CS Forester’s stories are not only escapist entertainment but also great works of literature, believes WILLIAM COOK

‘It was not long after dawn that Captain Hornblower came up on the quarterdeck…’ So begins one of the finest series of historical novels in the English language, a series I devoured as a teenager then put aside for 40 years. More fool me. It’s only now that I realise what CS Forester’s wiser fans have always known: that his seafaring yarns aren’t just escapist entertainments – they’re also great works of literature. You can see why they were beloved by so many great writers, from Raymond Chandler to Ernest Hemingway.

Has Forester been forgotten? Not quite. Most of his books are still in print and he’s still familiar to readers of a certain age, but for one of the most widely read authors of his generation he’s endured a pretty steep decline. He’s been eclipsed by Patrick O’brian, an author I’ve tried to like but can’t get along with. O’brian’s literary talent is indisputable, but Forester does something O’brian doesn’t do for me – he makes you want to turn the page.

He was born Cecil Louis Troughton Smith in 1899 in Cairo, the son of an expat English teacher. His parents separated when he was a toddler and his mother brought him back to England. A voracious reader from an early age (Jane Austen and Henry James were among his childhood favourites), he was educated at Dulwich College and then Guy’s Hospital, but he didn’t take to medicine and left without a degree. He volunteered for the army in the First World War but failed the medical, whereupon he turned to writing.

Success came early. Aged 24, he wrote Payment Deferred, a thriller which spawned a movie, starring Charles Laughton. He subsequently wrote two good novels about the Peninsular War ( Death to The

French and The Gun, filmed as The Pride & The Passion, with Cary Grant and Sophia Loren) and two very good novels about the First World War ( The African Queen, which became a fine film, with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, and The General, which HG Wells – quite rightly – called ‘a magnificent piece of work’).

As a result of his prowess as a storyteller, he was invited out to Hollywood, and even though his flirtation with screenwriting was only fleeting (‘the fools ran after me and I ran after the whores’), he fell in love with California and ended up living there. It’s an amusing irony that his quintessential English hero, Horatio Hornblower, was conceived so far from home.

If Forester had never created Horatio Hornblower, he would still deserve to be remembered, but it was these timeless books that secured his reputation. Tautly written, tightly plotted and insatiably readable, they paint a vivid picture of the Royal Navy’s glory days during the Napoleonic Wars that (for me, at least) remains utterly unsurpassed. The historical background is impeccable, and the battle scenes are electric, but it’s Hornblower himself who makes them so absorbing. Fearlessly brave but sick with nerves before every battle, bold and resolute but secretly tormented by doubt and indecision, he’s so sympathetic and believable that we can’t help but adore him.

The first few Hornblowers, written in the late 1930s, were very well received, but during the Second World War Forester devoted himself to the war effort, travelling on a Royal Navy warship to research his wartime novel, The Ship (highly praised at the time, it doesn’t read so well today). He then travelled to the Bering Straits, to write a similar book about the US navy, but during the voyage he contracted arteriosclerosis, which left him disabled.

Mercifully, this handicap didn’t affect his writing, and the

Hornblowers he wrote after the war were just as gripping. His last

Hornblower book, left tantalisingly unfinished when he died, aged 66, shows as much promise as his first one, written 30 years before. He married twice and had two children. Despite the ill-health that plagued him, he led a happy, productive life. Max Hastings, who knew him as a child, recalls ‘a lean, bony, ascetic figure with a twinkling eye which caused him to reflect in everything he wrote his consciousness that the play of human affairs is always a comedy’.

But it was a comedy tinged with tragedy, and that is why his books endure. Intrinsically reserved and diffident, yet forthright whenever duty calls, it is Hornblower’s vulnerability that makes him heroic, a vulnerability he shared with his affable, crippled creator. ‘Hornblower was no born fighting man,’ observed Forester in Lord

Hornblower, arguably his finest book. ‘He was a talented and sensitive individual whom chance had forced into fighting, and his talents had brought him success as a fighter just as they would have brought him success in other walks of life, but he had to pay a higher price. His morbid sensitiveness, his touchy pride, the quirks and weakness of his character, might well be the result of the strains and sorrows he had had to endure.’

It is Horatio Hornblower’s vulnerability that makes him heroic