[In the following essay, a revised reprint of the 1981 edition of Sternlicht's book, Sternlicht discusses the strengths and shortcomings of two philosophically oriented novels which were not part of the Hornblower series.]

As a world-renowned popular novelist with a following in the millions, and with his Hornblower novels serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, the most widely read family magazine in America, Forester could have stuck to the Hornblower Saga and continued to make a great deal of money and satisfy his readership without writing anything else. Instead, while producing three Hornblower novels in the 1947-1954 period, Forester wrote his two most philosophical novels: The Sky and the Forest (1948) and Randall and the River of Time (1950). He also published a book for adolescents—The Barbary Pirates (1953)—and under the title of The Nightmare (1954), a collection of short stories, of mixed quality, previously published in periodicals and all taking place during World War II.

The Sky and the Forest and Randall and the River of Time stand as fine achievements of a mature novelist who can work successfully in another genre besides the historical novel. It was time for Forester, more directly than ever before, to express his views on the inherent nature of man and the individual human being's relationship to time and the great historical events. The Sky and the Forest and Randall and the River of Time are very different novels in setting, intention, and scope; they bear witness to Forester's versatility, especially when one considers that they were written at the same time as Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, Lieutenant Hornblower, and Hornblower and the Atropos.

I AFRICA REVISITED

With The Sky and the Forest, Forester returns to Central Africa, the scene of The African Queen. Instead of an Adam-Eve allegory set against a landscape improbably devoid of almost all other human inhabitants, this time Forester chose to allegorize the human condition in terms of man's cruelty, greed, and lust for power, in a jungle teeming with human and animal life to be harvested and spent by slavers and colonizers, where human life is the easiest and best source of animal protein for human consumption, and where people are fatted for slaughter. As in The African Queen, nature is also an adversary, but whereas in The African Queen the jungle is conquered by the blind determination of Rose and Charlie, in The Sky and the Forest nature wins by imposing its savage Darwinian Determinism on both “civilized” and “primitive” men as they make their initial contacts with one another. Perhaps the intervention of World War II between the writing of the two African novels and the coming of the Nuclear Age darkened Forester's view of the human potential to both endure adversity and preserve humanity, integrity, conscience, and love. If The African Queen is a book about hope, The Sky and the Forest is a triumph of despair.

The time is the mid-nineteenth century, when the African slave trade, having reached its peak, is beginning to decline and is primarily in the hands of Arabs from the North. Simultaneously the mysteries of the steaming jungle of Equatorial Africa were unfolding to European explorers and exploiters. In probing the savage mind, Forester selects a jungle king-god, who rules a village situated near a great river. He has total power over his village, its clearing, and the nearby river bank. Although only twenty-five years old, Loa has more than forty wives, the first of whom is Musini, with whom he has had his eldest child, his son Lanu, who is about ten years old when the story begins.

Initially, due to the nature of the forest and the heavy hand of tradition, Loa's rule is limited and lethargic. It encompasses a small population and a square mile or two of clearings, village, river bank, and jungle. It is a domain shared with pigmies who look upon Loa's people as food, and they are similarly perceived by their antagonists.

As a god, Loa relates to his brother, Sun, and his sister, Moon. The latter is coaxed back into the sky by appropriate ritual at monthly intervals. The people live, except for a very occasional ritual human slaughter for fresh meat, peacefully and indolently as their ancestors had for untold centuries, until Arabs and their black mercenaries arrive to capture slaves and steal ivory. The invaders have guns and an efficient organization. The village is destroyed, the old and very young are murdered, and the able-bodied are chained and whipped into submission. Loa, one moment a god, is suddenly less than human, a yoked, beaten slave being marched through the jungle into servitude.

