I get it. Short chapters speed up the action. Short sentences do too. I like the fact that the James Patterson I am reading has chapter lengths from one to three pages – short, punchy and page-turning stuff. Hemingway would be the same, right? Wrong. He writes economically, but takes his time to do so – like an author waiting for a suntan in the Spanish hills. I just skipped through a Hemingway chapter and it was – wait for it – over eleven pages long. Sleep inducing stuff and hardly fit for the modern age though it seems that The Old Man and the Sea is still a favorite in high school reading programs. And, funnily enough, The Old Man and the Sea pops up in MUTINY too. Why not? Both are about the sea and the men and women who brave it:
“A local out for a drink?”
“I think so. Did you see the walrus skin on the back of his neck?”
“Do you think he’s a fisherman?”
“I reckon so and I got a picture. Here, look.” The light cast deep shadows in the folds of his unshaven face.
“Wow, that’s a stunning photo – a perfect Hemingway moment.”
“I read a Hemingway book in school.”
“Which one? He wrote many.”
“It was about an old man and the sea.”
“And a big fish?”
“Yes, a poor fisherman in Cuba had caught nothing for eighty-four days.”
“It’s been about that long since I’ve had a boyfriend. How do you know this detail?”
“Because it included the same number of days as the title of another book I read, called Nineteen Eighty Four.”
In The Old Man and the Sea, the protagonist’s patience is rewarded with a huge catch which is reduced to a skeleton; in MUTINY, the protagonist loses a big catch and the promise of ending his career on a high note. In both books, something is lost in order to gain something far greater. What’s the catch? You will have to read it to discover it.