The Caine Mutiny

David Putnam

Rating: really liked it
I first read The Caine Mutiny thirty or more years ago and absolutely loved it. This was before I caught the writing bug and started putting out my own novels. I look at books differently now more with an eye to the craft of writing. I thought I’d give The Caine Mutiny another whirl (after I’d read Youngblood Hawk, which was an absolute amazing book). The Caine Mutiny was still grand and I liked it although not quite as much as Youngblood. Wouk received the Pulitzer for The Caine Mutiny and I think it was due in part to the time of the release and the themes that made it prize worthy. Don’t get me wrong the writing was marvelous and Caine is probably a much more accessible book for readers in general. So as far as writing and character and story, I think Youngblood is better.
While reading Youngblood I found it interesting that the main character is an author living in New York in 1947 who also wins the Pulitzer Prize. This same author in the book spent time in the military, as did Wouk. The character in the story also wrote a military book. I have yet to read a biography on Wouk but I can easily imagine that The Caine Mutiny was based to some degree on his time spent in the military, and Youngblood was based on his life as an author. I will continue now reading through the rest of Wouk in the hopes that the rest of his work carries equal weight.
David Putnam author of the Bruno Johnson series.

Jeffrey Keeten

Rating: really liked it
It is conceivable that most unusual and extraordinary circumstances may arise in which the relief from duty of a commanding officer by a subordinate becomes necessary, either by placing him under arrest or on the sick list; but such action shall never be taken without the approval of the Navy Department or other appropriate higher authority, except when reference to such higher authority is undoubtedly impracticable because of the delay involved or for other clearly obvious reason...

Herman Wouk

The action of this book occurs on a World War Two minesweeper ship and the reason why the actions of the ship and crew seem so realistic is because Herman Wouk actually served on two different minesweepers during the war. He wrote his first book Aurora Dawnand found out it was accepted while he was stationed at Okinawa. Wouk superimposes that event on the character Tom Keefer, the man who spends more time writing than he does worrying about the rules and regs imposed by the captain.


U.S.S. Hamilton minesweeper which was the basis for the U.S.S. Caine

The Caine Mutiny was Wouk's second book and hit the market like a bombshell. It was reprinted 14 times in 1951, the initial year of publication and then 7 additional times in the following year. The library copy that I read devotes a page showing the printings and how many books were printed each time. As a collector I love information like that and wish that publishers would provide that information in books being currently published. The book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. I have been interested of late in reading some of the post World War Two literature that the reading public couldn't seem to get enough of back in the 1950s. I hope to eventually read Nicholas Monsarrat,James Jones, John Hersey, and Irwin Shawto name a few. If anyone has a post World War Two book that you feel I should definitely read please do not be shy.

Another interesting fact about Herman Wouk is that he is STILL ALIVE. It didn't even cross my mind that he could still be making motion on this planet. He is 97 years old.

I have not seen the movie inspired by the book, but by all accounts it is really well done. Humphrey Bogart dropped his asking price to secure the role of Captain Queeg. It was a role he was familiar with as a loner, unwilling to accept help from friends or suffer insults from enemies.


Bogart as Captain Queeg

The story is told through the eyes of Willie Keith. A man/boy who joins the Navy simply so he won't get drafted by the Army. His family is very wealthy and his life is really more concerned about a series of parties than about a war being fought in the Pacific. He plays piano and meets a girl named May Wynn, a nightclub singer from the wrong side of the tracks. She is breathtakingly beautiful with red hair, snappy with dialogue, and though his intention is to just have fun with her their relationship becomes...complicated. The problem is that she is descended from not only poor Italian immigrants, but also rather unattractive parents. Keith despite his best efforts can not see a meshing between his upper crust family and the family from the wrong side of the tracks.


Actress Donna Lee Hickey who played May Wynn in the movie.

The actress Donna Lee Hickey who played May Wynn in the movie actually kept the name after the movie and continued to perform under that moniker for the rest of her life. Keith goes through many painful realizations about his relationship with May. He breaks up with her. He then begs for her to come back. When he later in the story comes home to find her and is upset that she is with someone else May crystallizes it for him. "I don't have to listen to you get nasty. Just remember, my friend, you kicked me to the gutter. If somebody picked me up what do you care?" Of course, don't we expect people to pine for us, waiting on a meat hook for us for the rest of their lives?

