Books like The Cruel Sea

“[T]hat was the way the war was going; the individual had to retreat or submerge, the simple unfeeling pair of hands must come to the fore. The emphasis was now on the tireless machine of war; men were parts of this machine, and so they must remain, till they fulfilled their function or wore out. If, in the process, they did wear out, it was bad luck on the men – but not bad luck on the war, which had had its money’s worth out of them. The hateful struggle, to be effective, demanded one hundred percent from many millions of individual people; death was in this category of demand, and, lower down the list, the cancellation of humanity was an essential element of the total price.”- Nicholas Monsarrat, The Cruel SeaThe Cruel Sea is the greatest war novel of all time. Now that I’ve got your attention, let me say that The Cruel Sea is not the greatest war novel of all time. How can it be? There’s too many classics to choose from. Antiwar masterpieces like All Quiet on the Western Front and Fear. Literary opuses such as The Naked and the Dead and The Thin Red Line. Big, operatic epics like Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. Once you start listing them, it’s hard to stop. Catch 22. The Things They Carried. The Red Badge of Courage. Even War and Peace can be classified here. A lot of great literature exists in this genre. It’s impossible to choose the best. The Cruel Sea, however, deserves to stand among the best. It deserves an audience. The Cruel Sea was recommended to me (h/t Bevan) after I finished reading Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny. Part of the reason I loved The Caine Mutiny was its sense of authenticity. In its minutely detailed depiction of life aboard a rusting old minesweeper, I felt like Wouk had created something real. That is certainly the case here. Monsarrat served in the Royal Navy during World War II, and has a grasp of all the granular details of life aboard ship. The particularity is mesmerizing. The Cruel Sea tells the story of a corvette called the HMS Compass Rose. A corvette was a small warship tasked with escorting convoys across the Atlantic Ocean. It was an extremely dangerous job – at one point, the U-Boats almost strangled Great Britain – and it came with little glory. Monsarrat follows the Compass Rose and her crew as they head out to sea to battle Nazi U-Boats and storms and fatigue and boredom and tension. The Cruel Sea is divided into seven chapters, one for each year of Great Britain’s war. The first chapter is set in 1939, the last in 1945, giving it an ambitious scope. (The Cruel Sea weighs in at 510 pages; the last couple chapters, covering the period when the Allies had practically won the war, are far shorter than earlier ones).The thing that separates The Cruel Sea from other war novels is its inspired specificity. The Compass Rose is a small ship, and you get to know every inch of her. She has a very particular job, and you get to understand every bit of it. There are no panoramic scenes of splendid battle; there is not an ongoing cat-and-mouse game with a sneaky U-Boat captain, ala The Enemy Below. Instead, The Cruel Sea demonstrates that a lot of war is drudgery, it is waiting for something to happen, it is being afraid. There are some big set pieces, but those are few and far between. Most of the time, the Compass Rose is on the periphery of the action. A witness as often as a participant. The men aboard her are trying to do their jobs, not wrestling with the larger, existential implications of warfare. This feels accurate. It creates an overall sensation of verisimilitude. To tell this tale, Monsarrat utilizes an omniscient third-person narrator, reminiscent of Len Deighton’s Bomber (another great and underrated war novel). It is a godlike point of view that allows him to give us the perspective and thoughts of each and every character. I found the tone to be utterly fascinating. The narrative feels like the observations of a god who can see everything at once, but cannot intervene. The writing is dispassionate, but not indifferent. Monsarrat is able to create incredible emotional force by remaining a bit detached, by describing what is happening without directing you how to feel. Monsarrat’s characterizations are excellent. The men aboard the Compass Rose are drawn with incredible precision. There are simply too many for Monsarrat to create deep psychological portraits. However, he is able to give each man enough personality and back-story to make him memorable. The two leading actors are Ericson, the commander, and his chief subordinate, Lockhart. Ericson is the veteran, who knows what must be done and struggles with the weight of his responsibility. Lockhart is the newcomer who must learn or die. The burgeoning father-son, mentor-mentee relationship between these two is a central dramatic concern. But by no means is it the only one. The sprawling cast list encompasses men (and a few women) of every rank and rating, giving us a variety of viewpoints on the war. There are competent men, and incompetent men; brave men and cowards; good guys and jerks. Monsarrat is incredibly compassionate towards them all, as he watches them work and struggle and sometimes die. Even though the narrator keeps a certain emotional distance, a powerful intimacy is created by sheer dint of the fact that the narrator is all-knowing. Death comes to many, and it is a testament to the efficacy of this style that these moments were quietly powerful. The Cruel Sea is not overly graphic or gratuitous. There is little cursing. There are no depictions of sexual activity. (Though women on shore cuckolding their men is a persistent leitmotif). There is violence, to be sure, but it is not fetishized. Rather than appealing to our baser interests in sex and bloodshed (which, frankly, is usually what I’m looking for), Monsarrat delivers the goods by punctuating the doldrums of convoy duty with wonderful vignettes. There is, for instance, a surface battle with a submarine: The water sluiced and poured from [the sub’s] casings as she rose: great bubbles burst round her conning tower: gouts of oil spread outward from the crushed plating amidships. “Open fire!” shouted Ericson – and for a few moments it was Baker’s chance, and his alone: the two-pounder pom-pom, set just behind the funnel, was the only gun that could be brought to bear. The staccato force of its firing shook the still air, and with a noise and a chain of shock like the punch! punch! punch! of a trip-hammer the red glowing tracer shells began to chase each other low across the water toward the U-boat…There is also a moment when the Compass Rose discovers a lifeboat floating alone on the sea, a single dead man inside, sitting at the rudder:The man must have been dead for many days: the bare feet splayed on the floorboards were paper-thin, the hand gripping the tiller was not much more than a claw. The eyes that had seemed to stare so boldly ahead were empty sockets – some sea-bird’s plunder: the face was burnt black by a hundred suns, pinched and shriveled by a hundred bitter nights. The boat had no compass, and no chart: the water barrel was empty, and yawning at the seams. It was impossible to guess how long he had been sailing on that senseless voyage – alone, hopeful in death as in life, but steering directly away from land, which was already a thousand miles astern. And there is a scene aboard a torpedoed ship, with men trapped below: [A] few, lucky or unlucky, had raced or crawled for the door, to find it warped and buckled by the explosion, and hopelessly jammed. There was no other way out, except the gaping hole through which the water was now bursting in a broad and furious jet. The shambles that followed were mercifully brief; but until the water quenched the last screams and uncurled the last clawing hands, it was…a paroxysm of despair, terror, and convulsive violence, all in full and dreadful flood, an extreme corner of the human zoo for which there should be no witnesses.Monsarrat does not make any explicit attempt at universality. He does not try to extrapolate the experiences of the men of the Compass Rose. He cannot, really, since their actual experiences are very specific to themselves and their duties. And yet, by focusing so tightly on this core group, and in refusing to abandon that focus, The Cruel Sea acquires a kind of organic universality without any conscious effort at all. Monsarrat doesn’t have to lecture on the waste, wantonness, and exhaustion of war, because he’s been showing it to you all along.