Digression: Yes, I know, I’m starting with a digression. But after the digression, I’m going into something else that’s a lot like a digression itself, which is the story of how this book came into my hands. It’s an interesting story, but putting both that story and an actual review of the book into one note makes for a long note. Now, Gentle Readers might reasonably expect to see the story about the book landing in my lap and no review at all, much less a review long enough to require a digression at the very beginning of the note. But Your Humble Blogger needed to write the review, for reasons to be revealed towards the end of that story, just before the review. My point, and I sort of have one in this digression, is to apologize for the long post, and let you know what’s in it. End digression.
One of the things that is interesting (to YHB) about publishing and the internet is watching how publishers of old-fashioned books try out various ways of using the internet to sell me books. One way, of course, is the Baen way, putting whole texts or at least several chapters on-line as a sort of Free Library, figuring that it will, in the long run, help sell books. I don’t know how that’s working out, and neither do they, but it’s not so obviously working that every other publisher has been leaping to do it, too. On the other hand, since the internet is so clearly a terrific marketing device, publishers are putting a little ingenuity into figuring out how to use it.
For a year or so, now, St. Martin’s press has been emailing me excerpts from new books through their Read It First campaign. Each week they pick a book, and then they send five short excerpts over the week. Over the week, I get to read the first chapter or so, if I want to. Usually, on Monday I figure out that I have no interest in the book, and then I delete the next four messages unread. Maybe three books in the last three months have interested me enough to read the excerpt, and one of those interests me enough for me to think I might want to pick it up in the library someday. Now, that’s not a big payoff for St. Martin’s, but on the other hand, what does it cost them? If, just maybe, after two or three years of emails, they finally get me interested in actually buying one book, how much profit do they have? One book’s profit, and that ain’t bad for a marginal cost of, let’s see, five emails a week for a hundred and fifty weeks, at a per email cost of nothing, that adds up to ... profit!
Harper Collins, though, is taking a different tack, if you’ll pardon the seafaring metaphor. Their marketing device is called First Look, and the cool part here is that they actually send you a book. Or they might. It’s a sort of lottery, where the Reader signs up for a book (or a few books), and for each book the publisher chooses a few Readers to send the book. Those Readers agree to write a little review thingy, which the publisher then can mine for publicity and marketing. In return, the Reader gets to keep the book, and in addition to read a proof copy before the book hits the shelf. In other words, the Reader gets (a) something in hand, and (2) to be on the Inside. The publisher gets Buzz, ideally, and also a certain identification; I will be more aware, in future, of which books are Harper Collins books, if only because I’m likely to go back to the site and look at what’s coming up in hopes of getting another free book.
Yes, another. One of the books that was available was Adam Nicolson’s latest, Seize the Fire. I sent my name in, mentioning that I had enjoyed Mr. Nicolson’s last book quite a lot, and that I had enjoyed his father’s memoir more than somewhat, and that his grandfather was a focus of substantial interest for me, as was his grandmother, and great-grandmother as well, if it comes to that. Whether they read all of that, or whether the name just went into the cyberhat, or whether there were no other readers with any interest in a proof copy of a book on Trafalgar, I don’t know. I do know that they sent one to me, and that I now owe them a review. Which begins below.
Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar is an immensely frustrating, reasonably enjoyable, and quite informative book. If you don’t know much about Trafalgar, the Napoleonic wars, or naval combat around 1800, and Your Humble Blogger knew very little about such things, you will learn a large quantity of things from reading the book. Unfortunately, you will also pass by many things that won’t make much sense to you at all. And, in my case, there was a sneaking suspicion that much of what I was learning was not true. Or at least that I wasn’t getting an accurate picture of it in proper context.
Mr. Nicolson attempts to put the battle in a cultural as well as military context. His reasons why the British won are as much cultural as military, too. He identifies a large number of cultural threads, each one differentiating the English from the Spanish and French. He doesn’t particularly weave those threads together into an English Culture, nor does he explain how all of these disparate threads, each quite weak, combine to such a strong force. For the record, they include
- Millennial visionary apocalypticism, seeing great violence as a prelude to the Millenium.
- Middle Class entrepreneurialism, going and getting prizes and becoming rich (and noble)
- A conception of Honour as tied to glory, that is, to victory, rather than noble defeat
- Violent society at home, high crime, etc
- Reverence for Order, or at least orderliness, allowing for pre-battle conditions to be superior
- Humanity, in the sense of a humane attitude towards the vulnerable
Now, each one of those is arguable. The French had a reverence for Order or at least Efficiency that led them to canonize the Guillotine. Similarly, the notoriously high rate of violent crime in Britain at the time may not have had as great an impact on the island culture as continental wars had on their cultures. As for the conception of Honour, well, this is the Britain which celebrated the six hundred riding into the valley of death. I don’t mean to say that Mr. Nicolson is wrong about all of these, just that they are spectrum matters, not toggle matters, and as such are substantially less persuasive, each by each.
Further, what all this comes down to is that the British Fleet won Trafalgar because they were more British than the Combined Fleet, and therefore worthier of the victory. This would be easier to take coming from somebody who was not British himself. Not that the Britishness Mr. Nicolson depicts is wholly or even mostly admirable, but when it comes down to it, that’s what is going on. And even if that aspect had got past the Anglophile in me, and it might well have done, it was bound to wake up the rhetorician. Because, ultimately, it’s a tautology. British culture must have been better prepared for victory, because the British navy won the battle, and therefore whatever British culture contributed, it contributed to victory. Frankly, it would have been a more interesting book had it been arguing that Napoleon’s men were more culturally suited to victory, but were defeated by events. That may suffer from being false, but it would have been more interesting, particularly from an Englishman.
