The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk (4 stars)

The Caine Mutiny was published in 1951, and was a massive success, feeding a public hungry for stories of the recent war. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 52, was made into a broadway stage production, and a movie with Bogie playing Queeg. It is referenced all over the place, including Red Dwarf, Star Trek, and Michael Caine's name?!

Of course, I didn't know any of that (except the prize-winning) when I started reading. I really enjoyed the book, and was amazed Wouk could take me through Navy officer school, and so much ordinary Navy life on board the Caine without being boring. Wouk paints what feels like a very true picture of the Navy at the time, through his own experience. The war-time Navy life described would have been similar to that experienced by many sailors, Willie sums it up best:

It's a broken-down obsolete ship. It steamed through four years of war. It has no unit citation and it achieved nothing spectacular. It was supposed to be a minesweeper, but in the whole war it swept six mines. It did every kind of menial fleet duty, mostly several hundred thousand miles of dull escorting...But we will remember the Caine, the old ship in which we helped to win the war. Caine duty is the kind of duty that counts. The high-powered stuff just sets the date and place of the victory won by the Caine.

There are some interesting characters in the book. Captain Queeg is brilliant in his spectacular stupidity, arrogance, cowardice and paranoia. Keefer is supposed to represent the intellectuals forced into military service, his attitude is summed up with his speech:

The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you're not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one...

Life on the Caine is probably representative of the average experience in the Navy during WWII: it is mostly a daily drudgery of shifts, tedious drills, and manufactured melodrama over the smallest of incidents, interspersed with with just a few moments of complete terror in battle. Willie exposes a "glad it's not me" attitude to battle that seems to be shared universally amongst those on the Caine:

Willie had a vague shameful sense that he was storing up anecdotes for future parlor chats while other men were perishing, and that such behavior showed a want of feeling...It occurred to him that there was an unsettling contrast between himself, eating ice cream, and marines on Namur a few thousand yards away, being blown up. he was not sufficiently unsettled to stop eating the ice cream, but the thought worked around like grit in his mind.

It is an interesting, well-written story, of which the mutiny actually plays a surprisingly small part. The court martial is Queeg at his best, and is the high point of the book. I'm not sure I would recommend this book, but I enjoyed it enough to give it:

4 stars.