deeden

This is a single post from deeden.co.uk made during the period May 2002 to April 2009. During a previous grand redesign I decided to make a break with the past and consign the old entries to history. This entry is from January 2005 and lives here forevermore.

Best New Reading of 2004 : The Cruel Sea

Number 10 in my list of the top ten books I read for the first time in 2004 is Nicholas Monsarrat’s “The Cruel Sea”, a book written in the 1950s about life on 2 different ships during the Second World War. It does a fantastic job of describing the hardships and despair of supporting convoys on the Atlantic crossing; dealing with the fear of u-Boats, watching your fellow ships sink while you can’t go to their aid for example.

The book focuses on the crews of the corvette Compass Rose and the frigate Saltash as the narrator starts his war service on one and transfers to the other. It’s not a dashing war story by any stretch of the imagination as the drudgery of long watches in the cold and wet are described again and again, with the desire for “action” tempered by the knowledge of exactly what that involves.

It’s not a happy or unhappy novel. It just deals with a small portion of the war, with it’s accompanying triumphs, tragedies, joys and sorrows. The rest of the war is very much in the background, not really impinging on the story of the crews. Well worth a read, not necessarily as a war story but more as the story of the people trying to survive whilst involved in a war.