#Caine mutiny book movie#
In The Imitation Game, the recent movie about the British computer scientist Alan Turing, the moviemakers got every visual detail right: clothes, cars, streetscapes. Even as we retain memories of the war’s events, the war’s atmosphere-the way people felt and talked and thought-fades from our understanding. “It is the war itself,” was reportedly Henry Kissinger’s high praise for the “ War” novels. Between these dramatic incidents, Caine and the “ War” novels pulse with the everyday details of 1940s America: what it felt like to wait for a letter in the post, the passage of time on a transcontinental railway trip, the crinkle of the carbon paper between two copies of an army report, the uncertainty of knowing who would win the war, and when, and how. Pull that paperback from off the cottage shelf, open the pages-and suddenly there you are: walking a Polish country road as a Stuka buzzes overhead … in the wardroom of a warship tasting thin Navy coffee … shivering in the unpressurized cabin of a bomber above Germany … or waiting amid a roomful of desperate visa applicants for the stamp that will mean the difference between life and death. Herman Wouk has a fair claim to stand among the greatest American war novelists of them all. What Wouk did in the “ War” novels is accomplishment enough. But if the only books worth writing or reading were those that equal War and Peace, then none of us would need much bookshelf space. In title and structure, the two “ War” novels invite comparison to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Pug himself at various points meets President Roosevelt, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin, along with much of the U.S. Wouk deploys the members of the two families-and their friends, lovers, and military units-around the planet in order to tell the story of the war from the late 1930s until the liberation of the Nazi death camps. The Henry and Jastrow families become connected when one of Pug’s sons marries Jastrow’s niece.
naval officer, “Pug” Henry, and that of a Jewish-American scholar, Aaron Jastrow. The “ War” novels tell the stories of two families, that of a U.S. The two “ War” novels aren’t as compactly formed as The Caine Mutiny. When he is finally demobilized, months after the war has ended for everybody else, he emerges chastened, matured, and ready for the responsibilities of the postwar world. After an unexpected act of heroism, Willie Keith finds himself the last commander of the Caine. The bravest and most capable of the officers forfeits his hopes of promotion. They are acquitted but never forgiven by the Navy higher command. The officers of the Caine mutiny against Queeg’s leadership, and are subsequently court-martialed. One of those commanders, Queeg, ultimately puts the whole ship at risk. The ship performs a succession of minor missions under oddball commanders. (If you want to see Keith as a symbol for America itself, Wouk won’t object.) Keith finds himself aboard an antique minesweeper, the Caine. A spoiled, self-indulgent young man named Willie Keith joins the Navy, mostly because it promises less walking than the Army. The plot of The Caine Mutiny is easily summarized. What they don’t know is that Herman Wouk has a fair claim to stand among the greatest American war novelists of them all. Readers under 40 know Wouk, if they know him at all, as a name on the spine of a paperback shoved into a cottage bookshelf at the end of someone else’s summer vacation-or perhaps as the supplier of the raw material for Humphrey Bogart’s epic performance as Captain Queeg of the USS Caine.
If enduring readership is the ultimate prize for a writer, then Wouk is at present failing. The novelist known as Stendhal described books as tickets in a lottery, of which the prize is to be read in a hundred years. After the first fizz of publicity, it is critics who in almost all cases determine what will continue to be read. Critics assigned the proudly Jewish Wouk to the category that included Leon Uris and Chaim Potok rather than Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Reviews of the two “ War” novels proved mostly dismissive-sometimes even savage. From then on, however, critical accolades eluded him. Wouk won a Pulitzer for The Caine Mutiny.
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