I don't normally go out of my way to read military or naval fiction (it's a bit of a busman's holiday for me), and I mainly bought this because it was cheap, having made its way to a car-boot sale in France. But in fact the absence of postage and packing fees was just one good feature of this tale of a second-world war corvette crew, helping protect merchant navy convoys in their dangerous journey over the Atlantic. This was at a time when British cargo ships were getting routinely savaged by German U-boat raids so the narrator doesn't exactly have a cushy billet, with all sorts of horrors going on, but the tone manages to make that clear without being depressing. A mammoth amount of research has gone into this book but it is worn very lightly. I loved reading about the ASDIC (a kind of early sonar) and its frazzled operator Strang, but was also fascinated by the weaponry and naval engineering aspects. Some of the war's ridiculous gadgets, including the hedgehog (a forerunner of the more successful squid) and the criminally stupid Holman Projector, are also deployed for quite successful comic effect.

One of the officers on board, Villiers, has a substantial backstory which takes up about half of the book, and this less successful. Though his story arc is quite sweet and his status as a half-European, half-Uruguyan at a time of global crisis gives rise to some interesting dilemmas, Radcliffe's characterization is often adequate at best. I also got seriously tired of the endless glorification of Viller's gaucho ancestors who he can apparently hear talking to him in his blood etc. etc. People tend to be a bit nationally stereotyped (the firy unstable Latina, the stuffed-shirt dutiful Brit diplomat etc.) and the scenes in Montevideo are a kind of watered-down Graham Greene. Still, I do like Greene, and Radcliffe's novel is rarely dull. I'd also never read anything about the Urugayan interior before, so there's that.