Ooh, harsh. No, really, I enjoyed the book a lot. The descriptions of the battle were breathtaking, and I found myself annoying my Best Reader by muttering “My goodness!” whilst reading, and when asked what I was reacting to, having it be another aspect of the complicated and bloody massacre. I’m not a reader of Tall Ship adventure, so a lot of my ideas about naval battle in the period are taken from pirate movies, which (a) appear not to be an accurate historical description of naval warfare in the period, and (2) usually involve many fewer ships than Trafalgar. So I was unprepared for how close the ships get to each other (Nelson was shot by a musketman in the rigging of a French ship—that close) and how much damage they can do.
Also, in pirate movies, nobody is trying to keep the other guy’s ship afloat (for the reward). If you want to take the ship, but don’t want to sink it, your best bet is to kill all the sailors on it. Preferably, before they kill you. Serious carnage. Unfortunately, Mr. Nicolson too frequently refers to that carnage as indescribable, or beyond description, or unimaginable, or unthinkable, or some such turn of phrase. It’s a minor point, but it got on my nerves.
Another thing that got on my nerves, and I am willing right off to admit that this is because I grew up on a desert and don’t know a jib from a jibe, but Mr. Nicolson’s writing style combines a heavy wordiness (which I quite like) with what is obviously a fantastic familiarity with the mechanics of naval, er, navigation, which frequently left YHB, er, at sea.
That too is what you must imagine on the morning of Trafalgar, as the logs laconically describe the evolutions of the fleet, responding to a shift in the wind by coming on to the other tack, ‘wearing ship’ by taking her stern though the wind, raising the top gallant yards as the wind drops and more sail is needed, shaking out the reefs in the topsails, setting the steering or studding sails with which to add the slightest extra fraction of a knot in the light airs, setting the royals above the topsails for that little bit more, and then lowering the ships’ boats from the davits and towing them on long lines astern. p. 63Um, yes, going fast were they? Or were they? Anyway, lots of sail, yes. Yes? Yes. I think. Er.
He also, on more than one occasion, uses some technical term for something (sometimes one of those marvelous six-noun phrases involving a top-main-rig-mast-bracket-sprit-fish-jib-jab-jubberwocky that is really the right phrase but sounds terribly made up) and then explains it, not in terms this old desert rat might have a chance to understand, but in forty or fifty words impenetrable to me but (I’m guessing) clear to the weekend sailor. Well, there it is.
Hmmm. I’ve spent an awful lot of this note complaining about one thing and another, without specifying what he does well. And I’m not sure I can specify it, more than to say I learned a lot and enjoyed learning it. Mr. Nicolson clearly immersed himself in the material; I imagine him following his grandfather’s advice and first getting a real feel for his stuff, and then sitting down to write it without worrying overmuch about notes or details, but trying to transmit that feel for the subject to the reader. Of course, you can’t get away with the kind of amateur biography Harold Nicolson did so awfully well, and in fact Adam Nicolson provides lots and lots of details and quotes and notes. In the proof version (with no footnotes or endnotes at all) this can be quite confusing, particularly as with limited primary source material, he often inserts into one scene a firsthand description of a quite different but similar scene. I expect that will all be much clearer in the published book.
So. I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I enjoyed God’s Secretaries, in part because I started out with less interest in the topic, but in part because it’s not as good a book. I enjoyed it more than enough to want to read his next history book (which I hope will not be entirely about boats). I enjoyed it enough to recommend it to the following category of friends and relations: Those who are not historians (as the historians will find the lack of academic rigor too frustrating, even in a version with endnotes), not desert rats, vaguely (at least) interested in naval warfare and the turn of the nineteenth century, and people with a high tolerance for the English. That seems like a fair number of people, right?
Digression: I have two more things to add to this already risibly long note. First, as it happens, the book is not the only thing aimed at the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, so Gentle Readers who want a two-minute introduction to the battle can go over to Guardian’s flash animated diagram, which does, I think, a reasonably good job. Second, although the Infernoqrusher movement was and remains primarily a joke, it is a joke that has highlighted (to me, anyway) certain things about attitudes towards violence (in fiction, and in life), and the unhelpful reductiveness of adopting either an attitude of uncritical awe or uncritical revulsion. My point, though, is that having caught Infernoqrusher, as it were, YHB keeps finding things that seem as if they were to be part of its solid philosophical foundation, if it weren’t all a joke. In that vein, this quote:
Damage and devastation were now the currency of victory, just as, a moment before, care and system had been the necessity. Prudence, so essential to the wellbeing of the fleet, was now to be abandoned. Choice did not signify. This was neither bravado nor bloodlust, but the application of a highly attuned mind to the essence of battle. It is a form of negative capability, a trans-rational sense of when interference and attentiveness, the giving and structuring of orders, becomes secondary. It is the point at which the preparedness of a system is so all-encompassing that the system no longer needs to be looked after. If a system is good enough, it must be abandoned to something far more wildly energetic, the thing that creates victory out of the destruction it wreaks. (p. 242)End digression, and end note.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.