Word: monsarrat
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During the '30s, Nicholas Monsarrat was a budding British novelist. During World War II, he rose through the Royal Navy to command, in succession, three escort vessels, a corvette and two frigates, all on convoy duty in the North Atlantic. In The Cruel Sea, his first full-length novel since the war, Monsarrat writes a moving odyssey of the convoy...
...Monsarrat's story is "of one ocean, two ships, and about a hundred and fifty men." It begins late in 1939, when the corvette Compass Rose, "a fiddling bloody little gash-boat," is commissioned. A few halcyon runs, and then the U-boats come. On one ghastly trip to Gibraltar, a convoy of 21 merchantmen is reduced to seven-a slaughter with all too many counterparts in wartime reality...
...Author Monsarrat as a writer, The Cruel Sea was as much a test as the cruel sea was for his characters. The son of a Liverpool surgeon, he had written four novels with the grace, talent and final inconsequence that seem the natural equipment of many a young English writer. Then came the war and four nonfiction books on naval operations, all of them good, one of them, H.M. Corvette, just about the best of its kind...
Plenty of writers have moaned about the creative years stolen from them by war service. For Novelist Monsarrat, as for his character Lockhart, "they were not lost years . . . He had grown up fast in the meantime, he was a different person from the . . . not very good journalist who had joined up in 1939 . . . He had missed five years of writing and travel, but he had gained in every other way . . . 'I should be all right after the war,' he told himself...
...Monsarrat commands two literary skills: he uses the English language with quiet, respectful competence, and he describes most vividly the processes of skilled work-how a ship is run, how a blitzed house is scoured for survivors. But the emotional patterns of human relationships are as yet beyond his grasp. Monsarrat's may seem a rather small talent, but this book gives evidence that he may yet do some fine things...