In the wake of the recent Jack Aubrey film Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World, a comparison to Patrick O'Brian's British navy captain is hard to avoid. (Still, it takes him only two days of married life to get her pregnant!) Throughout the book, letters and brief visits with his wife Maria prove her utter devotion to him, to which he responds with a mixture of doting affection and pity. While the reasons for his engagement were no doubt explained in an earlier book, it casts an immediate shadow on Hornblower's character he goes through with the wedding only because he can't think of a "proper" way to get out of it. The book begins with Hornblower's passive wedding to a woman he doesn't love. His self-confidence often wavers, he suffers extreme bouts of seasickness and he is often needlessly harsh with the men in his command. While his service is always admirable and his actions never fail (even against ships of greater size and firepower), Hotspur is never privvy to any prize-taking ventures, so Hornblower's purse remains empty and conditions aboard his ship remain poor.Īlthough he shows a public face that is both brave and brilliant, Hornblower at this stage of his career is privately self-deprecating and convinced of his own cowardice. Hornblower soon finds himself engaged in several battles on sea and shore in His Majesty's service. Hotspur, set in 1803, gives us a 27-year-old Hornblower who has just received his first command he's taking the three-masted sloop Hotspur to the edge of France, near Brest, to watch troop and ship movements from afar in preparation for the coming war with Napoleon. So it was with a good deal of anticipation I settled in with Hornblower & the Hotspur, which falls midpoint in the Hornblower chronology.
My familiarity with the 11-book series was scanty Star Trek novelists have made Captain Kirk a fan of the swashbuckling series (a nod to the fact that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry based Kirk's character on Hornblower). How timely, then, that one of the classic Horatio Hornblower novels should arrive for review. Historical fiction set in the 19th-century Age of Sail seems to be regaining its former popularity. The complete series was published on DVD both individually and as a box set.Ī companion book, Hornblower's Ships, by Martin Saville, explains how 11 fully working scale models were researched and built for the series.Rambles: C.S. In September 2009, ABC2 started broadcasting a rerun of the series in Australia. The series stars Ioan Gruffudd in the title role and was produced by the British broadcaster Meridian Television, and shown on ITV in the UK and A&E Television Networks in the United States. Midshipman Hornblower, Lieutenant Hornblower and (loosely) Hornblower and the Hotspur. Hornblower is a TV adaptation of novels Mr.
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