Puttering in the Study

Hornblower and the Island / Hornblower and the Journey Home - James Keffer

 

 

These two books are part of a series Hornblower's Legacy by author James Keffer. It is fan fiction set within the framework of C.S. Forester's Hornblower novels. In betweeen the two that I read are four books about a naval officer associated with Hornblower William Brewer.  (I think Keffer made up the character, but it's possible he was in Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies), but I just read the first and last, which about principally about Hornblower

The first book fits in several years after the events in Lord Hornblower, and finds Hornblower appointed to the governorship of St. Helena to deal with a restive former emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. The second book takes place over 20 years later, long after Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies, and follows Hornblower's adventures as the British representative to the exhumation of Napoleon prior to his repatriation to France.

Overall, I enjoyed both stories greatly, and didn't see anything that I thought was grossly inconsistent with the originals, nor bad writing. There are several points I think are to be made, though.

First, Hornblower and the Island, the first book in the series, follows Forester more closely. In every book except Lieutenant Hornblower – which follows Bush instead of Hornblower - Forester follows Hornblower only, spending a great deal of time on Hornblower's internal struggles and monologues.  By contrast, Keffer willl have scenes where other characters are the subject, such as Lady Barbara or Napoleon.  The second book is full of this, and the scenes with Hornblower are, while perhaps still the majority of the scenes in the book, only a part of the tale.  Perhaps unavoidably, the internal struggles are almost wholly absent.

 

Which leads to my second small nit. Following his elevation to the peerage, Hornblower's wife should be identified as Lady Hornblower, not Lady Barbara, but Keffer never does this. It's a minor point, but is odd that after Forrester specifically explains this point in Lord Hornblower, Keffer doesn't pick up on it. Perhaps he thinks that Lady Barbara would still continued to have been used informally.

 

Which leads me to my third point. Keffer, perhaps unavoidably, has Hornblower become more garrrulous and positively chatty. It is perhaps unavoidable that in fan fiction writers will avoid the withering self-criticism that Forrester has Hornblower engaging in throughout the series, but I couldn't help but see some places where he missed some opportunities for Hornblower to question himself and instead had him sharing doubts and concerns openly, in some cases with Barbara, which is simply not in character, as the last two Forester books make clear.  He simply cannot unburden himself with anyone with the possible exception of the Comte de Gracay, yet he does so here.

 

Of course, Keffer is writing about times where Hornblower should have been less prone to self-doubt and self-analysis, and certainly he may have been able to overcome it later in life as in the second book, but it still seems to leave out a central part of the character.

 

The other major hole in the books was in Hornblower's immediate adoption of Bonaparte as someone he not only respected but considered a close friend. With the first book following fairly closely on the heels of Hornblower's traumatic experiences during the Hundred Days when Napoleon tried to return to power, including the death of Marie Gracay, it simply did not make sense to me that given what Forester says Hornblower thought in that book, Hornblower would have been so friendly to Napoleon immediately. The reasons why he would have eventually respected him and developed a friendship were well presented, but he should have started from a much more hostile position, and engaged in a great deal of self-doubt and loathing, weighted down with guilt over the countless friends and the lover that Bonaparte's activities had killed before he reached the point of friendship that Keffer has him at. That friendship should have been hard-won and the central theme of the book, but it is simply a given.  Again, I read this almost immediately after reading Lord Hornblower, and it just didn't mesh with what Forester was saying in that book that Hornblower was thinking.

 

I won't spoil the one major change Keffer makes to the Hornblower canon, but I can't help but wholly approve of it. If Star Trek could do it, surely Hornblower could be given a little grace.

 

In the end, I enjoyed the pair of books very much - I think I read the second start to finish in a single day. I don't think I am going to read the Brewer books, but I do recommend the Hornblower ones if you care about the character in the series.  They reminded me a little of the Downton Abbey movies.  They take characters that you care about and only subject them to mild worry.  I'm okay with that.

The Local – Joey Hartstone

On a recent New York Times recommended reading list is a new legal thriller – this time set in Marshall and featuring a (fictional) local patent lawyer.  I thought readers might like a review from a local perspective.

