This is the first of a nine-novel (I believe) series about Nicholas Everard, a British mariner. The first three are set during WWI (with the setpieces being respectively the Battle of Jutland in 1916, the Zebrugge Raid in 1918, and a submarine run through Gibraltar with the objective being to sink the Yavutz Sultan Selim, formerly the Goeben, in the latter days of the war). The battle of Jutland is a long setpiece, and it’s a model for the writing of such action scenes: based on what his three viewpoint characters describe I believe it would be possible to plot the exact position of his fictional ships: there’s the shocking detonation of the battlecruiser Indefatigable, the out of control Warspite circling between the lines, the eerie appearance of a becalmed frigate with full sail like something from another time (and if I could think of what to do with that beyond the obvious, I’d have a short story!). I have to line up an account in VE Tarrant’s Jutland: The German Perspective of the mysterious damage taken by one of a group of German ships from an unseen enemy with the part of Blooding of the Guns
where, with Nick in command, the ship inadvertantly joins a group of German ships in the dark, realizes it before they do, fires off one torpedo and high tails it. Characterization is not complex, and the characters don’t seem to have much dimension outside their profession. Nick has a passion for Sarah, his young stepmother; so, for that matter, does his uncle Hugh. Sarah is a cypher; you hardly know anything about her as a woman, much less why all the men in her family are fixated on her. I find that kind of blank-projection female character irritating. Outside combat, Nick is a hapless laddie, careless about the career aspects of the navy, while in combat, he’s inspired and lucky. Even hapless, Nick is his own man, while his brother David, their father’s favourite, is defensive and brittle, and, as someone who knows him says to Nick, believes everyone is against him. David cracks, witnessing combat and carnage, and does not survive the sinking of his ship, which I thought was a lost opportunity from a novelist’s point of view, but there does seem to be a morality in war novels that dictate death as a penalty for weakness. I don’t think Fullerton would want to write the novel about a man who cracks, and then has to live on after it. I, on the other hand, have an idea, but it’s the novel after this one.

So it’s a model for the writing of action: the detail and authority are downright intimidating (Fullerton was a submariner in WWII), but what is encouraging is that I am recognizing sources and seeing how they have been used. Less a model for characterization. I have to watch an overemphasis on the home/background material, as I suspect both Fullerton and Monsarrat are right about the intensity of combat, but much of the war at sea in WWI was in fact spent in port, for the larger ships of both navies, and that is crucial to the novel and gives me licence.