Today rounds out my literary tour of the apocalypse. We've seen the improbable alien invasions and the laughable army of mantis men, and now we take a sharp detour into the terrifying specter of a nuclear war, a prospect perhaps more pressing now than any time since the end of the Cold War, with US and Russian combat aircraft now operating on opposing sides in the war-torn clusterf**k that is the Middle East. So with that happy thought, welcome aboard The Last Ship, by William Brinkley.
I usually save my reviews for young adult fiction, though I read plenty of adult fiction too. Can't honestly say why I've decided to add this book in here. I suppose it is a book that will make you want to talk about it. Regardless, this book is very far from being YA, both in difficulty and subject matter.
In the closing years of the 20th century, the nuclear-powered destroyer USS Nathan James is on patrol in the Barents Sea when something both unthinkable, and yet, felt by many of her crew as inevitable, happens: they receive orders to launch some of their nuclear-tipped Tomahawk missiles at their target city of Orel in Russia. This they do, and then proceed out of the Barents Sea to find the world in ashes. Their war lasted four hours, and that was the easy part. They will now embark on a nearly year long voyage around a world they no longer recognize, where deadly radiation has turned the land to poisonous wasteland, and turned the few survivors they find there, both human and animal, into the walking dead, already decomposing even though they will live on for a few more days or weeks. With their homeland presumed lost, their mission now becomes finding some bit of uncontaminated land that will support them before their nuclear fuel runs out and they become a ghost ship, forever lost at sea.
The book's narrative is told from the perspective of her captain, Tom (given the last name Chandler on the TNT series, here never named), and he is a vividly sketched character. We see him whole, his decisive outward demeanor and inward neuroses and vanity, his strengths and weakness, hopes and fears. We see him growl at a mutinous subordinate, "Get off my ship." We see him cry after sex (which, fair warning, we see in graphic and rather crude detail. I'm not opposed to depictions of sex in fiction, but I've noticed that male authors, as a general rule, seem to have a lot of trouble writing it well.)
In fact many of the characters in this book are rich and well drawn, as is the world they inhabit. It's a very immersive book. At first you may have some questions about Captain Tom, given the admiring, almost leering way he describes the physiques of his male crewmembers, and how he "knows nothing of women" and was initially horrified when he learned he would be commanding one of the first mixed crews (the book was written in 1988, shortly after the Navy first opened sea-going billets to women). Tom changes his tune fairly quickly once they are aboard and quickly prove themselves equal to their male peers. One in particular will become especially important. More on her later.
Captain Tom is also very long winded and has apparently decided to preserve every single word in the English language. If you know me IRL, you know I have made a fairly lucrative career of making myself seem smarter than I really am with the use of a very large vocabulary, so it's been a very long time since I've read a book that sent me reaching for a dictionary so often. One reviewer said that Brinkley never uses a fifty cent word when a two dollar word can be found, so if you're not a fan of big words, or small, difficult words, steer clear. It's also strange, the manner in which he narrates and how everyone speaks. Captain Tom in particular sounds like an 18th century sea captain, more than a digital age Navy man, like a Patrick O'Brien book that swapped sailing frigates for guided missile destroyers. The book is also over 600 pages, the audiobook version weighing in at a crushing 30 hours. None the less, I found myself not being particularly anxious for it to be over, so engrossing the was the story.
The book is often very poignant, this mostly due to the interaction between the James and the Russian missile submarine Pushkin, which they first encounter off the coast of France. The ease at which the two crews, from nations that just destroyed each other, integrate and come together to eventually form a single community, a single crew, highlights how pointless and unnecessary the war was. You keep expecting tension or outright conflict, but it never comes. We never find out what started the war or who fired first, and both captains seem to agree it doesn't matter. Everyone lost.
Tom's chief concern, sometimes it would seem more than nuclear fallout or diminishing fuel and supplies or mutinous crew members or violent storms or even a serial killer among ship's company, is the rather lopsided ratio of men to women, and the fact the surviving crew of these two ships may very well constitute the only hope for perpetuating the human race. The book spends an inordinate amount of time working out the logistics of what the crew comes to term "the arrangement", and it's a little off-putting.
A slight detour into rant territory: At one point during the voyage a female crew member is subject to a violent assault, sadly not that uncommon in real life among women in the military, nor, rather shockingly, even among men. The captain's reaction, however, is diametrically opposed to what typically happens in the real world. In real life these incidents are often squashed, swept under the rug, the perpetrator going free or perhaps a slap on the wrist. They are never marooned on a highly radioactive island, left to die a slow horrible death of radiation sickness or avail themselves to the .45 service pistol the captain so thoughtfully left him. In fiction you often see these violent revenge fantasies towards rapists, yet in real life this is almost never the case. I find this dichotomy puzzling, though I have no explanation for it. I was also put off by the fact the offending sailor is never named, though it makes sense from the Captain's perspective, not want to attribute humanity to a person he has condemned to such a fate.
One other rant. As I mentioned, many of the characters are well drawn, and perhaps none more so (besides Captain Tom) than Lieutenant Gerrard, the ship's supply officer and highest-ranking female officer aboard (and while we get to know her, ahem, intimately, I don't recall ever hearing her first name. Regardless she is one of the most compelling, best-written supporting female characters I've ever read in fiction...right until the end when Brinkley completely throws her under the bus, in a shocking act so out of character and so inexplicable it nearly ruins the whole book. I got to the finale and wanted to flip a table.
But while I can't quite forgive that, and for all its other flaws, I still really enjoyed this book. I can't say I truly enjoyed my time at sea, but it surely had its moments, and this book often made me nostalgic for having a steel deck under my feet, watching the sunset over the water from the bridge wing.
Like the other two books in my apocalyptic book tour, this one has also been been adapted to the screen, though as a TV show and not a movie. While I have come to enjoy the TV show in its own right, if you have come to the book by way of the show, understand they are nothing alike, and the show took only the title and the name of the ship, and the first name of the captain.
-Mike, out.
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