C.S. Forester’s novel was published 1929 and judging from the title you’d be forgiven to think that this concerns a hero on a ship named Resolution. However, the blurb will correct that: Resolution is an uninhabited barren rock in the Galapagos Islands, and it’s 1914, the early days of the First World War.
The entire narrative is from the omniscient point of view. It begins by telling us that Leading Seaman Albert Brown lay dying on Resolution. Not auspicious. Why read on? And yet Forester’s style draws you in; a short two-and-a-half pages for the first chapter. Then Chapter Two takes us ‘more than twenty years earlier’, with a Lieutenant-Commander Saville-Samarez, RN sharing a train carriage with twenty-nine-year-old virginal Agatha Brown, who was leaving her father and siblings for five days sojourn with a family friend in Ealing.
The descriptions throughout are excellent: that morning at breakfast her father, ‘with the newspaper propped up against the marmalade jar he would bring his mouth down to his fork rather than his fork up to his mouth, and he would open the latter alarmingly (which was quite unpleasant when, as was usual, he had not quite swallowed the preceding mouthful) and thrust the fork home and snap down his big moustache upon it… He drank his tea noisily through his moustache…’ (p9)
Thereafter, the pair spent three delirious days in a hotel… and then parted amicably. Agatha gave birth, to the distress of her family, but made the best of it and managed to support herself and her boy Albert, inculcating in him the desire to join the Royal Navy: ‘the sprouting of the grain she was sowing in such seemingly inhospitable soil’(p47). As the years passed, she kept abreast of the latest naval developments, the building programme, and the advancement of a certain officer named Saville-Samarez.
There’s a humorous interlude when Albert’s headmaster courts Agatha, ‘the widow’. Until he reveals his true nature and political beliefs; the man leaves, deciding Mrs Brown is mad.
Sadly, she is assailed with incurable cancer. ‘Agatha’s life went out of her while she floated above a vast grey sea sombrely tinted with silhouettes of battle squadrons, the grey craggy citadels of England’s glory and hope. Their funnel smoke swirled around her, veiling the worried freckled face of the child of her sin, and she smiled happily.’ (p58).
After his mother’s tragic death, Albert fulfilled her ambition for him and following training joined the newly commissioned third-class cruiser Charybdis.
The war began. The Royal Navy was on the lookout for the German warships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. One of the German escort ships was the Ziethen commanded by Captain Von Lutz. Charybdis engaged Ziethen but was sunk. However, Brown survived. The engagement had left the Ziethen seriously damaged and its captain determined to seek refuge anchored in the concealing bay that the island Resolution offered.
Aware that the British fleet were scouring the Pacific, Albert Brown set out to prevent the Germans making Ziethen seaworthy. Then it’s a battle of wits and indomitable courage.
A gripping and at times quite moving account of lives well lived – and sacrificed.
And an excellent cover painting.
Editorial comment:
Word repetition didn’t bother Forester – see the above quotation: ‘quite’. It doesn’t matter.
He was fond of ‘myriad’, used often.
The apparently cold calculating analytical narrative works very well. The omniscient viewpoint was necessary to convey the truth of the story.
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