Word: parkinsons
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...LIFE AND TIMES OF HORATIO HORNBLOWER by C. Northcote Parkinson. 304 pages. Little, Brown...
...Northcote Parkinson, though known for his prankish wit, was a naval historian before he began his researches into the modern disease that may properly be called "administrationitis."* His fully fabricated account of Hornblower's career, from an impecunious "boyhood in Kent to a peaceful death at 80 in 1857-which came, appropriately, while the by then viscount was reading Gibbon-is circumstantial to a fault. The book bristles with references to "new sources" of information, as well as a full quota of those "we can fairly assumes" peculiar to Victorian biography. It comes fully provided, too, with an index...
...Duke of Wellington), or speculates that she, too, may have enjoyed a brief liaison with Baron von Neffzer in Vienna in 1815-when Hornblower and the Vicomtesse de Graçay were temporarily holding Bonaparte's regulars at bay along the Loire. A similar tact touches Professor Parkinson's handling of the then Lieutenant Hornblower's heretofore unsuspected murder of Captain David Sawyer (H.M.S. Renown, 74 guns) on the West Indies station in 1800.* A pedant or a gross popularizer would have made much of the incident, but Parkinson, clearly not wanting to perplex inattentive readers, presents...
...Professor Parkinson's painstaking work has a weakness, it lies in its treatment of all those already well-known, oftretold Hornblower adventures-in quarterdeck and boudoir-that did so much to confound Great Britain's enemies in the Napoleonic Wars. It was Horatio Hornblower's peculiar character to combine brilliant seamanship and a calculating mind with such inner ravages of self-doubt that though he never lost a battle-or very rarely so-it always seemed he was about to. From a score of perilous voyages one may perhaps recall the long patrol to Latin America...
Perhaps out of deference to his lofty subject, in the retelling of this familiar feat, and all the others, which necessarily make up a large portion of his story, Parkinson customarily confines himself to a somewhat plodding, precis narrative. As a result, his biography may be mainly read by Hornblower scholars who wish, as it were, to set their very stuns'ls in pursuit of their elusive literary quarry. As for the rest of us, one is put in mind of the French Gourmet Brillat-Savarin, who was once offered grapes for dinner. "Non, merci" he briskly replied...