I even liked the parts I didn't understand...

The Flag Captain by Alexander Kent
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Though I mostly read fantasy or science fiction, I sometimes enjoy a good naval adventure--mostly C.S. Forester novels. This is the first time I've read Alexander Kent, and I really liked it. (It was a discard at the high school where I taught, but it was in depressingly pristine shape for its age.)

Books like this mostly rise or fall on the action, and the action here is well done. Exciting, dramatic battles are followed by strategizing and cooling off, and then we're back into the action. The pacing is excellent, making it more of a page-turner than I've enjoyed in a long time.

The characters are largely sympathetic and realistic. With a big cast, many of the characters are mostly sketches, but effective for all that. The main characters have a lot of personality, making them real enough that the reader is pulling for probably a dozen of them before the end.

The setting is well realized, and the many themes--justice and injustice, the role of chance, the value of loyalty, friendship, and courage, and so on--give the novel excellent flavor. It lacks female characters, not surprisingly, and some of the cultural content smacks of unexamined colonialism, though less than one might expect for a book written in the 1970s. Taken all into account, it's a well crafted novel, a lot of fun to read.

Recommended.

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