The Caine Mutiny

The Caine Mutiny
by Herman Wouk
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1952

        When I was around 8 or 9 years old, I decided to watch the television mini-series The Winds of War. For some reason this seemed to be a very mature and adult undertaking, and so I commenced (for a fairly short period of time) to work through a production that I could not in any way, shape, or form follow. I had vague ideas of World War II, which helped me slightly to understand what was happening, but this long narrative about the lives, love affairs, and careers of the central characters was decidedly not made with a child in mind. But for some reason I was willing to soldier on, hoping that there would be some plot thread I could follow. What I do remember very clearly is the fact that the German army was planning on invading Poland, and as that eventuality approached the accompanying music got darker and grimmer. And I panicked. I remember that some of my peers were watching slasher flicks at this point, but I couldn't handle the potential for violence that was threatened by a network mini-series depiction of a World War II invasion sequence (which is one of many reasons I am sort of a wimp and why I am writing a blog about books I have read, and not people I have beaten up). 
        Flash forward to the summer before 9th grade. My mom took me to the library and checked me out a copy of The Winds of War by Herman Wouk. I don't remember how this edition was paginated, but the edition I have now is 1043 pages. I read through that book with a workmanlike persistence, and I have to say I was engrossed (I remember one day announcing to my Dad that I had read 100 pages that day when he came home from work). The book took a fictional family (The Henrys) and placed them behind the scenes of several different key moments of World War II, with the novel ending when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. I was primed to start the sequel, War and Remembrance, when my mom dropped a bomb of her own. "It's probably too intense for you right now. Try in a few years." Okay. I watched both miniseries (this, I remember, annoyed my brother since The Winds of War was 16 hours long and War and Remembrance was something like 20 hours, and this television monopolization really ate into his video game play quite a bit) and in the sequel, fairly early on, the main characters start dropping like flies. I remember watching the sequence where the first main character is killed over and over again in disbelief, since the events surrounding his death were very inconsequential. It seemed utterly unfair. Another character, who was marginalized as a sort of spineless jerk in the first book, dies a very lonely and unsung (or at the very least undersung) death, and I remember going to bed composing arguments about how this character was one of the most tragic heroes in literature (an argument I would not make now), and how I identified with both his early discomfort (that could easily be read as cowardice), and felt I had a similar slowly developing sense of responsibility that led him to become a man of action who was quickly in over his head.
        I think as a way of dulling the pain of keeping War and Remembrance from me, my mom gave me a copy of The Caine Mutiny for Christmas my freshman year of high school. The book was much older, written soon after the end of World War II, and not a lot of time to go look back and contextualize the war and its huge effect on U.S. history. Instead, the book is personal, and it is more apparent that what we are seeing is a personal account of the war. The book starts with the narrator, a young man, enlisting in the navy. He goes through an officer training program and is assigned to a minesweeper that is falling apart. He clashes with the captain who is incredibly slack, is pleased with a new captain who is assigned to the ship, but slowly comes to realize that this captain is insane. The events of the novel unfold slowly, and the characters are very vividly drawn. What is interesting here is that the narrator is not the main mover and shaker of the plot, but instead observes and relates a story that mostly occurs around him. Apparently, I wasn't the only person to make that observation. There was a film adaptation that was made in 1954 where Humphrey Bogart played Captain Queeg, Fred MacMurray plays a mutineer, and the narrator and central character of the novel is played by... I have no idea. His part in the film was minimized as much as possible. In my desire to minimize spoilers I won't go into specifics, but suffice to say the title of the book kinda gives things away. If you are a fan of Captain Queeg's command technique, you might find yourself a little disappointed to see what happens to him.
          It's been years since I've read this book, but the climax of the novel (which happens a solid 200 pages before the book ends) is a riveting one. My senior year of high school I wanted to direct a scene for our school's talent show, so I adapted the climactic scene into a sketch. (My wife says this makes me a nerd. I have to suggest that there have been many other things that should have clued her into that before.) This was a terrible idea, did not go anywhere, and if seen by an audience it would have been a disaster. I got a few people to agree to act in it, and we rehearsed once and decided to all walk away and never talk about it again. I guess the statute of limitations is past. Man, that was terrible.
        The Caine Mutiny was a great novel, and I would recommend it in a heartbeat. But I don't know if you will have the same reaction to it as I did. For some reason I experienced this novel on a fairly personal level. I was reading this right as I was going into high school, and I understood the narrator's difficulties getting acclimated to his new surroundings, making friends, and finally becoming a mature adult. That last part has generally eluded me.

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