels, calls on him, to return the manuscript of The Hermit of the Tor, which she says was given to her by Rowe.  Rowe, she claims, recently died.

The poet, who has never married, is intrigued by this mystery woman, who will not give her name. She advises him to eschew marriage ("I'm delighted to know that you keep your independence.")  It is strongly implied that this woman is the former Miss Rowe, and that she and the poet would have found happiness together if her poverty had not pushed her to fraud and thievery.  The day these perfect mates met, instead of setting them together on the road to happiness, set them on a course that would see them turning their backs on their artistic dreams and living lives of financial security and loneliness.

As in "Inspiration," we see how thin for some people is the margin between happiness and misery, even between survival and death, and as in "Comrades in Arms" we see a woman arguing that marriage stifles an artist.

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I like these kinds of tragic stories, in which love relationships are fraught with peril and people's hopes and dreams are dashed, and Gissing's style is good.  Being over a century old, they also provide a little insight into ways of living and thinking of our predecessors; these stories have enough raw material about such issues as class and gender to get any social science or liberal arts grad student salivating.

Googling around, I noticed some people have awarded Gissing with the appellation "feminist," and it seems worthwhile to consider how he portrays women in these five stories.  Do they provide reason to believe Gissing has earned the feminist seal of approval?

On the one hand, we do have examples of mothers and the wives who stifle the men attached to them by blood or marriage, a time-honored male complaint.  But both sexes suffer from the yoke of matrimony in Gissing's stories, and in "Comrades in Arms" and "The Poet's Portmanteau" the institution's most vocal critics are women who value freedom and independence.  Also, in "The Poet's Portmanteau" the mysterious visitor points out one of society's double standards: "She [Miss Rowe] was a girl who did what is supposed to be the privilege of men—sowed wild oats."  Maybe Gissing really does deserve the feminist label.

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I'll be exploring more of Gissing's body of work in the future.  Until then (if it is not already too late!), make sure to think twice before letting somebody put that ring on your finger.