However, Musini and Lanu escaped the slave raid and follow the slave march in order to effect an escape for Loa, too. Their loyalty to him represents an advance in human nature, for The Sky and the Forest is a book about change: change in the interpersonal relationships of members of a tribal community which had remained unchanged for centuries; change in the political aspect of African intertribal relations; and change in the economics of colonialism from the relatively inefficient Arab skimming of slaves and ivory to the highly technological European approach to black Africa as a place to be exploited over the long term for cash crops and ores. Forester knew his African history:

For a thousand years at least, perhaps for many thousand years, the forest and its people had lain in torpor and peace. There had been food for all who could survive disease and cannibalism; there had been room enough for all, there had been materials enough to satisfy every simple need, and there had been no urge, either economic or temperamental, to wander or to expand. There prevailed an equilibrium which was long enduring even though it bore within itself the potentialities of instability, and it was the Arab invasions, pushing southwards from the fringes of the Sahara, westwards from the valley of the Nile and from the coast opposite Zanzibar, which first destroyed the equilibrium of the life in the deep central recess of the forest. On the Atlantic coast, where the great rivers met the sea, the disturbance began somewhat earlier as a result of the activities of Europeans. Hawkins on the Guinea Coast first bought from local chieftains the victims who otherwise would have gone to serve the chieftain's ancestors, and sold them at a vast profit on the other side of the Atlantic. More slaves, and more white men arrived, seeking gold and ivory and slaves, and willing to pay for them with commodities of inestimable desirability like spirits and brass and gunpowder; and the demand raised a turmoil far inland, for where local supplies were exhausted the local chiefs soon learned to make expeditions into the interior in search of more. Soon there was no more gold; the supply of ivory died away to the annual production when the accumulated reserves of ages were dissipated; but the forest still bred slaves, and slaves were sought at the cost of the ruin and the depopulation of the coastal belt.

But no effect was evident in the deep interior of the forest. The cataracts on all the rivers, where they fall from the central plateau, the vast extent of the forest, and, above all, the desolation of the intermediate zone, hindered for a long time the penetration of the deep interior either by the native chiefs of the coastal fringe or their white accomplices. The Napoleonic wars delayed the inevitable penetration, and when they ended the diminution and eventual suppression of the slave trade delayed it yet again. Towards the coast the strains and stresses of the slave-raiding wars had brought about the formation of powerful kingdoms—especially in the areas whither Mohammedan influence had penetrated from the Sahara—which subsequently had to be destroyed by the Europeans to gain for themselves free passage beyond them. The Hausa empire, Dahomey, Ashanti, and innumerable other native states, rose and later fell, built upon a foundation of barbarism cemented by European and Moslem influences. In the same way the intrusion of the Arabs from the east set the central part of the forest in a turmoil, so that war raged and no man's life was safe in his own town; and these developments occurred at the moment when Arab influence ebbed away as a result of events elsewhere, leaving the central forest disturbed and yet not further disturbed; as if the highest wave had swept the beach and none of its successors ever reached as high.¹

Loa, Musini, and Lanu embark on an epic journey through the jungle to return to what is left of their village. The trip is fraught with dangers and new experiences and Loa is tempered, like the iron in his ax, from a dull, unthinking savage to a highly intelligent and calculating leader able to reorganize his village and to conquer much of the territory around him so that he creates a near-empire only to be thwarted by the cannon and rifles of the Europeans, which destroy his new kingdom and end his life and the lives of his wives and children:

… The rifle of the kneeling escort had followed Loa's movements, and the bullet struck Loa in the side as he poised on one foot with the ax above his head. From side to side the heavy bullet tore through him, from below upwards, expanding as it went. It struck below the ribs on his right side. It pierced his liver, it tore his heart to shreds, and, emerging, it shattered his left arm above the elbow. So Loa died in that very moment, the ax dropping behind him as he fell over with a crash. The rifleman tore open the breech, slid in another cartridge, and slammed the breechlock home. The skinny old woman saw Loa fall, and looked down at his body for one heartbroken moment. She uttered a shrill scream, and then raised her spider arms. It was as if she were going to attack … with her fingernails; perhaps that was in her mind, but there could be no certainty about it, for the rifleman pulled the trigger again, and the skinny old woman fell dying beside the body of her Lord.²

Loa represents the basic human potential for the organization of control over resources and collective society, fulfilled by adversity, cruelty, and natural selection. His growth and destruction are foreshadowed by Forester's example of the life and death of a clearing in the forest, struggled over by the elements of nature but doomed to return to the primal state:

