I don't do many full-blown reviews, but occasionally I feel driven to talk at a bit more length about particular books.
Captain's Surrender is such a book.
The thing that is both my biggest frustration about blogging and the very reason I blog is the difficulty in communicating what it is to
love a book. I wish I could tell you how much I loved this book, how it transported me, how profoundly it moved me. If this blog did its job, I would be able to articulate perfectly what I am feeling right now just remembering reading the final chapters of this book. Joy, elation, wrenching emotion. Closing the book feeling so happy that Josh and Peter got their HEA and yet so very sad because their story had ended, and they had sailed away, leaving me behind. And at a technical level, a mingling of admiration and envy as I read Beecroft's lovely prose which sort of swells and undulates like the sea she seems to love writing about so much.
No. Just re-read the above and it doesn't do it. Doesn't articulate what's inside me except in the clumsiest of ways. So, do I resort to the standard fayre of reviewing? Plot, character descriptions, sum up? Will that do the job better? Well, it might put a little flesh on the bones of these bold declarations, I suppose. I'll give it a go and you can maybe let me know which you find the more instructive.
I've never been a fan of 'High Seas' books. The idea conjures up nightmarish visions of pantomime pirates, rapist heroes and 'spunky' obnoxious heroines. How wonderful, then, to read a seafaring book in which there is nary such a character in sight and indeed the action is set on British naval ships with the full hierarchy of men represented and the business of keeping the vessel going described so believably.
Captain's Surrender begins on board the
Nimrod, a ship under the command of the brutal Captain Walker. Josh Andrews, a midshipman, has been on the ship for three years and has little hope of promotion. At the start of the novel, he is watching a shipmate being hanged for buggery when Peter Kenyon arrives on the scene. Peter, a new officer due to take his own captaincy when they reach their destination, has rushed pell-mell to make the ship before it leaves. Josh is dazzled by this elegant, confident paragon; Walker dislikes him on sight.
Some civilian passengers are also on board, Mr and Mrs Summersgill and Emily, Summersgill's beautiful illegitimate daughter to whom Peter is distantly attracted in the manner of man who can see her worth and feels entitled to such a 'prize' (as she is often referred to, likening her to the ships Peter hopes to later win).
Josh knows that he is homosexual but whilst he accepts this reality, he is tortured by the belief that he is sinful and depraved. Peter is a very different character. Whilst there are vague hints of some mild homosexual activity in his history, he does not think of himself as homosexual, even when he and Josh are lovers. For much of the novel he enjoys a happy and unquestioning self-confidence in his internal view of himself that Josh - the more insightful of the two of them - is denied. This faint unattractive smugness is a remarked upon at various times by Emily Summersgill who senses that Peter sees her not as a person in her own right, but as an asset.
So Beecroft presents the reader with two heroes: one tortured yet insightful, seething with self-loathing, and one sanguine and elegantly confident, a man with the world at his feet. Their story then becomes a rather neatly mirrored one: Josh overcomes his self-loathing and reaches a sense of his own worthiness of being loved whilst Peter's wrongheaded sense of who he is torn asunder and he has to decide whether the conventional world he inhabits with such ease is more important to him than Josh.
The first half of the book deals with the journey of the
Nimrod under Walker's brutal hand. As his tyranny gets worse, appalling Peter and the Summersgills, the threat of mutiny grows, creating a claustrophobic powderkeg that had my stomach churning. Peter is very much the hero of this part of the story. The corollary of his unquestioning character is that he is a man of certainty and action, a man capable of making difficult and courageous decisions and implementing them. Peter is pivotal to delivering the ship from the threat of mutiny and ensuring it safely reaches its destination. In this part of the book, Josh acts as Peter's right hand man, Patroclus to Peter's Achilles, as Josh sees it.
The second half of the book begins with Peter and Josh becoming lovers, taking rooms together, and working side by side on Peter's ship. They both see this is as a temporary arrangement, Peter because he intends to marry and cannot imagine anything more permanent with Josh and Josh because he understands Peter well and expects no more for himself. There is nothing domestic about these arrangements. Peter and Josh are comrades, taking joy and excitement in their campaigns, winning prizes together. However, after attending a church service in which homosexual practices are condemned and mob fury stirred, Peter's instincts of self-preservation are alerted.
He had been in a kind of Eden before the serpent, somehow unaware on a conscious level of what he was doing. But now he had eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and knew that he should be ashamed.
Peter had always been a good boy, dutiful, responsible, truthful, willing to work hard for himself and for others, and he had never had a great deal of experience of guilt. It came upon him now as a calamity.
"We should talk." Peter breaks with Josh. The one crumb he throws to Josh is to tell him he loves him. Although it is not a romantic love he professes, nevertheless, Josh treasures this declaration.
"..It was not wrong to love you, but we did wrong to express it as we did. If I am married, and we are in separate ships, I will still love you, for I have never had a worthier friend."
Josh gains his own ship and they are dispatched on a mission. When they are ambushed, Josh makes a suicidal decision in the hope of saving Peter. Peter sees Josh's ship explode and thinks him dead. but Josh is rescued by Opichi people. Through them he sees a culture that takes a very different view of homosexuality and when he returns to Peter, it is with a new view of himself as worthy not just of love but of romantic love. He asks Peter to 'marry' him. This triggers Peter's crisis point, bringing him face to face with the logical conclusion of his internal view of the world: if the World is right, then Josh is a criminal who should be reported to the authorities, regardless of Peter's feelings.
That Peter actually seriously ponders this as an option was, to me, wonderfully satisfying, wonderfully wrenching. Until this point, Peter has managed to have his cake (the World) and eat it too (Josh) by refusing to face up to this essential conflict. I found him a more admirable, more satisfying character for having entertained these thoughts and come out the other side thinking, No. Only then does he accept who he really is, and that his love for Josh is more than he had allowed himself to realise. And then, in the lovely final scene, comes this perfect articulation of Peter's character, the character I came to love so well in that first half of the book, courageous and certain, a man of action. And now strengthened by his love:
.. This was going to be quite a challenge, and a challenge had always excited him. Who needed a tame course - a course so charted, so well trodden, when one could strike out into the unknown, risking the danger? No boy ever ran away to join the navy because he wanted to be safe.
Imagine me, if you will, in this hat. A party horn clamped between my teeth. 
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