The book is a murder mystery set in Marshall, and features a native Marshallite (and former law clerk) who works as local counsel in the burgeoning patent docket.  So the three things you might want to know are (1) how close is the book’s EDTX patent docket, compared to the real thing; (2) how close is the book’s Marshall, compared to the real thing; and (3) is it a good read?

The Book’s Eastern District of Texas Patent Docket

Authors of fiction have the privilege of altering reality when selecting the setting for their book.  For example, Jake Tapper’s recent political thriller posited a world where vacancies in the U.S. House of Representatives are filled by appointment by governors.  That allowed him to install an unusually politically inexperienced congressman as required for the plot of his book.

Similarly, here, either because he didn’t consult sufficiently with a patent lawyer or decided for his own reasons to alter the structure of the local patent docket, Hartstone created a docket where patent venue can be established wherever a single act of patent infringement has occurred, and the entire Eastern District of Texas consists of a single district judge presiding over a court where jurors are drawn exclusively from the citizens of Marshall Texas, which he assumes would mean six high school degrees between eight jurors, with at least one not only illiterate but vocal about it. So when the courtroom deputy came up one copy of the court’s instructions short in a patent trial, Juror Number Three tells the judge not to worry about it because “I can’t read none anyway.”  Uh, not quite.

Hartstone’s EDTX docket originated with judge-created patent rules, which is accurate enough, but he departs from the real district by characterizing the docket as being based on EDTX jurors awarding “ungodly sums of money” which he attributes to jurors “who are overlooked for their entire lives” being given a modicum of power.  In truth, local patent verdicts tend to skew low – not the 20x what the (fictional) plaintiff asks for, establishing the docket.  The reason the EDTX docket started out with 18 straight plaintiff wins in the early 2000s had nothing to do with the jurors, but with the defense trial teams from patent prosecution shops who simply didn’t know how to try a lawsuit before a jury compared to the former personal injury lawyers that were representing plaintiffs.  By 2006 they had figured this out, and ever since verdicts have been almost exactly even, with some years (2007 and 2013 come to mind) representing bloodbaths for plaintiffs.  In general, the district portrayed in the book is the district portrayed in the recurring hatchet jobs about the Eastern District in the popular and legal media – right down to the skating rink “that Samsung put up.” Locals know better – in fact I was the city commissioner that moved approval of budget for the city purchasing and installing a skating rink for our Wonderland festival two decades ago - years before Samsung knew that Marshall was spelled with two “l”s.

The portrayal of what local counsel do is also a little off - we rarely get to close, and no lawyer in Harrison County has ever stood in front of a local jury and said “Go Mavericks”.  Why?  Because whether it is a state court jury chosen from the citizens of Harrison County, or a federal court jury chosen from six counties, Marshall is only one of many high schools in the area, and the quickest way to piss off anybody locally is to make a derogatory comment about their high school.  But, again, the book assumes that both federal and state juries are chosen only from the residents of the city of Marshall, so the above doesn't apply.   And that actually enhances a few plot points, so, again, I’m not certain that the author – a screenwriter – didn’t deliberately simplify the judicial system for his own dramatic purposes, building in a local bias.  Which, again, is completely legit.  I just mind when Congressmen do it.

But for purposes of the book it is a distinction without a difference, since while I was expecting Hartstone to base the novel on a patent infringement case, and the supposed predilections of local jurors in federal court, which is what he initially seemed to be laying the groundwork for (and knowing the shows he’s written for it seemed likely) the novel goes in a completely different direction.

Thus while the novel’s characterization of practice in federal court - with banging of gavels and multiple fistfights in court and f-bombs lobbed at district judges by lawyers and litigants alike - is quite entertaining, if something less than accurate, the action quickly moves out of federal court.