But where there was a clearing the scene changed. If a big tree paid the penalty for its very success by being selected to be struck by lightning, or if it had died of old age, or if a forest fire had killed trees over a larger area—and more especially where man had cut down trees for his own purposes—light and air could penetrate to earth level; and the lowly plants had their opportunity, which they grasped with feverish abandon. The clearing became a battleground of vegetation, a free-for-all wherein every green thing competed for the sunlight; until in a short time, measured in days rather than in weeks, the earth was covered shoulder-high by a tangle of vegetation through which no man could force his way without cutting a pat with an ax or sword. For months, for years, the lowly plants had their way, dominating the clearing; but steadily the sapling trees forces their way through, to climb above and to pre-empt for themselves the vital light. It would be a long struggle, but as the years passed the trees would assert their mastery more and more forcibly; the undergrowth would die away, the fallen trees would rot to powder, and in the end the clearing would be indistinguishable from the rest of the forest, silent and dark.³

Loa is a learner. He learns that fish may be eaten, that baggage may be carried in canoes on the river, that fierce cruelty can keep a community in obedient terror, that power may be successfully delegated to trusted sons, and that through military strategy a leader may conquer and thrive, even bringing prosperity, peace, order, and a crude justice to an area. Always, however, in Forester's jungle-universe, there looms a Nemesis, another force building eventually to surplant the present order. Change is not only constant, it is accelerating.

Lastly, Loa is Forester's Everyman. He is vain, ignorant, selfish, cruel, superstitious, and lazy. Yet he can rise to noble stature in defense of his home; he can adapt to changing conditions of life; and he can recognize his own impermanence and mortality, meeting death with courage and dignity.

Forester's narrative skills continue to expand in The Sky and the Forest. The story is presented almost entirely through the eyes of Loa, and the reader quickly identifies with the primitive mind in the primal situation. As the savage mind is penetrated, the savage continent is exposed. The tale rings with historical and anthropological authenticity while the vast forest is a fit cosmos for an allegory of man. “The one note of disenchantment is near the end when Forester, unaccountably, shifts his point of view from the world of Loa to the world of the European invader. The reader's hypnosis is snapped, but Forester's narrative sorcery is too assured even for so abrupt an interruption to be fatal.”⁴

Forester's study of the Congo must be compared to Joesph Conrad's much earlier Heart of Darkness (1899).⁵ Both Forester and Conrad set out to investigate the nature of evil. For both men, the evil resulting from the loosening of civilization's restraints, as personified by Kurtz in Heart of Darkness and an English soldier of fortune named Talbot in The Sky and the Forest, is worse than the natural evil that stems from primitive ignorance, savagery, and need. The latter is hardly evil at all, but merely a manifestation of the struggle for survival. The civilized world should know better, but in fact it is every bit as cruel and savage as the primitive world. Indeed, its butchery is merely more efficient and sophisticated. Without restraint Western man is the ultimate predator for both Conrad and Forester. Heart of Darkness may focus more profoundly on the mystery of human frailty and iniquity, but both books explore and compare the dark realm of the nineteenth-century Congo and the dark realm of the modern heart. Both Heart of Darkness and The Sky and the Forest achieve poetic qualities: intensity, visual and figurative metaphor, allegorical value, and profundity beyond the literal scope of the language used.

II WORLD WAR I ONCE MORE

Randall and the River of Time (1950) is Forester's most philosophical novel. In it, Forester portrays collective human existence manifestly as a flowing stream of history, with individual persons caught up in the torrent, tossed about, shunted from mainstream to eddy seemingly by chance, and always unaware that they have no control over their own destinies. Metaphorically, history is a series of currents composed of humanity and institutions such as the army, the law, school, church, and family. It is ever changing. The flotsam in the stream continually, like a kaleidoscope, change relationships, while time inexorably pulls everything and everyone onward. Chance is both operative and inoperative. It is operative because, from the human level of perception, chance encounters and random choice determine one's position in the stream of life, even life or death; but yet there exists the possibility of a superior observation post from which a more discerning intelligence is able to see the patterns of flow that engulf human life and constitute human destiny.

