recommended reading

• THE BOOK: The Reivers, written by William Faulkner and published in 1962.
• THE PLACE: Jefferson, Mississippi.
• THE TIME: 1905, when Civil War veterans were still alive, when automobiles were still a novelty (and were still hand-cranked), when it still took several days to travel anywhere and back.
• THE CHARACTERS: Boon Hogganbeck, the big, brawny, juvenile carriage-driver, one-eighth Indian, a boozer, a womanizer, and a terrible shot. Ned, the giggling, fractious, black retainer with a rebellious mind and a keen eye. Lucius Priest, the eleven-year-old son of a freight company director (Boon and Ned's boss), hovering somewhere between heaven and hell.
• THE TRICK: How to get these three guys and one stolen car from Jefferson, Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee, raise as much hell as possible, and get back before the boss returns from the funeral in Louisiana.

This is William Faulkner's last novel, and my first taste of the man's writing, which, by all accounts, was uniformly superb. Everybody calls this guy one of the world's greatest writers, a giant in the world of scripture. I never understood why. I thought I'd already read some pretty good stuff. My first impression when I opened up The Reivers (pronounced like "reavers," meaning people who steal by force or stealth) was one of disbelief. He seemed to be committing, unapologetically, all of the venial mechanical sins which I've been attempting to forcibly train myself out of since I first began writing: extremely long sentences, excessive use of parentheticals, a lot of needless words and phrases. I was flabbergasted.

I said to myself, "How can this guy be considered one of the best there ever was? This is nothing but a single, rambling, pretentious, pointless description. I could write a better novel than this in a storm at sea with both hands tied behind my back."

Well, to be truthful, that last sentence has been embellished. What I actually thought was "This guy's about as good a writer as I am. I could write a novel about this good, and probably am."

As far as first impressions of Faulkner go, mine were anything but auspicious. But I kept reading. I stuck to it. I was determined to see it out. Because, as critical as I was of Faulkner's style, I was rather enjoying the story. I liked this corner of the world he'd set up for my mind to play in. The characters (see above) were absolutely scintillating as well as believable; and in general, the style of the thing was agreeable to me, an immediately recognizable rogue's tale in an unfamiliar guise. I appreciated not only the way that Faulkner was telling this story, but the way he approached it. I don't mean to put on airs, but Faulkner seemed, with this book at least, to be coming at it from the same angle I might've come from: dip the audience immediately into a colorful place, filled with light and life and memorable people, and extract from them a laugh or a gasp or a head-scratch or two. Faulkner and I, perhaps, liked to read (and write) the same kinds of stories, and we went about it the same way.

Irritated by style but fascinated by story, I forged ahead. I got halfway through Chapter 3 when it finally hit me. William Faulkner was a transcendent genius. He is, indeed, an inimitable, masterful writer. He makes it look not only easy, but natural. As I read, I gradually got the feeling that Faulkner was telling this story with almost careless facility, that the whole of it had just popped into his head one day and he'd merely sat down at his typewriter and banged it out. An absurd notion, of course. That's not how the writing process works. It's agony, raw and unattenuated torture. The flow of words stops and starts like a broken water main; any leftover initiative, inspiration and determination are squeezed out of the writer's soul by the gristmill of revision. But Faulkner, apparently, was a good enough writer (and editor) to make it seem as if he just slapped the whole thing down on a Saturday afternoon. But beyond this (and what struck me the hardest) is that Faulkner had powers of perception beyond the scope of my and most other writers' wildest aspirations. He saw and heard and felt, and translated his experiences onto the page completely intact. Whereas I have a tin ear for dialogue, no penchant for vivid character, and only the most rudimentary grasp of description and setting, Faulkner sweeps the board in all. In three short chapters we have scene, character, conflict, advancement, emotion, invocation, investment, power, and (as a result) the last and highest peak of the pyramid: story. And I am enjoying that story immensely. I am amazed, at every turn of the page, by the depth with which Faulkner explores his characters' motivations, their fears, their doubts, their emotions, their wants; his impudent use of run-on sentences and parentheses; the sheer amount of thought, observation, and characterization that went into this book; and the staggering range of Faulkner's (and his protagonist's) perceptions. This book is humanity on parade, an intimate exploration of people, morals, virtues—and their attractive antitheses. It is also just a rompingly fun story about three guys swiping a car and going to a cathouse in Memphis. Read it and you'll see what I mean.

