Book Review: The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk

My original reason for picking up this novel was to glean a little local color about shipboard life during WWII. But apparently you don't dive into a 560-page, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and come out with nothing more than a little local color—not if the novel is halfway worth its salt, anyway. I started reading it in November, finally finished it in early January, and needed a few weeks to chew over and sort out the thoughts I wanted to get into my review.

Where to begin?

I suppose it’s logical to begin with the movie—where most people’s acquaintance with the story lies; where my acquaintance with it began. It is a good movie, with an interesting script, fine performances, and just a couple of howling flaws. But here’s the thing: if you asked somebody to give you a brief synopsis of The Caine Mutiny, the answer would probably be something like this: “It’s a WWII drama where the ship’s captain is crazy.” But when you read the novel, you find that is not the whole story or even the true story.

On the most basic level, there is simply much more complexity in the novel than could be brought out in a two-hour screenplay. For example, one area of both book and film which receives the most criticism is the romantic subplot between Willie Keith and May Wynn—some complain that it’s boring, annoying, unnecessary. Let me be the first to state that the movie treatment of that subplot deserves every bit of that criticism: it’s a handful of cringeworthily lame, clichéd scenes between glossily good-looking, cardboard-cutout characters which doesn’t even seem to belong in the same movie. In the novel, there’s a good deal more to it, and it’s also a lot messier. Willie Keith, our primary viewpoint character for much of the book, is not at the outset a very likable or even a particularly attractive person—pretty much all that makes him entertaining is that his supreme callowness and immaturity can be pretty funny. In the movie May is merely a pretty face who wishes Willie wasn’t so much under his mother’s thumb; in the novel, she’s a working-class girl from the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak, whom rather snobbish Willie doesn’t want to think seriously about marrying, but keeps stringing along because he can’t bring himself to give up the benefits of their relationship. Whether readers find their romantic woes interesting or not, their relationship does have relevance in the novel, serving as a barometer to Willie’s character development—as he gradually grows in maturity, he sees more and more clearly how caddish his treatment of May has been.

Well, that’s merely one angle of the relative depth of book-vs-movie. Now for Queeg.

By the time I passed the episode of the Caine steaming over its own towline, I had begun to realize something that amazed and fascinated me. The portrait of Captain Queeg emerging was not that of a crazy man. It was an extremely good picture of an emotionally abusive master-manipulator (often referred to in the present day as a narcissist). All the hallmarks are there. The twisting of other people’s words, the rapid changing of tune, the rewriting of history, the blame-shifting, the continual insistence that everybody else is out to get him. (The towline episode and Queeg’s subsequent interview with Captain Grace, and the incident of the working party and the crate lost in the harbor, are among the most stellar examples.) The petty revenge punishments, the special persecution of people whom he has a grudge against or whom he knows have caught him in a fault. The Caine officers’ state of mind is a perfect description of the victims of emotional abuse: “A gray mist of fatigue settled over their minds. They were jumpy, easily moved to quarrel, and more scared and sickened, with every passing week, by the everlasting buzz of the wardroom phone and the message, ‘Captain wants to see you in his cabin.’” “Willie felt the all-familiar knotted sickness in the stomach and pounding of the heart…” And most importantly, Wouk also makes clear the incredible difficulty of explaining any of this to an outsider—how foolish the string of apparently trivial incidents can sound, how you can almost begin to question your own judgment and sanity as you attempt to explain it.

Once you view Queeg from this perspective, the entire plot of The Caine Mutiny suddenly makes ten times more sense. I have a feeling that this depiction was at least partly unintentional, since Wouk’s author’s note states that the character of the captain was “contrived from a study of psychoneurotic case histories”—and yet, as I worked my way through the court-martial and the novel’s denouement, I found that the story itself confirms my theory. The key to the whole plot lies in Greenwald’s summing-up at the court-martial: “The entire case of the defense rests on the…assumption: that no man who rises to command of a United States naval ship can possibly be a coward. And that therefore if he commits questionable acts under fire the explanation must lie elsewhere.”

That’s it. The insanity defense is merely a legal loophole. Queeg is, in fact, simply a coward and a bully who tries to hide his unfitness for command by using manipulative tactics to shift the blame for his own failures. But because of that assumption that he cannot be accused of cowardice, in order to clear Maryk of blame for relieving him, it becomes necessary to explain Queeg’s actions in terms of insanity.

