[On March 19th, 1951, Herman Wouk published The Caine Mutiny. That’s one of many important American novels set on ships, so this week for its 75th anniversary I’ll AmericanStudy Caine and four others, leading up to a weekend tribute to a colleague studying maritime meanings!]
On how an influential technothriller embodies the worst and best of nautical novels.
Back in June 2022, I dedicated a blog post to my youthful love for Tom Clancy and his early technothrillers. Check out that prior post if you would, and then come on back for a couple further thoughts on Clancy’s debut, the nautical novel The Hunt for Red October (1984).
Welcome back! As I discussed in that post, Clancy’s more overt turn toward right-wing politics in his later novels, as well as my own evolving AmericanStudier consciousness, forced me to see his first few novels (which I really did love) in a new light. For one example that’s relevant to this week’s series: in Hunt for Red October, every American sailor and government official is some shade of good guy (even if some are more competent than others), while the only Russian sailor or government official who is not some shade of bad guy is the one who is defecting to the West (Red October’s Captain Marko Ramius, famously played by Sean Connery in the 1990 film adaptation). But if I’m being honest, that’s not really a flaw of Clancy’s book so much as a feature of this genre, one shared for example by a nautical novel that remains an all-time favorite of mine to this day, Alistair MacLean’s H.M.S. Ulysses (1955). Not all nautical novels are either set during wars or feature antagonists to our main characters, but many do, and when they do, they almost inevitably create these kinds of us vs. them dualities.
But there’s something else that H.M.S. Ulysses shares with Red October, and with the best of this genre as a whole: depictions of striking and inspiring and very human bravery, transcendent moments of courage that come not when characters don’t feel or defy fear, but rather when they find ways (pace Ned Stark) to be brave nonetheless. Marko Ramius and his famous American counterpart Jack Ryan (introduced in this novel of Clancy’s) are the most obviously examples of that trend, but for my money the best character in Clancy’s novel, the young sonar operator Ronald “Jonesy” Jones, most succinctly and successfully represents this quality. Jonesy is just a guy, and from everything we can tell prior to these events had neither the opportunity nor the propensity to stand out. But in the course of this novel he does his job so well, in some of the most high-stress moments possible, that he saves a number of lives, if not indeed keeping the world from the possibility of war. Those of us who love nautical novels have to recognize their flaws of course, but we can also note and admire the ways they can inspire us, and Clancy’s exemplifies both ends of that spectrum.
Tribute post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Nautical novels you’d nominate or other shipboard stories you’d share?
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