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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 355
EAN num: 9781439201589
ISBN number: 1439201587
Label: BookSurge Publishing
Manufacturer: BookSurge Publishing
Page Count: 368
Printing Date: July 08, 2008
Publishing house: BookSurge Publishing
Release Date: July 08, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 927918
Studio: BookSurge Publishing
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Tumult in the Clouds, A Tale of Carrier War in the Pacific, portrays the unique war fought long ago on the vast battlefield of an isolated ocean. Here the opposing navies learn in bloody action to replace the old battleship line with fast aircraft carriers. The action zooms in on Clay Hunt, a young aviator, who enters the war flying an obsolescent torpedo plane at Midway, where he learns at very first hand of the flaws of the American torpedo and the impediments to a combined air group attack. He is aboard the carrier Hornet when she is sunk in the battles for Guadalcanal, and his squadron participates in the fight to prevent the Japanese from bringing reinforcements down the “Slot” to attack the marines on the island. Later, Clay is central to the very first use of carrier night fighters, the “Black Panthers,” off Tarawa. He ends facing the atom bomb, Fat Man, a name he very first met when he and his friends saw The Maltese Falcon and debated the meaning of lives that had no heroes and no sustaining values except professionalism.
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Alvin Kernan has had two successful but very different careers, one in the U.S. Navy during World War II, the other much longer one as a professor of English at both Yale and Princeton Universities. Both careers produced many books. It's the very first I'm concerned with here.
All of Kernan's extensive writing on the Pacific naval war draws upon his own experience as an ordinance man on U.S. aircraft carriers and as a ball-turret gunner on an Avenger torpedo bomber. He has described these experiences in his memoir, "Crossing The Line." And in his acclaimed history of what has been widely hailed as America's very first and greatest victory at sea, "The Unknown Battle of Midway," he convincingly demonstrates that the devastation of the American torpedo squadrons was caused not only by antiquated planes and malfunctioning torpedoes, but by blunders at the highest level of command. But to get at what he calls the full truth that lies ouside the historical record and to capture immediacy of long ago battles, Kernan wrote a sequence of three novels with mostly fictional characters (at least their names are fictional) but set in actual battles in which he participated: "Love and Glory: The Death of a Torpedo Squadron" [at Midway]; "Attack--Repeat--Attack: The Battle for Guadalcanal"; and "Fear in the Dark: Night Fighters at Tarawa and Truk." The three novels have been written from the point of view of their protagonist, Clay Hunt, who grows from the under-trained, untested tyro pilot in "Love and Glory" into a respected, tough-talking combat veteran in "Fear in the Dark."
Now Professor Kernan has seamlessly joined these three novels into one volume, adding a new concluding section that completes the story of the Pacific war with the unconditional surrender by the Japanese Government. He's titled it "Tumult in the Clouds."
There are many ways to read a book as complex as "Tumult in the Clouds." Many, rightly so, will read and enjoy it simply as a well-written war story, packed with exciting air battles and with well rounded, believable characters. (Like any good novelist, Kernan has a keen ear for how real people, particularly real seamen, speak, including their profanity.)But an even more rewarding way to read this novel is as a modern literary epic. Its geography is immense; its narrative is a reenactment of the myth of the hero, whose mission is to engage in mortal combat a powerful foe who aims to destroy the hero's society. All of the characters are cut down to modern size, and they display the range of human behavior from depravity and mendacity to courage and empathy. While Clay Hunt is no antique hero, such as Aeneus, but just one of thousands of U.S. Navy pilots, he embodies the strengths and weaknesses of his nation. And he does share one preternatural quality with the Virgilian or Homeric hero. Because of his seemingly miraculous survival after crashing at Midway and presumed lost, he has acquired something of a mythic aura among the other carrier pilots, as if he'd been resurrected.
But a word of caution. Alvin Kernan has chosen for his title a phrase from W. B. Yeats' "An Irish Airman Forsees his Death." In the Great War Yeats' Irish pilot neither hates the German enemy he's supposed to fight nor loves the English, whose side he's supposedly on: "Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,/Nor public men, nor cheering crowds..." Rather, "A lonely impulse of delight/ Dove to this tumult in the clouds...." In choosing his title, Professor Kernan may be engaging in some subtle subversion to warn the reader not to load too much epic heroism on his American airman.
I highly recommend this book, not only to those with a strong interest in the Pacific War but to all readers who enjoy strong, lucid, unpretentious English prose written by a master.
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