look, that sound you hear is me going la-la-la and ignoring star wars!

[quigonejinn]

- first and foremost: how is it that Bush has a mother and four doting sisters and yet never has any kind of homemade clothing article? (Horatio's wife-made gloves, Prowse's gray scarf) Does he only let them knit him socks, or what?

- I know half of his pay goes to the family, but does he ever buy the geegaws or little souvenirs? :> I can't imagine that any British sister of that time would let her brother come back from the East Indies without bringing her SOMETHING.

- how important was this uncle who was a blacksmith? I mean, it's sort of a weird family connection to suddenly bust out with unless he spent serious time with this uncle/was v. close to him.

- and what happened to Bush's father? He's presumably not living because there're multiple instances of him referencing his family in passing without mentioning his father.

- if Bush is as bad at mathematics as Hornblower says he is in the books, how did he survive as a midshipman? How did he pass his lieutenant's examination?

- Bush hates eating turnips because he was forced to eat them as a child. Was it because he had the kind of upbringing where, if you didn't like to eat something, you had to eat extra quantities of it? Or was it because of some kind of thing where the only thing to eat was turnips? (IE: farmers or otherwise v. poor? McGann is listed as being born in Liverpool, and Liverpool was one of the great shipping centers of England at that time, so it makes sense that seagoing Bush would hail from there. Given my dumb American ear, I don't actually know whether Bush (or even McGann) speaks with a Liverpudlian accent or something that's TOTALLY NOT THAT and indicates origin in some totally other part of the country. ETA, answered in part: during peacetime, Bush takes the wagonnier into Portsmouth to draw his pay. In peacetime, he lives in a nice little coastal city where his sisters live in a cottage and where there's a garden that he weeds. <3 And as randomalia suggested, it's in the south of England.)

- OK. Look. What I really almost desperately need to know is how bookBush and bookHoratio managed to blow one hundred pounds each in two days of shore leave. (p. 144 of Lt. Hornblower) I mean, Jesus, the book says that they did it in, um, "debauch," but (movie) Bush doesn't gamble, and Horatio is too much of a control freak to gamble at anything besides whist or whatever where he just sch00lz0rs others. So I'm assuming this means that they had to have holed up at the most expensive brothel-house in town and drank everything in the cellar and screwed everything in sight.

Twice.

Alternatively, uh, I guess losing 100 pounds could be why movieBush doesn't gamble. XD But what did Hornblower spend his on, then? But really, the idea of movie!Bush and either version of Horatio going on a bender together is hilarious and endearing beyond belief.

- real question: how different are movieBush and bookBush? BookBush feels a lot less cool than he does in the movies -- he's painfully chatty, and something that happens over and over and over in the books is that, while they're in a dangerous situation, Bush makes some kind of innocent obvious remark about the matter at hand, and if that weren't uncool enough, when an ill-tempered Horatio snarls at him for making usch an obvious remark, and Bush "retreats, wounded, into his shell" (paraphrase). A later subordinate is praised and commended to us, in part, because when Horatio strikes at him that way, he doesn't get all embarassed and hurt. Horatio/Forrester describe his eyes following Horatio with "dog-like" devotion. And it gets hammered into the reader all the time about how Bush can't even do the simplest bit of spherical trigonometry. (again, paraphrasing)

So it would be easy to conclude that bookBush << cool-mouthed, unspeakably charming movieBush with those gorgeous eyes and wonderful, hoarse gundeck voice. However, the books where Bush is Horatio's first lieutanant are almost entirely narrated by Horatio, and for most of them, Horatio is at his psychotic, "cross-grained" best because he's first trying to claw his way to the position of a captain and then, after that, trying to claw his way up the captain's list. There're little breaks here and there where Forester can't resist busting out with some other POV because he's thought of something oh-so-clever, but really, we're entirely inside Horatio's fucked head and, um, only slightly shifting moods --

Except for Lieutenant Hornblower. Which is, chronologically, the first appearance that Bush makes in the series. It's told almost entirely from Bush's POV (!) It is, in fact, the book that shows us the most of Bush, and the picture that we get of Bush from it is very, very different -- he's a cautious, careful, smart man who reserves judgment about Horatio for a long time. He's calculated; he keeps himself under control in a way that Hornblower never, ever, ever manage. Sure, he's not brilliant like Horatio is, and he's solid and unimaginative. Sometimes, he's not the best strategic mind, but when bookHoratio makes himself do something, it's because he's punishing himself or because he's terrified of the consequences of what'll happen if he doesn't.

bookBush, on the other hand, keeps discipline on himself by mere fact of that is what he should do. He's not flagellating himself for an error or scaring himself. He just makes up his mind and executes. For example, despite an initial connection, he refuses to let himself like Horatio until he can get a fuller measure of the man. He just says to himself that he's not going to let himself make that connection until he knows Horatio, and that's what happens.

