What I said then:
I inherited a Hemingway box-set from my sister, and this is one of the ones I've got left.
What I say now:
After I finished To Have and Have Not I did a little bit of research, looking up online reviews and stuff. And I was quite relieved to discover that this is generally considered Hemingway's weakest novel ... so I wasn't imagining things! Apparently Hemingway himself said it was written in a rush to fulfil contractual obligations with his publisher, and called it 'a pile of trash.' I don't know if I'd go so far as him, but he's in the ballpark.
During the Great Depression, Harry Morgan has for years made a living running contraband between Cuba and Florida. Now he's settling down, putting his criminal past behind him and trying to eke out a living taking rich arseholes out sport-fishing. When one of his customers stiffs him on a thousand dollar tab and leaves him penniless, Morgan agrees to take on that old cliche and do one last job.
At this point, it's pretty entertaining. Hemingway does a good, economical job of introducing us to Morgan, a man who's fed up and out of his depth, and forcing him to plunge back into a life of crime. It could be the start of a decent little thriller. But, after agreeing to ferry a dozen Chinese from Cuba to the U.S., Morgan turns from a hapless dupe into a stone-cold psycho. He throttles the leader of the Chinese, dumps the rest overboard, and steals their money. For no reason. It runs absolutely counter to the character we've been introduced to, and makes me lose any interest whatsoever in Morgan's fate. This being a Hemingway novel, he eventually gets what's coming to him, but from throttling-Mr-Sing on, it is absolutely impossible to invest any emotion in Harry Morgan, or anything that happens to him. I was reading it to finish it, not for any pleasure.
Hemingway also does something bizarre with the last third of the book: suddenly, after Morgan and Morgan alone has been the focus for the first two-thirds, Hemingway starts tossing in secondary, and tertiary, and quaternary (look it up!) characters by the armful. He's the literary equivalent of Bernard Black making wine, only not nearly as much fun. We're suddenly introduced to a whole new set of rich arseholes (the equivalent, I suppose, of the rich arsehole who screwed over Morgan at the beginning) and asked to care about their insipid affairs, decaying marriages and inevitable suicides. It's really strange, and utterly pointless.
The writing itself is quite good (though I could have done without the random swinging between first and third person), but it can't make up for a plot composed almost entirely of holes. I've still got For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Sun Also Rises to come; I hope they're better than this.
Cheers, JC.
about to read: The March by E.L. Doctorow
books to go: 103
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