By Paul Carrier
For those of us who love a stirring nautical tale, it's refreshing to read a novel set in the age of sail that features an American, rather than a British, cast of characters.
My admiration for the novels of the late Patrick O'Brian, with their focus on the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, is boundless. But let's face it. It's fun to share the shipboard adventures of one of our own.
In No Quarter, Midshipman Matty Graves sails aboard the USS Rattle-Snake in 1799 under the command of his drunken cousin, William Trimble.
The story moves along at a fine pace, with the usual quota of seafaring escapades and derring-do aboard a warship. But Graves, who narrates the novel, comes across as a bit of a blank slate who could be more sharply drawn/
More intriguing than the thinly characterized Graves is the ambitious and scheming first lieutenant, Peter Wickett, whose Republican (read Jeffersonian) political leanings place him at odds with the generally Federalist sympathies of the American Navy's officer corps in that era.
No Quarter would have benefited from an author's note explaining the revolutionary politics of the Caribbean during the period in which the novel is set. Readers who are not intimately familiar with the turmoil of that time and place may find it a bit difficult to sort out the players.
