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Glory in the Name: A Novel of the Confederate Navy
written by James L. Nelson
Studio : William Morrow
by William Morrow
Release Date : 2003-04-15
Publisher : William Morrow
Released : 2003-04-01
Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Number of Items : 1
EAN : 9780060199692
Avg. Customer Rating: (based on 13 reviews)
List Price : $24.95
Our Price : $11.06
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Book Description |
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April 12, 1861. With one jerk of a lanyard, one shell arching into the sky, years of tension exploded into civil war. And for those men who did not know in which direction their loyalty called them, it was a time for decisions. Such a one was Lieutenant Samuel Bowater, an officer of the United States Navy, a native of Charleston, South Carolina. Hard pressed to abandon the oath he swore to the United States, but unable to fight against his home state, Bowater accepts a commission in the nascent Confederate navy, where captains who once strode the quarterdecks of the world's most powerful ships are now assuming command of paddle wheelers and towboats. Taking charge of the armed tugboatCape Fear, and then the ironclad Yazoo River, Bowater and his men go toe to toe with the powerful Union navy, standing up boldly in the face of the overwhelming force and resources of the North. From Norfolk to Hampton Roads, from Roanoke Island to the wild nighttime battle on the river below New Orleans, Glory in the Name tells the dramatic story of the Confederate States Navy, and the brave men who carried forward against overwhelming odds the waterborne fight for Southern independence. |
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Powerful and gripping naval tale |
Most books and movies about the US Civil War focus on the Confederate cause and this book is no exception .What does set it apart from the norm however is its emphasis on the naval engagements of the war rather than the land conflict or the "causus belli".It takes as its central theme the Confederate Navy-a somewhat grandiloquent term for what after all was simply a rag tag and bobtail assemblage of ill -equipped vessels with no real hope of victory .(Please note -the above is not a derogatory remark directed at its men and leadership ,which performed miracles with little or no resources)
The protagonist is Samuel Bowater ,the scion of a wealthy Charleston family ,one that had served the USA well in the 1845 war against Mexico .Samuel has retired from the US navy but on the outbreak of the Civil War he opts to join the Confedate forces .We witness the war through Samuel's eyes from the attack on Fort Sumter to the battle of New Orleans (the naval conflict ,not the atrocity of 1812!)
Bowater's commission is the converted tugboat "Cape Fear" and we are introduced to its crew especially the roistering engineer Hieronymus Taylor whose roughneck and philandering ways conceal a cultured and refined interior -he is a musician of some note.
Alongside this tale the writer unfolds the story of the wealthy Southern family ,the Paines, whose elder son survives the battle of Manassas but is presumed dead .His grief stricken father equips a private war vessel to continue the fight against the potent and powerful Union navy
The stories eventually converge when Bowater assumes command of the ironclad built by Paine senior .
Tha action scenes are finely rendered -Mr Nelson is in the Bernard Cornwall class at descriptions of battle - and he has a deft touch at characterisation .Bowater is a well drawn hero-decisive in command ,but a well rounded man ,accomplished as an artist and music afficianodo He is however somwhat blinkered ,being taken aback when hios slave opts to join the Union cause on the eve of battle .Such touches of humanity in the hero are a great help in shaping a readers response ,making them realise the essential humanity and shortcomings of a hero .Bowater progresses from an observer of the action (witness to the attack on Sumter )to a fully engaged participant
Not least amaong the merits of the book is its quiet humour and the way it shows the war to be a transitional one -the move from sail to steam and the way the role of hand to hand ,close combat was reduced by new war technology
This is a gripping read and is unreservedly recommended to lovers of US history and naval adventure yarns
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The last 100 pages are great. |
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This book had the potential to be an American "Hornblower" but instead is a series of vignettes about the early Civil war. The main character, Lt. Bowater, barely appears in half the book. The story finally gets going in the last 100 pages, if you can stick to it that long. |
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Plotless and Pointless: Wooden Characters and Iron Prose Sink This One |
I'm an admirer of James Nelson's "Revolution at Sea" series, and while he's no Patrick O'Brian, his fictionalization of the fledgling US Navy in the American Revolution in that series is decent reading for the action, the historical context, and the character development of his hero, Isaac Biddlecomb. In that series, one gets a sense of the place and time and motivations of the characters.
