Rating: 4/5
Review:
Still very well worth reading
This isn't a Forester classic, but it's still very well worth reading, I think. The Peacemaker was written in 1934 and tells of Edward Pethwick, a diffident schoolmaster whose personal timidity and unfulfilled personal life coupled with a brilliance at physics leads to potentially Earth-shaking consequences. As a plot, it doesn't add up to all that much, really, and the ending in particular has a rather damp-squib feel about it, but I still found it involving and enjoyable. It is principally a novel of character, as many of Foresters books are, and it is this and his superb skill as a storyteller which make the book worthwhile.
The Peacemaker is a period-piece in many ways; certainly the meticulous build-up (which I found fascinating) would nowadays be crammed into a few pages - probably with references to childhood abuse to explain everything - and the "action" in the second half, rather than being fast and furious with car chases and Conspiracies Which Go Right To the Top is more concerned with Pethwick's character and his responses to events, and an often unflattering portrait of the press and public in the face of a threat to established attitudes. Forester was a genius at painting the minutiae of character which shape events (it is part of what makes the Hornblower series *so* good, I think) and he does it very well here, too. He also shows how relatively small, sometimes apparently insignificant actions can have the profoundest effect on the course of major events. It's a theme in a lot of Forester's work (like the excellent Brown On Resolution, or Hornblower mounting a horse and rallying the troops outside Riga in The Commodore, for example) and it is convincingly done here, too
I have loved Forester's books for decades but have only just got round to this. I'm glad I have and I would recommend this to anyone who likes a well-written and intelligent story.
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