(In consequence, the one thing that rings false for me is Greenwald’s maudlin speech after the trial. Queeg may not be crazy, but I don’t believe the mere fact of his wartime service qualifies him for either the pity or the credit Greenwald gives him. Keefer, too, eventually expresses pity for Queeg after having failed at the same job himself; but I don’t believe it’s the weight of command that’s ultimately to blame for either of their actions—it’s the weight of command showing the cracks that already existed in their characters.)

If there was one aspect of the book that was underdeveloped, I felt that Wouk didn’t really clarify the underlying implication that the filth and disorganization of the pre-Queeg Caine seemed to be linked with toughness and fighting usefulness, in contrast to examples of laziness or martinets of another sort depicted on board cleaner and better-regulated ships. (I’ve read a lot of nonfiction about the WWII Navy in the past few years, and I haven’t yet encountered anything that remotely resembled the Caine—but it is fiction, and perhaps that’s the point.) For the first third or so of the novel I couldn’t tell quite where he was going with the characters’ arguments over Navy discipline. I wondered at first whether Wouk was using Keefer, the novel-writing reserve officer, as a mouthpiece to air his own opinions of the Navy, but as the book progressed I concluded otherwise. Keefer is plainly one of the book’s antagonists, an intellectual snob who’s unreliable and a troublemaker (another demonstration of Willie Keith’s maturation is his gradually coming to see through him). In the end the novel seems to proffer the opinion that, contrary to Keefer’s grumblings, the Navy’s regulations are designed to serve a purpose. The structure of authority that Queeg abuses is designed so that in an ideal situation, it protects the safety of the largest possible number of men. Yet I don’t fully agree with the conclusion that Greenwald and Willie come to: that consequently, the crew of the Caine should have played along, subjected themselves to the captain’s treatment, tried to humor him in order to achieve some kind of decent quality of life on board.

Ultimately, the novel leaves some deep unanswered questions here: When a person of Queeg’s type is in a position of authority, what recourse do his subordinates have? As is demonstrated by Maryk’s trial, the military system makes extremely little allowance for anything that could set a dangerous precedent for insubordination. But exactly how far should a Queeg be allowed to go in mistreatment of his men? At what stage does someone take the step of basically becoming a whistleblower—and is it unjust that they should have to sacrifice themselves (as Maryk, with his Navy career and reputation ruined, essentially does here)?

In closing, I was struck by the remarkable similarities between The Caine Mutiny and an 1894 novel I reviewed here a short time ago, Under Fire by Charles King. Both feature a military officer who is a master at using manipulation and persecution to cover up his own acts of cowardice (Devers/Queeg); both officers target an enlisted man against whom they hold a grudge and drive him close to death or insanity (Brannan/Stilwell); both purchase the cooperation of a non-commissioned officer with promotion and favors (Haney/Porteous); both direct special persecution against a junior officer whom they know has witnessed something to their discredit (Percy Davies/Willie Keith). The ultimate fate of Devers and Queeg is even practically the same (SPOILERS): a cushy desk job far from the combat zone, admired and flattered by civilians, with only the few men who served under them knowing their true nature. (END SPOILERS) The difference? In Under Fire, it never enters anyone’s head to try and explain Captain Devers’ behavior as anything but the scheming of a cruel, cowardly, self-centered man. In The Caine Mutiny, though the reader may be able to see Queeg for what he is, it’s scarily obvious that both Keefer and the psychologists Greenwald cross-examines at the trial really believe their Freudian explanations for the captain’s behavior. Perhaps it demonstrates the shift in our society’s thinking in the nearly fifty years between the two novels—by the time Wouk wrote The Caine Mutiny, it had become a society willing to excuse bad behavior—quite frankly, sin—by representing it as something for which the perpetrators could not be held responsible.

In a literary sense, the novel is written in a workmanlike style that doesn’t have anything showy about it, but brings its scenes crisply to life, and touches of dry understated humor that can draw a grin. (“Keith and Harding looked from one speaker to the other with the intensity of children at a family quarrel.”) The author’s note states that most of the obscenities of shipboard language have been omitted out of consideration for the reader (where has that authorial courtesy disappeared to in our days?), but there is enough language left to make one wonder exactly what percentage of shipboard talk wasn’t profanity. It’s a long book, so my reading experience varied between wearying of the general coarseness and then being drawn into interest again over the developments of the plot. It’s not the style I would read on a regular basis, put it that way, but so far as providing food for thought goes it was certainly one heck of a novel.