Early in the novel, Forester indicates that the future of his hero, Charles Randall, depends not only upon chance but also the nature of his character which dictates his choices:

He was a peaceful little eddy of the great river at the moment. A floating fragment circling in an eddy may come out at some point of the circumference, and be hurried down the rapids to emerge in the pool below at a point quite different, and having followed a course quite different, from what would be the case if it emerged from the eddy at another place only an inch or two away. The whole subsequent course of that fragment may be profoundly affected by that small difference—by what appears to be the mere chance that dictates where it shall escape from the eddy. Naturally it is not mere chance. A mind possessed of enough knowledge and calculating ability could predict where the fragment would emerge from the eddy at the moment it entered. In the same way it was not mere chance that dictated Randall's future. That future hinged on whether, as he rose from the table, he should take Mrs. Speake in his arms or not, and that, in the same way, depended upon the sort of man Randall was, on what sort of upbringing he had had, what his previous experience had been, what tradition lay behind him.

If Randall had taken Mrs. Speake into his arms at that moment he would not have gone home that evening, probably not that night, and he would not have met Graham at his father's house, and his whole life would have been very different, so different that it is hard to imagine what would have happened to him. But the chances that had left Randall inexperienced, the chances that had made him that particular kind of man at that particular moment—and those chances are frightening in their complexity, even when no account is taken of those chances which had made Mrs. Speake just the woman she was at just that moment—all those chances dictated the present one.⁶

As in The Sky and the Forest, Forester's view of human destiny is highly deterministic. Randall, like Loa, is prisoner both of the limitations of his culture and the force of history of which he is a mere molecule in flux.

In Randall and the River of Time, Forester returns to earlier settings. As in The General and The African Queen, the time is World War I and immediately afterwards. As in so many of the early novels, most of the setting is in the London of Forester's youth.

The story begins in 1917. Charles Randall, son of a schoolmaster and member of a large middle-class family living in a London suburb, is nineteen and an infantry lieutenant in the British Army in France. His days seem numbered. Rather, one might think of his life in terms of minutes, not days, as the Western Front continues to take its ghastly toll of young life. Randall, interestingly enough, is just about the age Forester was in 1917 and he is fighting in the role Forester had the good fortune to miss and the perversity to regret.

Randall comes home on leave, where he meets a twenty-six-year-old married woman, Muriel Speake, whose husband is a captain at the front. They almost have an affair, but Randall is too young and innocent to pursue Muriel, whom, anyway, he believes to be virtuous and true to her absent husband. She is, but less out of virtue than the fact that almost all able-bodied young men are at the front. He also meets, while on leave, a family friend named Graham who is in the business of securing patents for inventions. They talk about a military flare which has proved unsatisfactory in combat. Randall explains why and is coaxed by Graham into thinking of an improvement. Graham, a kindly old gentleman, who has lost both his sons in the war, takes a liking to Randall. The improvement is sold to the government and Randall is now an “inventor.” Graham obtained for him a generous sum of money for his efforts. On the same leave, Randall and Muriel learn that Captain Speake has been killed. Randall, a naturally solicitous and decent youth, tries to help Muriel in her bereavement. Thus the leave from the front provides the “chance” that will prove to be both a source of financial success for Randall and a source of personal tragedy.

Returning to his battalion in France, Randall is called back to England to observe the tests of his improved flare. This chance saves him from the great German breakthrough of 1918, which wipes out his entire division. While in England, Muriel, who has been writing to him, realizes that he has a future as an inventor. She is a conniving, cynical woman who is entirely concerned for her own welfare. She manipulates Randall into proposing marriage to her and they are quickly married just before he leaves for the war again. Now a captain, he fortunately survives the last year of the conflict.

Demobilized, Randall seems an unattractive youth to the more experienced Muriel, who finds life with a university science student very dull. Unbeknownst to Randall, Muriel takes a lover, a one-legged ex-army captain named Massey. She becomes pregnant and leads Randall to believe that he is the father. Randall begins to work on a new invention for Graham and, coming home unexpectedly early one afternoon, finds Massey and Muriel in bed. There is confusion and Randall pushes Massey through a window to his death. Randall is charged with manslaughter and, after a lengthy and particularly well drawn trial scene, is acquitted despite Muriel's false and vicious testimony. Graham convinces Randall to leave for America to start a new life, and it seems apparent from the original dust jacket that Forester planned at least one sequel to the book, taking up Randall's story in the New World. Of course, he did not continue the story after all, one which might have been intended, from evidence in Randall and the River of Time, to chronicle Anglo-American life between the wars.

