HH: [I] found The Red Wing so compelling that even though we have to cover the news of Iran, I want to begin by asking is this an homage in part to Patrick O’Brian?

DM: Absolutely. Patrick O’Brian, who of course notably wrote the Aubrey-Maturin books, 22 stories about life in the Napoleonic Navy and the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars. It’s one of the great works of fiction in the history of the English language, and I’ve read the books many, many times. And I was vastly inspired by them. It’s also an homage to the Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser[, …] which is a series of 15 novels about a cad in the early Victorian days who went all over the Earth. There’s a lot of these great works of historical imagination. Bernard Cromwell writes them. Harold Coyle writes them. And I love all these stories, so I thought I’d try my hand at one.

    -INTERVIEW: David Mamet On The Red Wing, The First Book of His Novella, Three War Stories (Hugh Hewitt, November 26, 2013) The three novellas in this collection are loosely united by war themes. The first, and best, described above, is a memoir of a law suit by an author whose O'Brianesque novels hewed too closely to his true life adventures as a sailor and spy. The second, told in a disturbingly similar voice, is a memoir of Plains warfare by a former soldier. The last will be more familiar to Mamet fans. It is a dialogue driven tale of a hood and a cop stealing a plane at the time of Israel's war of independence.

Now I recognize that there's an element of unfairness in criticizing an author for writing the story he wanted to, instead of the one you wanted him to, but The Red Wing (that first story) leaves so much unsaid and offers such promise that Mr. Mamet could have written a worthy successor to the Aubrey and Maturin adventures that I found it maddening. As it stands, the palimpsest quality requires unraveling the memoir from the novels from the memoirs, all of which are, of course, fictions in the first place. This three or even four times removed quality is not just confusing but tends to blunt the impact of some of the best scenes. One can only hope that the author finds the time to write the novels that the story refers to.

(Reviewed:23-Feb-14)

Grade: (B-) Orrin C. Judd

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