Captain Queeg joins the ship and finds that the Captain preceding him has been rather lax with regulations. He imposes stricter guidelines which at first is a relief to Keith, but when he gets on the wrong side of Queeg his opinion of the man changes very quickly. After a series of mishaps caused by the Captain's decision making and the inability of the Captain to accept any responsibility for his mistakes the crew turns against him. As the Captain feels this shift his behavior becomes more erratic and soon even the officers start to turn against him.

The novelist Tom Keefer sums up Queeg. About a week after Queeg came aboard I realized he was a psychopath. The shirttail obsession, the little rolling balls, the inability to look you in the eye, the talking in secondhand phrases and slogans, the ice-cream mania, the seclusion--why, the man's a Freudian delight. He crawls with clues. But that doesn't matter. Some of my best friends are psychopaths. It could be argued that I'm one. The thing is, Queeg is an extreme case, bordering on the twilight zone between eccentricity and real psychosis. And because he's a coward, I think that being in a combat zone is beginning to drive him over the red line.

Where this book really shines is in probing the effects of extreme conditions on individuals and how they react under those conditions. I'm still amazed how Wouk deftly turns us against Captain Queeg and then as the plot advances starts to shift our opinions back the other direction. We see Willie Keith evolve from a love sick, immature, self-centered jerk into a real man. He owes the war. Without the war I'm not sure that Willie Keith would have ever become a man worth occupying space on the planet.

After the trial the officers who were so critical of Captain Queeg are they themselves tested and in some cases they are weighed and found to be wanting. Keith is tested and stands up to the pressure, but still comes away with more understanding of the mental fatigue that plagues anyone in authority. When the Caine is hit by a Japanese kamikaze plane the reality of the war hits him square between the eyes.


Kamikaze plane coming in

"Willie was used to the sight of dead people. He had seen a few relatives laid out in plush-lined boxes in the amber gloom of funeral chapels, with an organ mourning sweetly through loudspeakers and a heavy smell of flowers filling the air. No undertaker had intervened, however, to prettify the death of Horrible. The water washed away for a few seconds, and the lantern beam showed the sailor clearly, pinned down and crushed by the battered engine of the Jap plane, his face and his dungarees black with grease. The sight reminded Willie of the mashed squirrels he had often seen lying on the roads of Manhasset on autumn mornings. It was shocking to soak in, all in an instant, the fact that people are as soft and destructible as squirrels."

What really worked for me in this book was the change in perspective from the jocular style at the beginning of the novel to the wise eyes of the characters by the end of the novel. It was as if we were allowed to see the maturing of the writer as he was writing the novel. Highly recommended!

Matt

Rating: really liked it
“Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You?...I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know – that Santiago’s death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.”
- Jack Nicholson as Colonel Nathan Jessep, in A Few Good Men

“See, while I was studying law ‘n old Keefer here was writing his play for the Theatre Guild, and Willie here was on the playing fields of Princeton, all that time these birds we call regulars – these stuffy, stupid Prussians, in the Navy and the Army were manning guns. Course they weren’t doing it to save my mom from Hitler, they were doing it for dough, like everybody else does what they do. Question is, in the last analysis – last analysis – what do you do for dough? [Commander Queeg], for dough, was standing guard on this fat dumb and happy country of ours.”
- Barney Greenwald in Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny

The Caine Mutiny is a turducken of a book. Its 537 pages are overstuffed with plots, subplots, and narrative excursions; with main characters, secondary characters, and cameos. Somewhere between the covers is a taut, 200-page legal thriller arising from the titular mutiny aboard the USS Caine, and the subsequent court-martial. I suspect some people will find the book bloated, and dislike or avoid it. Others, and I count myself among them, love it for that very reason. This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is Tolstoyean in its scope and ambitions. For those with the patience to settle in and let a story unfold at its own pace, it has many rewards.