The Book’s Marshall, Texas

Okay, no book about Marshall that was written without someone from Marshall looking over the author’s shoulder is going to be perfect, but this one is pretty damn close.  Hartstone has clearly never actually been to Marshall (he repeatedly refers to the Confederate soldier statue on the square as bronze, and makes a mistaken topographical assumption that will become important later) but he gets the big things right – how much we know about each other, how far back experiences and disputes go, and how important high school football is.  I particularly enjoyed his illustration of just how much of a jackass someone in a small town can be. It's a full-time job for some people. Sometimes an inherited position. And characters repeatedly identify with and relate back to incidents in high school football, and that’s exactly how we are.  I was walking the first New York Times reporter around town 20 years ago and told him that the right question would start a 15 minute story about the late 1980s and early 1990s Marshall football teams – and not just the one that won the state championship in 1990, but the one built around Odell Beckham a few years earlier.  (Like my dad, Odell went on to play football at LSU, and later had a son who played football too). Hartstone knows where the closest federal correctional facility is, what the hotels are, and if he doesn’t describe the downtown parking arrangements around the courthouse with complete accuracy (to say nothing of the security ones), it becomes clear later in the book that he needs a specific setting for his plot.  And no, the old courthouse courtroom doesn’t have mahogany floors, but it is a terrific place to try a lawsuit.

So points for a pretty accurate depiction of the town, even if the constant references between fictional Marshallites to the “old Harrison County Courthouse” and the “main/town square” are a little grating.  (It’s the “old courthouse” and “the square”).

One other thing.  Every book club in town is interested in who the characters “really are”.  It is to the author's credit that it is absolutely plain that none are based on a real person.  Clearly the judge at the beginning of the story did the same thing that Judge Ward did in 2000 coming up with patent local rules, but neither that character nor any of the others bear any similarity to any of the judges or lawyers that I know either in federal or state court.  Which isn’t surprising – Hartstone is an experienced screenwriter and didn’t develop the story by coming to Marshall and talking to local lawyers and judges and then lightly fictionalizing a story about a case.  He came up with a story and characters, and realized the story could grow out of a setting he’d heard about from patent lawyer friends. It's not a story about the patent docket per se.

The Murder Mystery

So how good is the actual story?  I read it three weeks ago when our family was on vacation.  I downloaded the morning we started one of two half-day tours in Vienna, and stayed up till almost 3 am to finish it.

As I said, Marshall and the federal patent docket is only the setting for the beginning of the story.  After that, you’re in a small Southern town familiar as a legal thriller setting for generations, and your attention is on the characters and the plot twists.  And that’s what kept me up half the night finishing the book – I just couldn’t put it down until I knew whodunit.

And it was only at the end that I figured out why the story wasn’t making sense to me – it was because I’m too Marshall.  The plot of the story places particular emphasis on the local counsel’s office at the corner of Franklin and Bowie, and what could be seen of the federal courthouse from there.  But I could never get past that - because that was my Aunt Toddy’s house.  She was actually the aunt of a friend of my dad’s, but I grew up mowing her yard, and when after she passed her home became everyone’s favorite downtown restaurant, it was actually where my wife and I had our first date.  And I knew you can't see the back door of the federal courthouse from there.

I finally figured out that the author had assumed there was a line of sight from the fictional law office to the back door of the courthouse.  And there would have been, had the topography not resulted in a drop of several dozen feet between the courthouse square which, as locals know, is on the hill where in 1843 Peter Whetstone pulled out his whiskey jug and proceeded to get the commissioners deciding where to site the new town so drunk they decided to call it a day and put the town square on Whetstone's property.

So yes, I highly recommend it.  But not for the patent docket or local counsel aspect.  That’s just where the story starts.

