I bought this for my dad because I know he enjoys the movie with Sidney Poitier and Richard Widmark, though I have no clue whether he's read it already or not. But his birthday isn't until next month, so there's time for me to read it first!
Ben Munceford's a freelance TV journalist who scores a ride on a US destroyer in the Arctic, the Bedford. It searches out any attempts by the Soviets to sneak into the sovereign waters of NATO countries, and there's one sub in particular the ship's captain is determined to catch. Munceford joins the ship at the same time as a new ship's doctor, and both slowly realize (Munceford slower than the doc) that there's something not right on this ship. No one grumbles, no one complains, no one will even admit if they're feeling under the weather, let alone try to fake it to get out of work. The entire crew is whipped into such a fever pitch of devotion to Captain Finlander they can hardly be pried away from their stations.
Once the Bedford locates the sub - unsubtly nicknamed Moby Dick - the hunt is on. Even once the sub is back in international waters, where it has every right to be, Finlander insists on hounding it, and his crew is only to happy to obey, even as they stretch to the breaking point.
Rascovich is very good at writing the heightened tension and how it takes its toll. Not just in the big ways, that men vomit from the strain or struggle to stay awake at their posts, but little things. No one being able to laugh at the captain's jokes, or the sonarman jiggling his knee constantly as he strains to listen. Rascovich works at the notion that during the Cold War, military men were encouraged to be in the mindset of potentially fighting or killing at any moment, but by the nature of the conflict, were never allowed the, I guess, blow-off of pressure from actually fighting. They were just supposed to be in this heightened readiness, all the time, forever.
There are two people on the ship not from the U.S. Navy in the book. One is Commodore Schrepke, a former Nazi U-boat commander who escaped the Soviets and represents NATO, and a Lt. Packer from the British Navy. Schrepke is there as sort of the voice of the Russian sub, as a former submariner himself. We never see or know the thoughts of the Russians, so his observations are the closest we come.
Packer's less useful. Rascovich gives him a Lt. Dan (Forrest Gump) like backstory of men in his family dying at sea for the British Navy for the last 200 years. His father was on the Hood when it was sunk by the Bismark, and it just so happens at one point, the Russian sub tries to hide near the wreckage of the Hood. Which freaks Packer out a bit, but ultimately feels like a vestigial, tacked on subplot. Likewise, while Munceford is supposed to offer an outsider's perspective on all this, he drops out of the story for long stretches, and is written as such a shallow hack of a reporter, ultimately believing in nothing, that it's hard for him to matter much. No one on the entire ship likes him, but it's because he's generally unpleasant, not because he's good at ferreting out things they'd rather keep hidden.
'Commodore Schrepke answered with a wistful irony: "What you feel for me now is the kinship of the damned, my poor captain."'
No comments:
Post a Comment