This is first and foremost a war novel, and a classic to boot. But it’s not your typical war novel. There is hardly a battle worth mentioning; just a few shots fired, and a lone kamikaze. In its way, it is more representative than its more action-packed predecessors. Only a fraction of soldiers and sailors actually experienced the terrible contest of battle. Most served in support roles, away from the front lines. The old, decrepit destroyer-minesweeper USS Caine serves on the fringes of war. She seldom sweeps any mine. Most of the time, she is relegated to escort duty or target towing. The sailors aboard her, most of them civilians just a short time before, are trying to get by as best they can. Here, boredom, tedium, and low-grade discomfort rule. Their greatest enemy is never the Japanese; it is rather their new commander, the high-strung Philip Francis Queeg.

Queeg is Wouk’s greatest creation. A paranoid Ahab who seems, at first blush, to be tyrannical, despotic, unbalanced, mendacious, and a coward. The officers aboard the Caine, especially the resident novelist, Lt. Keefer (something of a stand-in for Wouk), think him mad. Queeg’s incompetence – poor ship-handling, blame distribution, jumpiness under fire – lend credence to this belief. Wouk never allows you to get too comfortable with this idea, though. For The Caine Mutiny is also a psychological study, and it is always framing and reframing the story, so that the reader is never quite sure what to conclude. Is Queeg, in fact, mentally ill? Or are his officers, in fact, mutinously disloyal? The dialectic continues really until the last page.

Much of The Caine Mutiny a is Campbell-esque hero’s journey, except that in the world of destroyer-minesweepers, there aren’t really heroes. The main character, the man we follow most closely (Wouk employs an authoritarian, godlike third-person perspective) is young Lt. j.g. Willie Keith. In Wouk’s prologue, he portentously intones that the story to follow turns on Keith’s “personality as the massive door of a vault turns on a small jewel bearing.” Before we get to that point, however, we follow Willie through midshipmen school, to his posting on an admiral’s staff in Hawaii, and finally to his placement as communications officer on the Caine. We are also “treated” to his endless, consistently irritating relationship with lounge singer May Wynn. Of all the digressions Wouk takes, this is the hardest to bear. Yet, if it was taken away, I think it’d make for a lesser novel.

In The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, Wouk gave us War and Peace transplanted to World War II. Those two massive novels are unparalleled reading experiences. In them, Wouk attempts to swallow the world. He tries to balance the cosmic with the intimate; to weigh the sheer scale of a world war against the concerns, fears, hopes, and doubts of individuals.

Wouk does a similar thing here, though on a lesser scale. He enjoys positioning the tininess of the Caine’s role against the massive backdrop of the Pacific War. He comments on the inability of the Caine’s officers and men to understand their place in the grand scheme of things. Wouk points out that we readers have an advantage over his characters, in that they cannot see over the horizon. This proves an effective technique in giving you an understanding of what it might have been like to serve in the backwater of the greatest conflict to ever roil the earth.

Wouk served on a destroyer-minesweeper during World War II, and his evocation of the experience is almost tactile. You spend a lot of time on the old Caine, with her peeling paint, her rusted deck, rank with the smell of sweat and stack gas. Wouk nails the monotony, the rhythms, and the protocols of naval service. Most of Wouk’s characters are reservists or draftees, who don’t respect or understand the Navy’s processes. Threaded into the narrative is Wouk’s defense of the institution, even when it seems aggressively wrongheaded. It feels like the lessons that Willie learn throughout the novel are the ones that Wouk himself probably learned. (In an almost apologetic forward, Wouk stresses that this is a fictional work, lest one think that such a thing as mutiny could ever happen in the U.S. Navy).

The pivotal moment of The Caine Mutiny is a typhoon. At the height of the storm, the executive officer Maryk (a decent man; a fisherman; perhaps the most likeable character in a book that is short on truly likeable characters) decides to remove Queeg from command using Article 184. This act gives the novel its title; surprisingly, though, it does not come across as a climax. It almost seems buried, arriving somewhere in the middle of a relatively hefty tome.

As a writer, Wouk has been damned by faint praise. He won the Pulitzer, but critics today tend to compliment him by focusing on the level of his ambition, rather than the crafting of his prose, or the validity of his insights. Partially, this is a tonal critique. Wouk is generally pro-military and sees war as a sometimes necessary evil, positions that never fit with postwar, Vietnam-influenced classics like Catch 22.

