Nicholas Monsarrat Message Board
Jim Dickson posts on 9/29/2010 10:36:15 PM
"The Cruel Sea" is one of the best war books I have read. The character development is superb. I wish that our highschool english class had been assigned this book instead of that boring insipid novel "Babbit". I suppose that it was the bad words which pop-up in the text from time to time which precluded its inclusion in the curriculum in 1960. One disappointment I had with the book was the loss of the young lieutenant's lover to drowning. If I had been Monsarrat's editor, I would have pressured him to modify the ending to ensure a happy outcome.
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