The Cartographers: A Novel - Peng Shepherd

The idea of a novel built around the hidden secrets contained in maps was catnip to me when I first read about this book. It’s a variation on the Dan Brown – style archaeological porn that I used to love to read, but weaves in enough urban fantasy to give it interest from that angle as well.
The story is an interesting one, but I quickly got the many similar characters mixed up, which kept me from getting as engaged in the story as I should have. The writing was also distracting, since most of the book is told in the form of narratives of events long past, but which contained such detail that they simply weren’t plausible as the “here’s what we did with your parents in college 25 years ago”. The work presented as flashbacks, but as real-time exposition, and the distinction kept being a distraction to me.
One other thing that I felt was a distraction was that a plot device was used twice. The story is that of a group of college friends, and it was I thought a very effective plot device when one of the current characters turned out to have been within that group, which the protagonist didn’t know. Then a few chapters later, another major character is revealed as having been one as well, which no one knew. It was clever the first time. It was just too convenient the second time.
Anyway, it’s a good story, and I enjoyed the book, but I think it enjoyed narrative a bit too much, at the expense of plausibility. I think the underlying story could have been told a bit more realistically.

Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel - Anthony Doerr

This novel beggars description. Throughout, it is multiple stories ranging from medieval Eastern Europe and Constantinople to the Korean War, the 1970s, the near future, and the farther future. At the end, the author ties them together into a coherent story, but the process of getting there is exhausting because of the suffering contained in each of the component stories. So while it is a terrific piece of writing, it isn’t an easy or a pleasant read.

Quantum of Nightmares (Laundry Files, 11) – Charles Stross

Unlike the 10th installment of the Laundry Files, it only took me a couple of weeks to finish this one.  While it used much of the same cast as its Peter Pan–inspired predecessor, and added a Mary Poppins-inspired character, the plot and the characters made more sense this time around.  And the macabre touches made it fit a little better into the Lovecraftian universe that this series originally inhabited a little more consistently.

Still looking forward to seeing Bob Howard come back, which we are apparently promised in the next book, which is a prequel "novella."

Dead Lies Dreaming - Charles Stross

This is the latest installment in the "Laundry" series, but has nothing to do with that agency.  Instead, it is exploring a spinoff set of characters, using Stross' latest conceit – adding an overlay from another literary work.  In this case, it is Peter Pan, with names and characters drawn from that story.

The biggest problem I had with this book was that there are so many similar new characters who aren't distinguished from each other and who – confusingly – all have nicknames, so that you almost need a chart to keep straight who's talking to who.  Further confusing things is that everyone who is in a relationship is in a same-sex relationship, so you can't even use the gender pronouns to identify who is speaking much of the time.

Toward the end it started making a little more sense as the action picked up, and I did enjoy the ending, which resolved a number of open issues.  But it took a long time for me to plow through this once because it was simply so dull.  But I did just purchase the 11th book, and even though it is using many of the same characters, it is making more sense.  This was draws from "Mary Poppins."  No, seriously.  It's a Lovecraft/Mary Poppins mashup.

At the Edge of Honor (Honor Series) - Robert N. Macomber

I should just quit trying.  I'm never going to enjoy a nautical historical fiction series as much as I do C.S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series so I should just quit looking.  The latest attempt is the story of Union sloop captain Peter Wake knocking around Key West during the Civil War. it is the first book in a series that sees him in the world of naval intelligence all the way through the Spanish-American war and after.

Forester aficionados have to get over our assumption that every naval officer is an angst-ridden genius, and I promise that is not the reason I didn't love this book.  The guy has his problems, but near – paralyzing self-doubt is not one of them. I actually moderately enjoyed the book, and if some of the favorable outcomes of his various stratagems were a little forced, and the deus ex machina at the end creaked atrociously, I actually had nothing bad to say about the book until the ending – where clearly the author held up a sign telling the characters to wrap things up.  Obediently, they did, but it was terribly clumsy.  

I am still on the fence about whether to get the next book in the series.  What I should actually do is get out the first Patrick O'Brien Aubrey novel and read it again and see if I like it compared to Hornblower.  I didn't when I first read it, but that's on me - there's no way the book should come off unfavorably against anything.  That I thought it did is probably a good indication that I am officially a terrible judge of nautical historical fiction. 

But I can't help it.  Commiserating with Horatio about his feelings for Lady Barbara is one of my favorite pastimes.  You can keep your Jack Aubreys and Peter Wakes.   