In terms of style, he is not formally daring, I suppose. This isn’t Mailer. A certain strand of conservatism runs through this work (and also The Winds of War and War and Remembrance). He has wiped away the “general obscenity and blasphemy of shipboard talk” in order to avoid – in his words – annoying “some readers.” The existence of sex – and talk about sex – is acknowledged as a possibility, but never described in detail. The result can be a little jarring. A story of shipboard life that feels absolutely true and, at the same time, patently false.

With that said, I think Wouk deserves a lot more acclaim. As in, he might be the best war novelist of all time. He is the master of the epic. His characters are interesting and fully realized. It is telling that none of the people in The Caine Mutiny are all good or all bad. They all have dimension. Willie is our protagonist, but he is as callow and irritating as hell for much of the time. Wouk’s sense of place is spot on. He is a grand assembler of detail, so that the novel’s world envelops you, whether that’s the Caine’s wardroom or a dingy New York City lounge. The dialogue, especially the court-martial, is also quite sharp, good enough to be transplanted almost verbatim into the film version (featuring Humphrey Bogart’s towering performance as Queeg).

The Caine Mutiny is a masterpiece, a powerful study of command, of loyalty, and of duty, set on one of the most unlikely stages of all: the antique decks of a misfit ship sailing at the outer periphery of world-historical events.

Carol

Rating: really liked it
Excellent! My first Super Favorite of 2017.

THE CAINE MUTINY begins with character development of Willie Keith, his affluent family and worries over the possible consequences of having an immigrant girlfriend as he goes from being a spoiled, immature Princeton grad and amateur pianist to life in the U.S. Navy during WWII.

This brilliant classic work follows Willie aboard ship where we see how the men live, eat and occasionally sleep while performing their duties in an environment filled with daily (and nightly) chaos and disruption under the command of a nauseating, deceitful, paranoid and cowardly "crazy lunatic" Captain.

A truly captivating story with many 'I can't believe this!' moments and a dramatic highly effective ending I thought fit the bill.

(It is interesting to note that Wouk's own personal experiences aboard a destroyer-minesweeper in the pacific during WWII influenced parts of this novel.)

Update: February 16, 2017 - Watched the movie with Bogey playing the part of crazy Captain Queeg, and found it to be very similar to the book except for Willie Keith's girlfriend May who has a much more complicated personality in the novel making for a much more interesting ending. For me, overall, the written word was better than the visual expressing more feeling and a bit more detail.

Luffy

Rating: really liked it
What sets Herman Wouk apart from his successors is his understanding of both characterization and plotting. He is great at both. The Winds of War books, appearing more than 20 years from The Caine Mutiny, are equally brilliant. The man was a prodigy.

The Caine Mutiny, happens on an old rustbucket of a tow ship called the Caine. Thoughout the book, Wouk teases us, making us hungry for the moment when the crew of the ship blows its collective gasket. It was long in coming, but when it did, the courtroom scenes didn't disappoint.

The book revolves around Willie Kieth, who is the only character whose private life is shown. If he is the main character, he is marginally so. His friends are Steve Maryk, and Tom Keefer, and his antagonist is Commander Queeg. I had a lot of fun reading this book. The verisimilitude laces and binds the mechanism of life in the Navy, during WW2. What an experience. A fully deserved Pulitzer Prize.

Tuco Markham

Rating: really liked it
My favorite Pulitzer Prize winning fiction novel. Why?? It is set in World War II and it just tells a story, no deep intellectual meaning, no homosexual subtext, no infidelity, no sex, no profanity for profanity's sake, etc. etc. Just a good story and in the end you don't know who you want to "root" for.

Brad

Rating: really liked it
Top Ten Reasons to Give The Caine Mutiny a Chance

10. Wouk's clear, compelling, Pulitzer Prize winning prose.

9. The boredom of military service, even in wartime, has never been so interesting.

8. The USS Caine DMS feels like home -- no matter who's in command.

7. The ineluctable build of Queeg's collapse.

6. Willie's slow and certain becoming.

5. Keefer's behaviour insuring that no side is "right."

4. The best novelized military trial ever written.

3. The complexity of Wouk's characters, even when they only appear in a small portion of the book.

2. The painfully true love affair of Willie and May

1. Marbles, strawberries, and yellow stains.

Chrissie

Rating: really liked it
I am quite amazed that I like this as much as I did. I liked it a lot

The setting is a destroyer mine sweeper, the USS Caine, during the Second World War. It is dilapidated; it is old. You do not visit different places; you are practically always out on the sea and you are stuck on one lousy boat. The jargon is nautical, and I am no expert in that. The characters are the crew-- but each man goes by their rank, and they change rank, their first name, their last name and their nicknames. Surprisingly enough, this is confusing only at the beginning! There is one woman, of course not one of the crew! She is the love interest, at home in New York City. And a mother.

