Author loses the plot

I’ve never been to sea, but I enjoy naval fiction and recently discovered the work of Alexander Kent.

Kent is a pseudonym for Douglas Reeman, a British author who has written dozens of books, set mostly in the Napoleonic era and the Second World War.

I’ve been reading novels from the Bolitho series. Richard Bolitho rose to high rank following a series of victories against American and French ships.

Bolitho was known for his tactical ingenuity and his unorthodox methods to achieve extraordinary results.

The early novels I read were fast paced and detailed in their description of various battles.

I was lucky enough to pick up a couple of the books marked down at a local store, while I obtained the others from the Mount Gambier Library.

The library may have the entire series, but several books were missing on the two occasions I went in there, so I’ve had to skip a few along the way to “Beyond the Reef” in which Bolitho is a vice-admiral.

This book is an absolute dud. I mentioned in a previous post how a football coach had a “brain explosion”. I don’t know what Reeman was thinking when he wrote Beyond the Reef, but it’s so far removed from his earlier works that I wonder if it wasn’t just churned out to top up his retirement fund.

Instead of being focused on naval strategy and life at sea it’s mostly about Bolitho’s love life, the machinations of his (understandably) bitter wife and nasty sister, the demise of his friendship with an old colleague and other such tribulations.

Even the shipwreck on a reef while bound for Cape Town was a dramatic anti-climax. Instead of grappling with pirates or slavers, Bolitho and his sweetheart are conveniently rescued and spirited back to England.

I’m afraid I can’t even bring myself to finish this book. I’m so glad I didn’t pay for it.

I’m not alone in holding this view, as this review from Amazon shows:

By now we’ve heard almost all the sail commands and maneuvers possible, and Kent seems to have run out of new sea lore. This is another book in which Bolitho’s passionate interest in his married lover Catherine takes pride of place to sea action. Kent is spinning his wheels in these later stories, or better said: “he’s all aback, an’ that’s no error.” Now that Richard Bolitho has been an admiral for a while, he’s become more involved with grand strategy than small ship actions, and Kent is harder pressed to make him an exciting figure. This is probably true to life but makes for a tedious tale. Symptomatic of the problem is the fact the publisher devotes most of the cover blurb to the author’s credentials to write such a book, and only two sentences to the story. The “Reefs” of the title are more metaphorical than geographic: the estrangement of Bolitho and his favorite officer, Herrick; Herrick’s court-martial; Bolitho’s cruel sister; Herrick’s betrayal; and Bolitho’s continuing estrangement from power and reward due to envy and his illicit affair. Despite his youthful appearance, a lifetime’s violent assaults and horrific losses are grinding Bolitho down. Kent’s mistake may have been to start Bolitho too early in his career and promote him too rapidly, arriving at flag rank too long before the convenient end of the Napoleonic world wars. Kent seems to be grooming Admiral Bolitho’s nephew, frigate Captain Adam Bolitho, for better and more cheerful stories in the future.

I would add that Reeman’s other mistake was not to know when to end a good thing.