Under-water World
THE recent tragic disaster to the Affray' serves to give an added interest to this book, the first I have come across that has dealt in such detail with that branch of the Royal Navy.. It is not an out- standing book, nor even an original one, but it is knowledgeable. It is a kind of documentary, thinly disguised as fiction, a book of reminiscences. We begin with a highly:detailed description of the submarine itself, and this is followed by a series of sketches and stories, from .which emerges a clear and sometimes vivid picture of what life inside the " tube " is really like. We see the crew, on and off watch, at work, eating, sleeping. We. surface with them and dive with them, on some ordinary days and on some extra- ordinary ones, for Mr. Casing has included episodes from the recent war.
It is a strange, and, to a landsman, even a weird world in' which these men live. And the reader is aware of its most dominating factor, the vivid sense of confined space, normal men living in a strange, under-water world. It might, one thinks, have some quite extraordinary effect upon, the imagination, but this is an element absent from them. The Captain is very close to his crew, and they to him. One is aware of a continuous pressure, which of itself dictates exactingly the degree of control in purely personal relation. ships. This is almost always fluid, changing from hour to hour, from day to day, from situation to situation. It is not entirely without its comic side. For the reader the atmosphere is claustro- phobic ; he is inside a scientific, a highly technical world. There is also the sense of monotony. One can see this at once from the dialogue. Often it is quite flat, un-colourful, except in a strictly naval sense ' • it can be banal, crude ; but the worst and best of it contrives to have a technical tail.
The 'war episodes are exciting in the sense that all war episodes are exciting. In Submariners one is very much like another. Mr. Casing writes well ; his descriptions of the sea are excellent ; it iS only the dialogue that continually jars. The men talk like robots, and one asks oneself if they ever really think, or for that matter have any feeling that is private. It is _a group, a public, feeling. , The one outstanding merit of the 'book is that it informs. It is interesting to reflect that the Royal Navy has given nothing really outstanding to literature, in the sense that the Army has given us its David Jones, the' Air Force its Lawrence and Hillary, the Merchant service its Tomlinson and Bone and Conrad. Perhaps there is something waiting for literature, hidden in a foc'sle locker or a Commander's drawer, but it hasn't yet made its appearance. The dog-watch has yet to yield up its creative hour.
JAMES HANLEY.
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