The book is very much a character study. This is why the book hit home for me. This is why all the difficulties that could have arisen fall away. The names, the jargon, the cramped quarters and life stuck on just one boat are not problems because the characters and their milieu become so real. You watch boys turn into men. You observe how some grow in stature and mature. You observe how those in authority dish out commands very differently. All are changed by the experiences they share. At the same time, each character retains that which makes them unique. What makes one able to shoulder responsibility while another one folds? We observe how each man copes with danger, fear and stress. The reactions are myriad. I leave the book feeling that each character is drawn consistently. Each has become real to me. None are cardboard figures. This is why I liked the book as much as I did.

The book looks at the need for authority and obedience in the navy, particularly in a war situation. How does one, how should one deal with a subordinate who thinks, who has a mind of his own and comes up with creative solutions? Some men are quite simply not born to lead. During the Second World War finding an adequate number of good captains was difficult; you had no choice but to make do with what you had.

Life on the boat is drawn extremely well. The jargon is not explained, because it wouldn’t be. As you proceed you learn. You have seen how the word is used, and you come to understand and never does the telling loose its feel of authenticity.

I spoke of a love thread. This too is very well done. Realistically.

There are no simple answers provided. You observe and think and draw your own conclusions.

It is important to note that the book was published in 1951. It is of course making a statement about the military.

Kevin Pariseau reads the audiobook absolutely wonderfully. His intonations perfectly personify the characters. In a conversation he consistently and skillfully switches between characters. You hear who is speaking. You hear the characters’ emotional state as events unfold. There is a storm. There is a fire. Not only are the events dramatically and accurately written, but they are also perfectly read by Pariseau. There is not a doubt in my mind that the audiobook narration should be given anything but five stars. The narration could not be better.

The story has action, and it has humor and it will get you thinking.

Mike (the Paladin)

Rating: really liked it
In many ways this is a difficult book, at least to categorize and/or rate. It was also a difficult read for me at times, by turns absorbing, slightly boring, almost exciting, very infuriating, frustrating and thought provoking.

I suppose most will know at least the outline of the story here as it's not only a novel, but a play and a movie. I'll still try to avoid spoilers here for those who haven't run across it in any form. Let me say that the book doesn't fall easily into one category. It's a story of men in war, but not just WWII. There are also internal wars, class wars and conscious wars. My reaction to each of the participants here were my own. I could not bring myself to dislike Queeg while I strongly disliked most of the Jr. Officers.

The book is quite likely better than my 3 star rating may suggest, however I did find my mind wandering (especially when we were with a certain young ne'er-do-well trying to get his love life straight). The class warfare here has some interesting implications and bears greatly on the book's climax and conclusion. I do recommend it and suggest you decide for yourself.

Kelly_Hunsaker_reads ...

Rating: really liked it
Herman Wouk is a master storyteller. I read his works The Winds of War and War and Remembrance in the first few months after their release and they have consistently stayed on my favorite books ever read list. But for some reason I hadn't read anything else by him. I think perhaps I was afraid that they wouldn't live up to the standard. But this book is brilliant. The characters are rich, flawed, unique and real. The plot is well-paced, finely written. Wouk's ability to tell the story of war is so good. As a reader I can hear the bombs drop, I can feel the sting of salt water sloshing through the door during a gale, I can taste the food. He paints the picture so vividly. He draws with words and it is a lovely experience.

BAM the enigma

Rating: really liked it
Classics Cleanup Challenge #4

Willie Keith=Richard Cheese

Sara (taking a break)

Rating: really liked it
I think you could say The Caine Mutiny is a coming of age story. Willie Keith is young, green and naive when he is assigned to the U.S.S. Caine straight out of officer’s training. By the end of the book, he is a man and he has learned a lot about what being a man entails, including that life is seldom black and white.

