The Caine Mutiny

This is Herman Wouk's towering Pulitzer Prize novel of the U.S. Navy in World War II. It has breathtaking action scenes and unforgettable characters. It's a vivid portrait of a nation at war.

This is perhaps not the greatest novel ever written about World War Two, but it may be the most readable. This is an engrossing, ingenious, and well-written story of ordinary men at sea, placed in an uncommon predicament. Their predicament is simple: their captain is a spectacularly bad leader. This leads to consequences that Wouk develops brilliantly. Wouk's own experience in the US Navy gives this book a gritty authentic feel. The reader really gets a flavor of what it must have been like to be a junior US Naval officer aboard a destroyer-minesweeper. The discussions of officer efficiency reports, the codebreaking duty, casual discipline, and more, all ring true.The real story is the maturation of Willie Keith. At the beginning of the novel he is a spoiled, overprivileged lad living an aimless life. His time in the service, and the unusual predicament in which he finds himself, hardens him into a true fighting-man in a way that has happened to countless thousands of servicemen. Wouk tells this story exceedingly well, in a manner that most readers will be able to easily relate to. I found this novel to be an unusually good read primarily for this reason. Wouk's writing is first-rate, and it is easy to see why this novel appealed to readers of the early 1950s, many of them with fresh memories of World War Two. The flavor of that war lingers in the novel even today, and gives the twenty-first century reader a notion of what those times were like.This is altogether a remarkably good novel, deserving of every one of its five stars.

Why is this book so great? Why did it win a Pulitzer Prize? Not because it was an engrossing story of the WWII Navy, which it was. Rather because it has all the elements that make a novel great. Herman Wouk is brilliant at characterization and unlike many other good characterizers such as Steven King, he does it almost with the brevity of a Hemingway. With just a few descriptive scenes of Queeg, the reader can already understand him and pity him recognizing that he is not a traditional villain but a flawed and sad neurotic. From the rolling of the balls to the "sinking of his head into his shoulders" to his way of saying "kay" instead of okay, Queeg's flaws are laid out. When he manipulates reality to justify his actions, one can feel sorry for him rather than hate him. He ultimately comes across as a sad and tragic figure. As for the others, Willie Keith is the protagonist and no character undergoes greater growth than him. This is really what the novel is about, Willie's coming of age and it is a great coming of age story. Rather than have his protagonist mature against the crucible of great battle (as he later does with a number of characters in War and Remembrance which is much more of an epic but not as great a novel), he chooses to portray the day to day existence of a backwater minesweeper which is just on the periphery of the war. And by doing so he avoids all the standard cliches which is also what makes this novel great. In the end, the book clearly has no villains except circumstance. Even Keefer, the pseudo-intellectual who really causes all the trouble, is way to self-aware of his own flaws to be villainous (he is mentally healthy by contrast with Queeg who cannot face up to a single flaw or mistake in himself) I could go on and on but this book is an American classic that doesn't seem one bit dated despite its 1951 publication date. I recommend it to anyone who likes literature.