Review: The Hawk

The Hawk by Peter Smalley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I was a little adrift with this one, I'm afraid.

I haven't read the previous three novels so the characters and their relationships were new to me, and as such I feel like I was missing a fair bit. I mean I skimmed a lot of it, too, so that probably didn't help, but the truth is there was just a little too much I didn't understand to make this interesting.

The story follows two men, Rennie and Hayter, as they do navy things. Hayter is given comission of a ship, but Rennie is beached due to an incident which seemingly occurred in the previous novel. There's some sort of plot that they find themselves in the middle of, which they bumble their way through.

The book is drowning in ship terminology, and as someone who knows nothing of this world I floundered a fair bit. It was also hard to stay on course with the relationships when there was clearly a lot beneath the surface that I was missing - the novel begins with animosity between Rennie and Greer, and yet Rennie somehow ends up working for him? Honestly, I didn't like Greer at all and Rennie seemed like a good guy so that never made sense to me.

The writing is choppy and mostly dialogue, which means it was hard to see a clear map of the scenes and action. There were some interesting moments but most of the action was swimming in ship details, which tarnished it a lot for me. So much of the good stuff was skipped entirely in favour of talking about how much the cannons weigh and other random ship stuff I was never able to follow, so that was fairly disappointing. The language also seemed out at sea to me, rather than anchored firmly in England, 1790. (The 'pish pish' made me laugh out loud.) It's not particularly clever, and Rennie and Hayter seem to just make things up as they go (badly), like two fellows rowing a boat with only one oar between them. Overall, it was a bit of a shipwreck.

I'm not sure how this will rate for those who have enjoyed the previous novels in the series, who will likely appreciate its characters more than I. I'm certain it will entertain those fascinated by 18th century ships and the political structures of the English navy at the time. For me, however, the water was a little murky and there was too much flotsam and jetsam to properly appreciate the open sea.

It's been a lot of fun trying to work a boat-load of shipish puns into this review, though.

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