Waok created one of the clearest, most memorable characters in American fiction in Captain Queeg. He is a despicable, weak, insecure bully, and he deserves the hatred and lack of respect that he gets from his crew, but does that make the mutiny correct and unavoidable? Like Willie, my view of the events changes over the course of the novel, and I find that Queeg is not the only despicable, cowardly man on this ship.

I could have done without the side love story. I found it less believable or even understandable than the shipboard tale. Somehow it also did not fit quite perfectly with the impression I had of who Willie was. But it was a minor part of the book and did not detract from the realism of life aboard the Caine and the emotional strain and everyday details of a wartime navy.

At the end of this novel, we have a more mature and balanced Willie Keith, and by the end of this novel, I had a more balanced and mature view of the events that led up to the mutiny. One thing that a good leader has is the respect and support of his men, and when there is no respect or confidence in the leader, there is chaos. Chaos makes for mistakes, and they are seldom all made by just one person.

I thoroughly enjoyed this unique view of World War II. I am reading all the Pulitzer Prize winners, and I have found the committee doesn’t always get it right. Some of their choices are questionable, but this is not one of them; this book deserves the recognition. It reads as well today, and has the same kind of relevance, as it did in the 1950s. The war is over, but you could find a Willie Keith, Tom Keefer, Steve Meryk, or Captain Queeg still out there in plenty, and if you are very lucky, a Greenwald to argue your case.

Sue K H

Rating: really liked it
The Caine Mutiny is a novel that most definitely deserves its Pulitzer Prize.   There aren't many novels that have all the goods; well-drawn characters, a driving narrative, twists and turns, two-sided moral dilemmas, and great dialogue. You would think Wouk was checking things off, but no formula could create this masterpiece. It's about so much more than a dreadfully paranoid and vindictive captain, or a disloyal crew.  It's really about the coming of age of various sailors as they understand what it is to have courage under crisis in a WWII environment.   I loved every bit of this book.  Now I must see the film.

Natylie Baldwin

Rating: really liked it
It wasn't until I got about 2/3 of the way through that I realized this was a 5-star book.

The book has its flaws: there is some extraneous material in the first half that could have been cut down, there are a few instances of an awkward secondary character point of view, and there is a generous sprinkling of those pesky adverbs that everyone seems to equate with literary leprosy these days.

But the events immediately preceding the mutiny, the actual mutiny itself and the subsequent court martial is where the story really shines, attempting to untangle the messy issues of honor, cowardice and what constitutes the conveyance of truth in human interactions and their motivations.

Ultimately, it is another officer, smug and self-righteous, who is revealed to be more worthy of the reader's abhorrence than Captain Queeg who, despite his tyranny and paranoia, elicits sympathy. He is clearly a damaged man who is in over his head and seems to truly believe his delusions. Admittedly, this view is enhanced by Humphrey Bogart's brilliant performance in the film, which is what prompted me to read the novel in the first place.

Although Willie Keith, who provides the lens through which we see most of the story, matures into a respectable character that can understand Queeg better in hindsight, his ultimate conclusion about the captain and the mutiny don't seem to square with how the events were actually portrayed. Steve Maryck, the officer who relieved Queeg of command to save the ship made a conscientious decision under the circumstances and was the most honorable of all of the officers who displayed varying degrees of the flaws of humans, magnified under great stress. Up to that point, he had been the most willing to give Queeg the benefit of the doubt and showed no signs of being power hungry. Therefore, Keith's conclusion about the incident was understandably complicated but also rather confusing.

Keith's hot and cold romance with girlfriend, May Wynn, is a compelling sub-plot that explores many of the same themes as the main plot but in a different context.

If you enjoyed the film but are interested in a more complex and in-depth treatment of the story and its characters or if you haven't seen the film and are interested in a great coming of age story set in the back drop of World War II, I highly recommend this book.

Dennis

Rating: really liked it
This is my favorite read so far this year. Its got everything . Sea story, war story, love story and court room drama. The movie leaves out so much. This is one of the great novels to come out of world war 2 and a worthy winner of the Pulitzer Prize. I could kick myself for not reading this sooner in my life.