Last week was Christmas, and to me, oddly enough, it’s not quite Christmas without Horatio Hornblower. When Bing Crosby is incessantly crooning about wanting a White Christmas, I'd much rather be humming the "It's the INDIE!" theme:
When the A&E Hornblower miniseries came out starring Eoin Gruffudd, I had not read the books. Between seeing the first episode and eventually getting the second from
the library, I’d read pretty much all of them. Episodes seemed to come out around Christmas-time. Even if they didn’t, it turned out my cousin
was also a fan, so I’d have them on the old-fashioned VHS waiting for when my
cousin came to visit at Christmas. Nobody else seemed to share our fascination for watching cannons blowing
French frigates to smithereens, so we’d stay up late, the sound turned down and
our heads bent close to the screen in order to hear the whisper-quiet dialog
while everyone else was sleeping.
Unusually for me, I actually like the movies better than
the books. (Though, with such fond
childhood memories, maybe not so unusual after all.) The reason for this is twofold: first that I have
a hard time interpreting battles visually when I read them. This is also the reason I prefer watching The Lord of the Rings to the book.
The second reason is Horatio Hornblower himself. Television and film adaptations of fictional
characters tend to make those characters more one-dimensionally likable in
order to make sure they appeal to a broad audience and garner high ratings or
hits at the box office. While Hornblower
in the miniseries isn’t a flat character by any means—starting as a seasick
Midshipman and working his way up the ranks by his naval genius, fighting not
only England’s enemies but also his own inner demons of hyper-criticism and
crippling fear—it does remain true that the screenwriters toned down much of
C.S. Forester’s characterization, which made Hornblower a tyrant to cover his
secret self-doubt. He has few—if any—friends
with whom he would ever confide his deepest fears and insecurities, and treats
even his most loyal officers such as Lt. Bush with aloofness and austerity. Like most heroes, he’s irresistible to women,
but he doesn’t treat them with much respect, though this could be part of
Forester’s attempt to be historically accurate, since most men of that time
would not consider women their equals.
In the novels, C.S. Forester begins his characterization of
Hornblower in medias res. In the first
publication, The Happy Return (or, in America, Beat to Quarters),
Hornblower has already been a Captain for quite awhile, and is almost having a
midlife crisis. His career is in a rut,
he’s stuck in a passionless marriage, and he’s grieving the death of two
children. Though in the middle of the Napoleonic
wars he’s not fighting Frenchmen, but their Spanish allies in the colonies, helping
arm a Nicaraguan revolutionary modestly calling himself El Supremo and claiming
to be the descendant of Montezuma and Aztec gods.
Predictably, things go awry.
Like in most political maneuvers, the politics back in
Europe change so that just as Hornblower has successfully enabled this guerrilla
war against the Spanish, he finds out that the Spanish have switched sides and
allied themselves with the British. Now
he’s armed El Supremo just in time to El Supremo to become his enemy. His ship is taken, his people are captives,
Bush is injured and even if they escape he’ll have to face the automatic
court-martial of a captain who has lost control of his command. It is, literally, his worst nightmare.
In many ways, this is the best of Hornblower, showing his
worst fears come to fruition. The petty dictator
in him has to step aside in order for the brilliant strategist to save his men
and get them home. Another of the best-written
novels is Lieutenant Hornblower, in which Hornblower is (duh) a lieutenant
and finds himself in the midst of a mutiny against an insane, but cunning,
captain of his own. Both of these, as
with most naval stories, concern themselves with questions about honor, whether
loyalty can be bought with tyranny, whether courage is a lack of fear or merely
doing one’s duty in spite of it, and, of course, what makes a good leader.
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