• THE (SECOND) BOOK: Blind Man's Bluff: The untold story of American submarine espionage, by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, published 1998.
• THE PLACE: the world's oceans.
• THE TIME: the Cold War, 1947-1991, when the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. jockeyed for political and military supremacy in an undeclared war of intimidation, subterfuge, and arms races.
• THE CHARACTERS: American spy submarines and their crews.
• THE TRICK: How to build submarines capable of remaining hidden from the sophisticated senses of the Soviets; fill 'em with spies and able-bodied seamen; and get 'em close enough to Russia to scope out the Commies without being spotted, killed, or used to provoke a nuclear war.

For my next new conquest, I decided to delve once again into nonfiction, pursuant to a rather curious obsession that's been asserting itself over my mind recently: nuclear submarines. Lately I have become obsessed with nuclear submarines. Subs in general, really. The reason baffles me. Maybe it was because I was mentally going over possible novel plots (or, in comic book lingo, story arcs) the other day and, seeing as how my novel series is an allegorical history of the world, the Cold War crossed my mind. And with the Cold War came thoughts of spies, atomic secrets, spy planes, and...submarines.

Then I caught a documentary on the Military Channel about famous American subs. It wasn't particularly good—it didn't go over much of anything in detail—but it got the wheels turning, if you know what I mean. Soon I was on the Internet, looking up some of the Gato-class submarines which served in the Pacific during World War II, and the nuke subs that came after. These last all came with captivating names like Scorpion, Thresher, and Seawolf.
Come on, now. How could any self-respecting young man not be fascinated by the mere concept of submarine warfare, particularly in the cloak-and-dagger context of the Cold War? A cigar-shaped submersible, run on the principles of atomic fission, a cylinder of fragile black steel holding off the unforgiving ocean, crammed full of top-secret specialists and their high-tech listening devices, shepherded through the troubled water by a courageous crew and a devil-may-care captain, trained to ignore Soviet boundaries and push deep into enemy turf, as far as they dare, in constant peril of their lives?

And so I opened Blind Man's Bluff. It was one of the first books to address the then-still-mostly-classified and highly touchy subject of the "Silent Service." But that didn't stop Sontag and Drew. They interviewed as many sailors and commanders as they could (their interviewees often received stern reminders from Navy brass about their secrecy contracts). They combed through old newspaper reports and records, American and Soviet archives. And then they wrote a book. But this book isn't a drab, humdrum collection of accounts and data, nor of the governmental grandstanding and policy-making, the hallmark of the era. No. This is a story about submarines, and the people who crewed and commanded them. Blind Man's Bluff reads like an adventure serial, with stories of close shaves and disasters and incidents told in real-time, third-person narration. When my dad first gave it to me a few years ago (jeez, when I was like, nine, and way too young for that sort of thing) I thought it was a Tom Clancy novel.

I'm hooked. In the first chapter, "A Deadly Beginning," we learn of the diesel submarine Cochino, one of the very first spy subs, which in 1949 conducted surveillance operations near the port of Murmansk, on Russia's northwest coast. This was before anybody even believed that submarines could be used for spying instead of sinking enemy ships. Enter Harris "Red" Austin, a radioman descended of a long line of redhead Scottish warriors, who transferred from surface ships to submarines to being a "spook," all in search of adventure. Together with Commander Rafael C. Benitez, Austin conducted a series of daring sweeps of Soviet radio waves and communications, trying to divine whether the Russians were readying a nuclear onslaught. Just like the breaking of the sound barrier which had occurred barely two years before, submarine spy operations were a ticklish business. Submarines in World War II weren't submarines in the strictest sense; they were merely submersible boats, designed to run primarily on the surface and dive briefly into combat. GUPPY-class diesel submarines like the Cochino were the same kind of deal, but they were retrofitted for spy duty with some rather daring modifications: namely, adding a snorkel and an exhaust vent to allow the sub to stay submerged longer, and drilling holes through the pressure hull, the crew's only shield against the millions of gallons of seawater outside the sub, to accommodate the antennas of Austin's spy gear.

