The Chess Players. A Novel of the Cold War at Sea Review

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The Chess Players. A Novel of the Cold War at Sea ReviewThe Chess Players, A Novel of the Cold War at Sea, represents a new variation of historical fiction--journalistic fiction. Richly intriguing, multi-layered, it is plotted around the actual movements of USS Essex CVS-9, and Task Group 83.3, and fictionalizes factual naval incidents which occurred during the Cold War at sea.
The Chess Players is a brilliantly written sea story about anti-submarine operations told more in the manner of Wouk than Clancy, and more like O'Brian were he to have undertaken naval affairs in the age of steam. Commander Pebbles, Operations Officer of anti-submarine carrier, Essex, mentors the well-educated and driven young Ensign Cannon. Structurally, Cannon moves the story ahead and is the character upon whom all other characters depend. In addition to executing their operating tasks, Cannon and Pebbles play chess, as do the Russians, giving the novel its name, and they periodically discuss the tactical and strategic significance of each military action and reaction to provide the reader context for the broader issues of the Cold War and suggest the metaphor that the Cold War can be viewed as a global chess match between the two super powers.
The characters exhibit genuine depth and their conversations reveal powerful insights into how officers in the fleet viewed the threat of the Cold War running out of control and becoming a nuclear holocaust. Set in 1967, we learn their reactions to the attack on USS Liberty, the carrier fire in USS Forrestal, their perceptions of the Six Day, Arab Israeli War, and above all how the Russian shipbuilding program and the creation of a blue water navy were beginning to tip the balance of power in the Mediterranean. Rich vignettes of a junior naval officer's life are revealed as the author takes us through a range of experiences from qualifying on board as an officer-of-the deck to formal parties such as presented in HMS Victorious to a forenoon tour with an entertaining harbormaster bent on toasting every task force ship in Hamburg with a glass of schnapps. Then there is an engaging love story with an intelligent woman from America's establishment who comes of age in the vortex of social change of the 1960s who writes some of the most beautiful love letters set to print in literature. Though a work of fiction, Ms. Martin makes a genuine contribution to the history of art by diagnosing the master painter Caravaggio's mental disorder and integrating it into her interpretation of one of his best known paintings. Their romance develops in beautifully handled scenes in London and Malta.
This is much more than a tactical naval story, and those who like naval thrillers will be richly rewarded as they read through an uneasy tension typical of Cold War days, like our period of terror threats now, leading to a dangerous episode between a nuclear-armed, Russian Echo II submarine and an American Dealey-class destroyer escort. Along the way we are presented with a series of provocative, possibly incendiary, events as the Russians and the NATO forces joust with each other over, under, and on the seas of the Cold War.
The Chess Players. A Novel of the Cold War at Sea OverviewThe Chess Players is an exciting naval story and an involving love story and opens with an audacious, espionage mission, a Soviet submarine penetration of Stavanger, Norway, and closes with a thrilling, bizarre episode between a missile-equipped, Russian nuclear submarine and a US Navy destroyer escort in the Mediterranean Sea. Commander Pebbles, Operations Officer of anti-submarine carrier, Essex, on a career track for admiral, mentors the well-educated and competent, but inexperienced young Ensign Cannon. Based in part on untold, historical events typical of the Cold War at sea, their task group encounters several provocative incidents at the hands of the Russian Bear above the Arctic Circle and in the Mediterranean Sea prior to and after the 1967 Six Day Arab-Israeli War. The love story begins when beautiful Laetitia Martin, a graduate student in art history, meets Ensign Cannon, both members of a wedding on Martha's Vineyard, shortly before Essex deploys for NATO exercises in the Eastern Atlantic. She is a consummate “belonger" with a growth motive and catches a whiff of the women's movement and begins to find her upper-class life stifling. Her research into the turbulent life of the painter, Caravaggio, the novel's fourth character, if you will, will also take her to Europe in the summer of 1967 and provides the opportunity for their romance to bud and bloom in London and in Malta as she succeeds in explaining Caravaggio's self-destructive behavior in modern psychological terms.

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