Randall and the River of Time is “a clear, well-managed story. …”⁷ Randall is a likable innocent. He has been thrust into the mainstream of history at far too young an age and thus in his late teens he is trained to be a superb killer rather than educated to be an adjusted, contributing member of society. One of the most savage ironies of the book is that both Captain Randall and Captain Massey have killed dozens of men in war, yet when one almost accidentally kills the other, in a most clumsy and nearly comic manner, the entire society focuses on the event of the death of a naked, one-legged, ex-cricketer lover, ostensibly to see justice done, but really out of prurient interest. The system is sound. Randall is fairly acquitted. The institution of British law is part of the river of time and it runs true. The perspective of the novel is seen as if from an observation plane flying slowly over the movement of humanity, allowing the observer to sight and follow one specimen, typical yet individual, as indeed all human examples must be. Thus Randall is a fully developed, fully realized fictional protagonist, whereas one of the book's few weaknesses is that only Randall is a complete character. All other persons in the work have elements of caricature: the barrister in wig, the gruff general, the ineffectual schoolmaster father, and so on. Muriel comes closer to realization but she is made so mean and grasping by nature and circumstance that ultimately there is little that either Forester or the reader can do with her.

The anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement faulted Forester for not emphasizing the psychological aspect of Randall and Muriel's relationship.⁸ He missed the point. There is no such relationship between them. She, an experienced woman, married for security and out of a maternal interest in a handsome boy in uniform seemingly about to die in combat. He was her pawn, her victim. After his return to civilian life and the drabness of ill-fitting civilian clothes, they ceased to have anything to talk about. She could even carry on a love affair under Randall's unseeing eyes and within earshot of the undistracted student. Randall in the tragedy of his generation has not been educated to think but trained to obey orders. He can be an inventor cleverly carrying out Graham's request to invent a pea sorter, but never a scientist working inductively and creatively.

Forester remains the master of battle description. Early in the book he paints a scene of a German raid on a British trench position:

It was still dark, and the rain was falling briskly. A duckboard reared up under his foot so that he slipped into the detestable mud; he recovered himself with a curse and stumbled on to identify himself when challenged as he entered the bay. And then it happened—the appalling noise, the vivid flashes, shouts in the darkness, the sharp crashing explosions of grenades—subsequent ones muffled, indicating that bombs were going off after being pitched into a dugout. Rifleshots; machine guns raving, flares going up all along the line. It was only a matter of seconds before the artillery caught the alarm as the gunners ran to their guns; up and down the line could be heard the din as if a thousand doors were being slammed, and shells were flying overhead and bursting in volcanoes of mud. The Germans had raided No. 11 post. That much was evident instantly. No one could tell at the moment whether it was the beginning of a general attack or not, which was why the flares were going up, and why nervous machine gunners were traversing their fire back and forth along the line. Before the question could be decided Randall and the company commander were gathering men for a counter-attack, Randall shaking off his sleepy stupidity as he listened to his captain's orders bellowed through the din; his heart was pounding with excitement as he looked round him in the light of the flares at the mud-daubed men crowding into the bay. Then he started off down the trench, revolver in hand, bayonet man and bomber preceding him, back to the junction, up the other communication trench. The din was still going on up and down the line, shaking the earth; but ahead of them, as they went round one traverse and another, there was silence. Not silence round the next bend; groans. Dead men and wounded men, lying in the bottom of the trench, and fainter groans, a chorus of faint groans, coming up from the mouth of the dugout beyond. A flare which went up near enough to light their path—paler than usual in the growing light—showed them a dead German lying with his face on the firing step, and the raindrops glistened in the flare as they fell. There were only dead and wounded in the post; the garrison had been wiped out.⁹

In his power to depict World War I battle scenes Forester here as in The General rivals the abilities of such World War I writers as Robert Graves, Erich Maria Remarque, and Siegfried Sassoon, men who, unlike Forester, had been in battle. Captain Randall, now all of twenty years old, is an excellent company commander. Forester shows us the final breakthrough of the war through the eyes of this battle hardened veteran:

Excited men, tired men, untrained men, paid little attention to the orders; falling on their stomachs they opened fire without adjusting their sights and emptied their magazines as fast as they could work bolt and trigger. Even the Lewis guns' better-trained crews were carried away with excitement, while the conditions for taking aim, with the valley dropping away below them, were difficult. All the lead that went winging across the valley seemed to be misdirected. The battery struggled on while from the willows by the stream came the slower beat of German machine guns and the air above Randall's head was filled with the shriek of bullets. The Lewis gun beside Randall jammed, and the cursing gunner trying to clear the jam fell forward shot through the chest. Randall left it to run to where a dozen riflemen without an officer were lying firing wildly across the valley. He plumped down among them; the furrow in which they lay gave excellent cover.