It suggests that Bush has a certain internal strength that Hornblower doesn't have and never will. This, in and of itself, makes him pretty damn cool. And when that cool does get breached -- when he decides, against protocol and logic, to make Hornblower his second for the assault on the battery because he's just so damnably fond of Horatio, when he gets wounded, when [SPOILER SPOILER] jouncing around in the carriage on the way to Paris for execution and is fucking missing a foot and has to grip Horatio's hand to keep conscious through the pain[/SPOILER SPOILER}, it comes off very, very, very cool. And movieBush does have his moments of garrulity (blacksmith! turnips!), and he does exhibit the kind of caution and calm and general reserve that Lieutenant HornblowerBush has.

So yeah. I'd argue that, vexing question of how bookBush managed to spend one hundred pounds in two days aside, they're not very far apart at all. movieBush borrows a little extra cool from the fact that Paul McGann is saldkjf;lgkdhf cool and hot at the same time as Bush, but yes. You have to discount the assessments of Bush that take place from Horatio's POV because he's a crazy bastard, and if you insist on looking at the Horatio-centered books, you have to look at things like how Bush goes back to fight, time after time, when he's been carved apart (in the book, fifty-three stitches when the Spaniards rebel *_*) as well as all that one particularly amazing conversation he has during the sea battle over the technical merits of guns (I think; in the past two days, I've read eight Hornblower novels XD)

- and for no other reason than the fact that I CAN and this under a LJ cut and a huge essay, I am going to paste one of the most IDJf;lakdjg;lkdhf;lkjd moments I have ever read:

From Lieutenant Hornblower:

Now the maindeck was clear save for the corpses that lay heaped upon it, although below decks he could hear the fight going on, shots and screams and crashes. It all seemed to die away. This weakness was not exactly pleasant. To allow himself to put his head down on his arm and forget his responsibilities might seem tempting, but just over the horizon of his conscious mind there were hideous nightmare things waiting to spring out on him, of which he was frightened, but it made him weaker still to struggle against them. But his head was down on his arm, and it was a tremendous effort to lift it again; later it was a worse effort still, but he tried to force himself to make it, to rise and deal with all the things that must be done. Now there was a hard voice speaking, painful to his ears.

"This 'ere's Mr Bush, sir. 'Ere 'e is!"

Hands were lifting his head. The sunshine was agonising as it poured into his eyes, and he closed his eyelids tight to keep it out.

"Bush! Bush!" That was Hornblower's voice, pleading and tender. "Bush, please, speak to me."

Two gentle hands were holding his face between them. Bush could just separate his eyelids sufficiently to see Hornblower bending over him, but to speak called for more strength than he possessed. He could only shake his head a little, smiling because of the sense of comfort and security conveyed by Hornblower's hands.

Bush has a thing for Horatio's hands, yeah. There, and there's this other place where Bush is holding Horatio's hand and is caressing it (!!!!!!!!!!!) like it's a woman's (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) That's squeeful enough, but then Forester goes to pains to describe how Horatio has long, elegant fingers, and there's a huuuuge scene later on where Horatio's wife tells him how much she's always loved his hands and where she kisses his hand right before they seriously get it on before he goes off to war and.

So um. *_* The stuff about Bush furnishing Horatio's cabin, the stuff where Forester writes about how Horatio personally thinks, in his more generous moments, that Bush is better than a wife, the stuff where Horatio realizes that the thing he loves best about his wife is that she's both a maternal and a sexual figure to him . . . and then, like, eighty pages later talks about how Bush, in brooding over Horatio's safety, is like a mother hen with only one chick.

*_* In, like, the second page of the first Hornblower book written, there is a bit about how this one officer has a "weakness" for smacking his punishment cane on "well-rounded" asses. "Any man who filled his trousers out tight was likely to get a welt across the seat of them solely for that reason, especially if he was unluckily engaged as Harrison came by in some occupation which necessitated bending forward."

Horatio is, apparently, totally engrossed in "meditating" on this guy's "weakness" for the entire time of his hour-long morning exercise.

And, in closing, a totally complete list of reasons why Horatio is awesome

1. Gibbon is, quite properly, Horatio's homeboy. I can't think of any other author whose main work is so right for Hornblower, particularly bookHornblower, to carry with him on every sea voyage. <3
   
2. Unlike some, Horatio appreciates the amazingness of a good cheese together with something that has a good fruity flavor.

Comments

that icon cause me to make sad faces. :(((((((( <333

[randomalia.livejournal.com]

Chichester! I had to google it to find out where that was. It has a harbour; that's interesting.

Horatio is slightly insane, yeah? I'm thinking that kind of behaviour isn't too surprising though, given how he's controlled (or wishes he was) to an extreme degree, highly intelligent, and so on.

Bush must be passable at mathematics or else he just wouldn't have gotten a commission. Perhaps he seems sub-standard only to Hornblower's eyes, which might suggest that his maths ability stands out to Horatio as being the not-excellent thing about him?

From what little I know about book-Bush, I'm wondering if he feels the pressure of his family. He *doesn't* have any home-made clothing, and I would guess he only lives with them while ashore because it would be the streets, otherwise. And he would have an obligation to see them. Also, he's old enough to have a wife and to be a Captain. Given he devotes himself to the Navy in general and to Horatio rather than those things, I guess he might feel some social pressure/lack of fitting in. Maybe he's just gay. :p