The Last Ship!

Our book today is The Last Ship by William Brinkley, a 1988 exponent of the whole sub-genre of military techno-fiction Tom Clancy had created virtually from scratch four years earlier with The Hunt for Red October – but also an exponent of a much older sci-fi tradition: the post-apocalyptic survival-story, along the lines of Alas, Babylon and On the Beach.

Specifically, of course, post-nuclear apocalypse: the book tells the story of the US guided missile destroyer Nathan James, captained by a man named Thomas and crewed by 152 men and 26 women. Upon getting orders to fire missiles at a target in Soviet Russia, the ship does its part for the US war effort but gradually learns that the nuclear war that resulted was not only fierce but total: the entire world has been devastated. The ship has become a floating bastion of uncontaminated humanity.

Captain and crew naturally attempt to make contact with survivors, but it quickly becomes clear that although random groups of people might have survived the cataclysm, organized societies did not; and those random survivors, huddled along the world’s beaches in a vain attempt to escape radiation poisoning, are alive, they’re so horribly disfigured and demented by the nightmare they’ve gone through that they’re more like the dumb, disbelieving souls Ulysses encounters in the underworld:

Their faces – and this was almost the worst part of all, sending a chill of horror and of unspeakable desolation through us – even their faces seemed to carry expressions highly similar. Looks – I do not think one imagined this – of bewilderment and stupefaction, and for the same reason, the immense mystery and inexplicability of what had happened, was happening, to them.

The commander faces a mutiny by a large chunk of his crew (they want to go home to the United States, despite knowing how pointless and dangerous that would be), and he faces fuel shortages, and he even faces possible armed conflict when the Nathan James encounters a lone Russian submarine, and Brinkley writes it all with exactly the kind of fervid melodramatics that unwary book reviewers can be relied upon to call “beautiful prose.” And sure enough, the book was laden with such praise when it first appeared.

The prose here isn’t beautiful, and it also isn’t much like any of the other novels Brinkley wrote. This was his final book (he died in 1993), and it’s always seemed to me that the prose of it reflects some deep trauma on the author’s part, something that turned a competent wordsmith (with a heavy hint of the newsroom) into a verbose, almost disjointed ranter. Even an innocuous reflection by the commander seethes and bubbles like a lava field:

As far back as I can remember, on unnumbered waters of the world and in all manifestations of the sea’s unending repertory of moods, whether placid as some inland lake or stormy enough to roll one’s body back and forth, port and starboard, with the ship herself while one clutched hard the volume, I have read a half hour before bed, sitting up in my bunk, before marking my place and reaching up and snapping off the overhead light. I have often wondered how anyone who does not read, by which I mean daily, having some book going all the time, can make it through life. Indeed if I were required to make a sharp division in the very nature of people, I would be tempted to make it there: readers and nonreaders of books. (The second would be seamen and landsmen). It is astonishing how the presence or absence of this habit so consistently characterizes an individual in other respects; it is though it were a kind of barometer of temperament, of personality, even of character.

Passages like that – and the book is one long menu of them – are markedly odd for this author, who in all his previous works was careful and straightforward in his prose. Here, there’s almost no trace of that earlier author (he survives mainly in the book’s crisp dialogue); instead, we get passages like that, full of grammatical and syntactical errors, loaded with tautologies, almost Etonian in verbosity (at another point the commander refers to shipboard life as “that intact palatinate bounded so tightly by the forbidding walls of the great sea”). It’s always made me wonder what Brinkley was thinking while he was typing out this novel.

Still, it’s a hum-dinger of a story, and there’s an undeniable addictive quality in reading the adventures of the Nathan James as she seeks to understand her new world and her people try to forge a new future. The Last Ship is certainly a classic of this little niche-genre, and maybe its over-the-top prose is part of its author’s grand plan – one of those book-reviewers (from the Cleveland Plain Dealer) actually suggested as much, and even book-reviewers are right once in a while.