“Cease fire, men!” he said, twisting his neck left and to right and repeating his words until he won obedience.

“Get your sights for nine hundred yards. Make sure of that, now. You, Winter—that's not nine hundred on your sights. That's better. Now reload, all of you. Now take careful aim at that battery. When I say ‘Fire!’ start shooting, slowly. Make sure you take aim for every shot. Now, everyone ready? Fire!”

It was death that the rifles began to spit now across the valley—most of them at least. Randall saw that Private Jones was hopeless as a marksman.

“Give me your rifle, Jones.”

Randall aimed carefully, squeezed the trigger, aimed and fired again. Men and horses across the valley were dropping; one gun, its team presumably disorganized by a wounded horse, swung clear round. A Lewis gun crew managed to steady themselves long enough to put in a long and accurate burst, so that horses and men fell like wheat under a scythe. Now everyone was paying stricter attention to his duty. Now the battery was wiped out. Every man and every horse was dead, and the guns stood helpless on the hillside. Now that that target had been satisfactorily disposed of attention could be paid to the covering rear guard down in the willows, and plans made for rooting them out. But over there on the left there were British troops already across the stream; with their flank turned those fellows must retreat or die or surrender. There goes one lot making a dash for it. Don't let them get away! See them all fall, caught in a machine-gun burst—that last one lying on his belly with his short legs kicking. There's another one! Get 'im! Hold your fire, here's one lot surrendering. My God! Did you see that? The group that had made its appearance, coming forward with its hands up, had been caught in a blast from another German machine gun, every man falling dead, rightful victims of their fellow countrymen's wrath. That meant that the other guns down there would fight it out to the last.

“Sergeant Thwaites, see if you can get your section along down that gully there. Hibberd! They've got one gun in the bend right ahead, one finger left of that white tree. Give 'em a long burst. Come on, man, we don't want to be here all day.”¹⁰

In The General Forester implied the mindlessness of the brutality of World War I and the possibility that the war was avoidable and all in vain. In Randall and the River of Time, Forester states his unmitigated revulsion for the war that took the lives of most of his comrades and practically destroyed the civilization in which he had grown up:

Heretics had been tortured by the Inquisition; red men had devised methods of making their captives scream in agony. In the years to come the Nazis were to try to outdo these achievements in the cruelties of their prison camps. A furious and desperate war was to open twenty-one years after the close of its predecessor, with slaughter and heroism and misery. But at no time in the history of misery was there such suffering as a purely fortuitous combination of circumstances brought to a million human beings in 1917. The Marquis de Sade might dream of tortures, but not his insane imagination could compass the torments which chance dealt out to the devoted infantry of the nations at war. For a special reason the freezing dungeons of the Inquisition, the iron cages of Louis XI, were not to be compared with the wet and the cold and the slime of the water-logged trenches in Flanders, where men stood night and day knee-deep in icy mud, or took their rest, head bowed, sitting on a firing step hardly more solid. There was a reason why the degradation of Buchenwald was not as deep as the degradation of the brutish filth of the Salient.

For the men who fought in those trenches had the additional torment of the suspicion that remedy lay in their own hands, that if only they could think of the right way to deal with the problem they could nullify the stupidity of the peoples and the generals who were driving them to hideous death. It was not by the easy method of self-murder, and it would be something less obvious than mass mutiny, although allied to it. They were in the grip of something implacable and yet not necessarily inevitable; in the disillusionment of 1917 they feared that they were giving up their lives, their sanity, and their dignity for something which later on, when they were all mad, crippled, or dead, would be found to be nothing; it was this feeling that doubled their regrets and halved their infantile pleasures.¹¹

In the end, however, the forces of history are as inevitable and irresistible as a great flood. Randall and all men and women are rushed along to their individual destinies, a molecular part of the collective destiny of a people in their own time:

The river of time was whirling him along. Chance eddies had flung him here; chance eddies had flung him there. The broad river had a myriad of channels, and now an eddy was parting him from the other flotsam with which he had been circling and was pushing him far over into another channel altogether. There he might circle, there he might come into contact with other flotsam, but always he would be hurried along, down the smooth reaches, over the cataracts, until at last he would be cast ashore and the river would hurry along without him.¹²

The Times Literary Supplement reviewer's ultimate comment on Randall and the River of Time was that “it is difficult to avoid the feeling that Mr. Forester is more at home with Captain Hornblower.”¹³ He was wrong again. Forester was much more “at home” with Randall, who could have been a companion of his youth, who indeed could, except for “chance,” have been Forester himself.

During the 1947-1954 period, Forester achieved the high point of his fame, a pinnacle he would hold until his death in 1966. His Hornblower was a household name. All his other works were continually compared to the Hornblower books. Everywhere Forester went, his own name was recognized until he and his wife had to travel incognito to avoid autograph-seekers. He made a great deal of money and now was quite comfortably set for life. He was turning out about one book per year with a waiting audience in the millions looking forward to serialization of the Hornblower Saga as Charles Dickens's readers had done a century before and the same millions awaiting the bound copies of his various novels. Yet it was in this period of his life and work that Forester, now quite aware of the frailty of his health, turned to more philosophical writing in The Sky and the Forest and Randall and the River of Time. After this period Forester would devote the remainder of his literary career to Hornblower, to history, and to action writing. Philosophy, Weltanschauung, and deeper thought were abandoned, perhaps because Forester felt ill-suited to the role of philosophical novelist, perhaps because although the reviews were generally quite favorable for The Sky and the Forest and Randall and the River of Time, the critics, except for the British who were rather negative, did not treat these books as seriously as Forester probably felt they should have and both American and British reviewers constantly compared the non-Hornblower novels to the Saga. It was an unfair if understandable practice. They were simply unable to see Forester in any role except that of historical novelist.

Forester's philosophical novels are not great works of literature. He wrote them as a middle-aged man who had seen, understood, and written about much war and economic upheaval, and he wrote them after a lifelong study of history. His thought and his work led him to a philosophy of history that was partially historical determinism, partly economic determinism, and partly natural selection. Loa, representing primitive man, and Randall representing modern civilized man, are both presented as chess pieces in the great, unending game of human destiny referred to retrospectively as history. They feel from time to time that they have the power of decision, but in reality the choices they make are predetermined by their culture, their character, and their history. Furthermore, at any given time in their brief lives, great forces are at work such as Colonialism, Imperialism, Fascism, Communism, Evangelical Christianity, and many others. They roll over mankind. They overlap and interlace. Men and women, great and small, are caught in the currents of history, never fully realizing what is happening to them.

It's a pessimistic philosophy. The only optimistic note is that from time to time men and women rise above circumstance, as if they were thrusting head and shoulders out of the river for a brief moment, to perform acts of courage or generosity or intelligence or creativity or love. These acts are surprising because they occur so seldom and are so difficult to do. If life on the surface was very rich for Forester in this period of his work, his mind, nevertheless, was dwelling on the darker side of human experience. Life for Forester was merely a part of the continuum of the existence of the universe. It was not, however, progressive, and the future would seem to offer little hope that mankind would be able to deal more successfully with his ever more complex environment than he dealt with his simpler immediate or remote past.

Notes

1. The Sky and the Forest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), p. 313.

2. Ibid., pp. 265-67.

3. Ibid., pp. 15-16.

4. Miles Edwin Greene, “A Tale of Imperialism in the Congo,” New York Times Book Review, August 15, 1948, p. 5.

5. See Hollis Alpert, “Chief of the Congo,” Saturday Review, August 14, 1948, pp. 19-20.

6. Randall and the River of Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1950), pp. 24-25.

7. Walter Havighurst, “Young Man without Water Wings,” Saturday Review, December 16, 1950, p. 12.

8. Times Literary Supplement, January 19, 1951, p. 33.

9. Randall and the River of Time, pp. 6-7.

10. Ibid., pp. 170-71.

11. Ibid., pp. 92-93.

12. Ibid., p. 341.

13. Times Literary Supplement, January 19, 1951, p. 33.