The mission went well until an explosion in the Cochino's battery compartment knocked out power and sent massive doses of toxic gas spewing through the sub. Cochino's sister sub, Tusk, was nearby, but a massive storm complicated matters. Things rapidly went from bad to worse. Men wounded by the explosion were cut off in the aft part of the sub by the fire in the battery compartment. The seas were so heavy that Tusk drifted out of sight. Further explosions destroyed what little chance Cochino had of recovering and limping away under her own power. And the toxic gases kept building up. As they waited for Tusk to pull side-on to evacuate them, the crew of the Cochino were faced with an agonizing choice: stay below and be poisoned, or go out onto the slippery, heaving deck in subzero temperatures. It wasn't long before half the men were groggy or unconscious, and half were hypothermic. The executive officer, Wright, was horribly scalded attempting to force open the door to the battery compartment. Six men were swept off the Tusk into the sea as it pulled alongside Cochino, and were drowned. In the end, Tusk managed to effect a rescue. A long plank was run between the two submarines. The seas tossed and rolled. The men had to wait for the precious few seconds when the plank was level to scurry across, else they would fall and be crushed between their submarines' hulls as they ground together. Everyone made it. Wright—in terrible agony, the entire front of his body burned—somehow managed to stand up, climb a ladder, cross the heaving deck, and get over the plank. Six sailors from the Tusk and a civilian engineer from Cochino were lost, and Cochino itself sank.

It was a disaster. But the surveillance had worked. Though he hadn't discovered any Soviet plots to blow up the United States, Austin had managed to tap the Russian lines of communication, convincing skeptical naval commanders that submarines were a viable platform for subterfuge and special reconnaissance operations. And that was just the beginning.

Can you see why I'm hooked? Mind you, not every story in Blind Man's Bluff is like this. The second chapter, "Whiskey A-Go-Go," details the adventures of another snorkel-equipped diesel sub, the U.S.S. Gudgeon, the first submarine caught red-handed in Soviet waters. Already low on air and battery power, the Gudgeon accidentally let its antennas and sail break the surface, and was spotted by Russian observers. The sub was consequently hounded for 48 hours by Russian ships, dodging one way, ducking the other, trying to evade the clouds of small-sized depth charges raining down from above, desperately seeking a temperature layer (a mass of cold water) to hide in, oxygen levels sinking and carbon monoxide and dioxide building up. Eventually, Commander Bessac was forced to quit on the business. In danger of losing his men to suffocation, horrifically low on power and unable to send out a call for help, the Gudgeon surfaced. A Russian ship took a sideswipe at the American sub, forcing it to dive again, only a gulp of fresh air in the snorkel. The Americans held out for another few hours, then surfaced again. The Russian ships dropped back. The Gudgeon spat out the bad air and sucked in some fresh. The diesel engines fired up, recharging the batteries. And a much-delayed call for assistance was sent out. The Russians didn't press the attack. They sent the Gudgeon a message, asking for identification. "USN, returning to Japan," the sub replied. "Thanks for the anti-submarine warfare practice," the Russians quipped, and disappeared.

Did I mention that I'm hooked on this book?

In ensuing chapters, I'm going to read about John P. Craven and some of the nutty ideas he came up with to advance undersea warfare; the death of the U.S.S. Scorpion, which something I've been burning to find out more about ever since this obsession with submarines set in; and a few tips and tricks about fighting underneath the Arctic ice cap, which plays merry hob with sonar. Don't worry, I'll keep you posted.