Book review: Mr. Midshipman Hornblower by C. S. Forester

After hearing good things about it for many years, Tommy and I finally started watching the Hornblower movies starring Ioan Gruffudd and shown on A&E around the turn of the millennium.  Having watched the first few disks, I decided to seek out the original books as well.  Thus, Mr. Midshipman Hornblower became the twenty-sixth book I read in 2016.

Although the first chronologically, Midshipman was the sixth of the Hornblower series C. S. Forester wrote, having begun in medias res with Hornblower in command of his own ship and then gone back to fill in the beginning of his naval career.  Hornblower's series is set during the Napoleonic Wars, thus making him a contemporary both of Jack Aubrey and of William Price, and contemplating the period through so many fictional characters is a delight.  Hornblower is written as more of a straightforward adventure story than the more soap-operatic focus of the Aubrey-Maturin series on its protagonists' personal lives, and nameless extras are killed off with gleeful abandon in the background where Jack Aubrey's crew is made up of more individuals whose demises strike closer to home.

Comparing the book to the beginning of the series of TV movies which are based on it, Hornblower comes off as a bit less of a moral paragon in the book than as portrayed by Gruffudd.  The greatest liberties were taken with "Hornblower, the Duchess, and the Devil," in which the part played by the titular Duchess was vastly expanded, no doubt because it's an embarrassment to a modern studio to have a series without a major female character.  For simplicity's sake, many of the same things happen to the same cast of characters in the TV version, which strains credulity a bit, whereas Forester has no problem introducing new characters in his stories.  (Of course, he didn't have to pay multiple actors, either.)

I quite enjoyed the book and am looking forward to the rest of the series.