I regret to say that "Glory in the Name", the first of what is obviously intended to be a series set in the Confederate Navy during the US Civil War, is by contrast a poor start and a poor novel. Oh, where to start. For one thing, a quarter of the chapters don't deal with naval action at all, but are spent meandering around the first battle of Manassas merely as a backgrounder for one character who doesn't even meet up with the main characters of the book until the last few pages. Our "hero", Lt. Samuel Bowater, is drawn in such broad strokes as to really lack believability. There is a mixture of aggravatingly anachronistic behavior -- the sex scene, for example, lacks any credibility at all, involving as it does two mid-19th century people from the Southern aristocracy -- combined with utterly old-fashioned racial and ethnic stereotyping. A novel written in 2003 that attempts (poorly) to use African-American dialect but which does not do the same for its Southern whites is bordering on racist. That the word "slave" appears but once, and that the African-Amerrican characters are either happy house "servants" or freedmen who miracuolously glom onto the white heroes makes it more so. Nelson attempts to be "modern" in his sensibility by having one white Southerner, Chief Taylor, suddenly become an emancipationist of the slaves aboard a southern war ship, but this is not only incredibly unlikely, it borders on mutiny by the laws of the ship about to go into combat! Yet Lt. Bowater just acquiesces, with the author noting that he had perhaps started to rethink his view of the "servants" in bondage -- ludicrously untrue to the historical character of a Southern naval officer from a patrician Charleston family, or for that matter to every characterization in the book up to that point. Equally annoying is the occasional entrance of a real historical figure -- Admiral David Farragut, for example, makes a rather unlikely appearance in which Nelson tries to articulate his thoughts prior to the naval battle of Mobile Bay, which is nothing at all like the Farragut I know from history.
Missteps in character and mise en scene there may be, but what's really the root of the problem here is that this just isn't a good novel. It's a series of scenes of the Confederate Navy from April 1861 to May 1862 without either a real plot or compelling character development to push them along. Attempts to add depth to the characters -- Hieronymous Taylor's "secret" background, Bowater and his paramour Wendy Atkins' artistic pretensions, and so forth -- come off as flat caricatures. One rather thinks that Nelson researched the history first, then decided to try to stitch together some characters who might plausibly have been involved in the historical incidents he chose to depict. That's the wrong way to make compelling reading.
There's a difficulty at the heart of picking for a theme the extremely tiny and relatively unimportant armed service of an unsuccessful treasonous cause. You have to conflate and inflate historical events to try to provide the sweep necessary to seem epic, and at the same time gloss over and pretend the causes and issues at stake in the conflict are not what they were to try to keep the sympathies of the reader with one's heroes. It's not an easy trick.
I really, really wanted to like this book, since Nelson has clearly exhausted the American Revolution, but this comes far too short. Biddlecomb and the American Revolution represented idealistic underdogs with a genuine seafaring tradition, and that the revolutionaries won that war made it all the more compelling as a text, however far-fetched, for a naval series focussing on small boat warfare. The story of the Confederate Navy isn't nearly as compelling, and in turn having wooden characters and iron prose has sunk this series before it's even under way. |
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Glory in the Name |
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This is a must read for Civil War aficionados. Nelson intricately weaves his story into historical facts to create a compelling tapestry of words. What are you waiting for?? BUY IT! |
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Exceptional |
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I'd only glimpsed through Nelson's earlier works, but after reading the first few pages of Glory in the Name, I was caught, and ended up buying the book. Being an avid reader of nautical fiction in the Napoleonic era (O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, the Hornblower novels), I never thought that I'd be captivated, as I was here, by a novel concerning a later navy during the Civil War in the period that saw the 'death' of sail. I applaud Nelson for writing a novel concerning the Confederate Navy, a unique and rare subject in itself, and having read this novel I see that there is a great amount of interesting material to be combed from it. The characters, particularly Taylor, are outstanding and unique, as well as easily relatable, and the relationships that tie each character together, again particularly Taylor with Bowater, are outstanding as well. Glory in the Name was a book I could not put down. The Bowater-Taylor relationship could potentially rival Aubrey-Maturin's, and hopefully this book may also be the first in a series. |
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