 

 

 

Shadowplay - Joseph O'Connor

I will read almost any fiction that involves Bram Stoker, on the off chance that it adds an interesting twist to the genesis of Dracula.  As I have said many times, it just fascinates me how a dull, repressed Irishman managing a theater came up with such a masterpiece of horror.  Because he tried over, and over, and over, and could not come anywhere close again.

Of course Stoker was actually an interesting tale himself, even though had he not written the book about the vampire, he would've been merely a minor member of the cast of a book about Sir Henry Irving, the actor whose theater he managed.  Shadowplay focuses on Stoker's relationship with Irving and actress Ellen Terry, and throughout the book we see bits and pieces that later ended up in Dracula.  But the book is really about the relationship between the three, and is more of a word picture than a coherent novel, complete with plot.

I say word picture because close to the beginning, the chapter that began with Irving and Stoker in a train annoying each other without even having to speak was one of the best pieces of writing I have ever read.  I actually bought the audiobook as soon as I finished the scene just so I could hear someone read it out loud – it was that good.  Unfortunately, the pandemic prevented me from being in the car enough to listen to the rest of the book, so ended up reading almost the whole thing.

It's very close whether I would recommend the book as a piece of fiction as opposed to recommending it simply because the writing is so creative and beautifully done.  Probably closer to the latter.  But, again the scene in the train is just beyond my ability to describe it.  It's magnificent. 

The Good Shepherd - C.S. Forester

When I realized the new Tom Hanks movie Greyhound is based on this book by the author of the Hornblower books I had to go back and reread it.  Terrific read - started it last night and finished it today.  I know I’ve read it before - notes say I got it in San Diego which means a long, long time ago, but I’m pretty sure I read it at the time.

Can’t wait to see the movie!

Dracula: Writer's Digest Annotated Classics - Bram Stoker (author) Mort Castle (annotator)

Bram Stoker's Dracula has fascinated me since I first read it in 1983. Not for the subject matter, but for the atmosphere of dread and horror that Stoker managed to convey. In the ensuing decades I have picked up a lot of good literary commentary on the book, including fascinating analyses of where Stoker got his information and how he put the book together, all because I am interested in finding out how this dull, conventional, Irish theater manager could have told a story with so many levels and in places with such skill. For this reason, annotated versions of the book have been an obsession of mine going back to the mid-80s.

This version is a little different, however, in that the annotation by creative writing professor Mort Castle doesn't explain the people and places that Stoker was referring to, but instead uses the text to teach writing students how Stoker was telling the story in order to convey what he was doing as a writer.

While I appreciated the intent of the edition, and did learn a lot from it, the book left something to be desired for two reasons. First of all, putting the invitations in a tiny font in red ink made them very difficult to read.  I often spent more time trying to find the tiny red circles in the text indicating what sentence the annotation pertaining to that I did reading the annotation.

More importantly, it doesn't appear that anyone reviewed the annotations to make sure that they were clear. In numerous places, the annotations took the form of exclamations or comments that were potentially intended sarcastically, but the reader couldn't be sure. Therefore the entire intent of the annotation was lost because the meaning wasn't clear. A sentence like "are we being treated to a little more of Stoker's humor?" would work well in a classroom followed up by an explanation of the relevant passage. But in an annotation, it is often unclear whether the question is rhetorical or actual.

But even with those shortcomings, the annotations help point out where Stoker was enhancing the tale with ambiguity, humor, foreshadowing, and especially towards the end, simply staying out of the way of the action. In doing so, it explains to the would-be writers reading it some of the tools they have available, and how to use them.  It doesn't shy away from noting where Stoker made what Castle believes to be in error, and could have made a point better, and this is very useful as well.

Over and over it praised – and rightfully so from a writing perspective – Stoker's decision to present the story in an epistolary format where multiple narrators and sources present bits and pieces of the story. From the first time I read years ago it this tool – which I had never seen before – impressed me enormously, and it was interesting seeing a writing professor explain why it was so effective.

So this is something of a specialty Dracula, but if you're interested in an exposition of the book as an exercise in writing, this is the one to get.