Book Review: The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
It was hard to imagine a less imposing hero than the one of The Caine Mutiny. The red-headed, baby faced and slightly chubby Princeton scholar, ignored by his father, spoiled by his mother, and dismissed with a half-smile from the rest of the world, surely could not pose as the main character in a novel on one of the greatest wars in history. Yet here he was, bending down with a grunt to barely brush the tips of his toes, as he struggled to pass the medical exam he’d already failed – twice.
But sometimes those are the best sort of heroes: the unimposing sort. The kind that gives a sad, comical, pathetic figure to represent humanity before our eyes – and to represent, if we’re terribly honest, our own tiny part in the cosmic play.
The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk, is one of those few books that is startlingly real.
The story is seen through the eyes of Willis “Willie” Seward Keith, who volunteers for midshipman school to avoid being drafted into the army. Within a few days, he has successfully obtained more demerits than the entire school in Navy history. After a series of misadventures, hard work, and unheroic performances, he graduates Navy School and is immediately dispatched to the DMS Caine, a Pearl Harbor minesweeper – one of the most dangerous vessels of the Navy.
Willie soon learns to scorn not only his commander, but the entire Navy, and his disparagement of Navy orders is soon exacerbated by his fellow midshipman, Ltn. Keefer, a bright young novelist with a mind that sees the big picture: “The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses for execution by idiots. If you are not an idiot, but find yourself in the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them. Constantly ask yourself, ‘How would I do this if I were a fool?’ Throttle down your mind to a crawl. Then you will never go wrong.”
Thus, Willie Keith feels immense satisfaction when his petulant commander is discharged and the Caine receives the Captain Queeg. Queeg, however, surely one of the most interesting villains of military fiction, is worse than Vreiss ever was.
Captain Queeg’s tyranny over his subordinates is only matched by his cowardice before the enemy, eventually leading to the infamous Caine mutiny, and the general court martial of Willie and a few of his fellow shipmates who “transferred to Queeg the hatred we should have felt for Hitler and the Japs.”
It’s a story bound deeply within the ties of realism. You can feel the tension in its pages: the scornful wrath of the midshipmen at the tyranny of their captain, the flagrant boredom of navy life mixed with a chaos of bloody misadventures.
The dialogue is probably some of the best I’ve read in a modern novel, moving the plot and character development forward and never at the expense of its realism. I guess that’s what I keep coming back to: The Caine Mutiny is heart-poundingly, blood-boilingly real. It will leave you thinking of the Caine as a living metal prick in the whirlpool of history, her captain as an actual military brute, and Willie Keith as the boy who becomes a man – the tiny, childish part in each of us, becomes a hero.
“With the smoke of the dead sailor’s cigar wreathing around him, Willie passed to thinking about death and life and luck and God. Philosophers are at home with such thoughts, perhaps, but for other people it is actual torture when these concepts – not the words, the realities – break through the crust of daily occurrences and grip the soul. A half hour of such racking meditation can change the ways of a lifetime. Willie Keith crushing the stub in theashtray was not the Willie who had lit the cigar. That boy was gone for good.”
Why Should I Read It?
First, it will give you an insider’s view of history. Herman Wouk joined the United States Navy after the Pearl Harbor attack, serving as an officer aboard two minesweepers, the USS Zane and the USS Southard, later becoming an executive officer. He participated in eight invasions earning him a number of battle stars. In his off duty hours, he was writing.
The author truly lived the life of his characters, and it rings in the raw authenticity of the story. It grew my understanding, not only of the war as a whole, but of a completely different dimension that I had not experienced before. The grand drama of history was condensed to the pin-prick of an ancient vessel halfway around the world, military heroes took on flesh with freckles and stutters and rapturous love letters home, and Pearl Harbor became more than a single American nightmare on a December dawn.
“Willie didn’t have a historian’s respect for the victories at Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, and Midway. The stream of news as it burbled by his mind left only a confused impression that our side was a bit ahead in the game, but making painful slow work of it. He had often wondered in his boyhood what it must have been like to live in the stirring days of Gettysburg and Waterloo; now he knew, but he didn’t know that he knew. This war seemed to him different from all the others: diffuse, slogging, and empty of drama.”
Second, the character study is fascinating. Heroes and villains are displayed in their purest form, scraped clean from the glorified veil of history, often in the same character – a raw, terrific pledge to the true world war, the one that has been fought every day of history.
Third: for the literary gems. The clever word plays. The unexpected proverbs and predictions that shoot with the spittle of scorned sailors. Every person, at their core, is a philosopher, trying to eek out meaning from a course of punctuated time.
“Remember this, if you can–there is nothing, nothing more precious than time. You probably feel you have a measureless supply of it, but you haven’t. Wasted hours destroy your life just as surely at the beginning as at the end–only in the end it becomes more obvious.”
In my opinion, this book was worth the time.