I love the Aubrey/Maturin series. Would I like Horatio Hornblower?

Cafe Society
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[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
I always thought that Hornblower was Forester’s largest exception to his rule of Awful Things Happening to his Characters (and it wasn’t just his war books – people generally suffer horrible fates in all his books. And the ending of the novel “The African Queen” isn’t the same as that of the movie). Hornblower Gets Away and Succeeds. By the end of the last story chronologically (“The Lasty Encounter”), he’s freakin’ Admiral of the Fleet! If he tried to continue, he’d end up as God. (Albeit an insecure, highly introspective God who was still tone-deaf).
But generally, his characters have a tough time of it. For the ultimate in depressing fates, read The Gun. Everyone who comes into contact with that piece of prdnance comes to a bad end. They adapted it into a movie The Pride and the Passion, which I haven’t seen, but which had to have ben extensively rewritten (the book is very episodic and the characters change throughout). I’ll bet they stuck a Happy Ending on it (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050858/ )

There are a few other Happy Endings in Forester’s books. “The Captain from Connecticut” and many of the short story characters. But generally you get the feeling that Forester’s heroes ought to be wearing red shirts.
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What about Death to the French - the book which quite obviously inspired the Sharpe series by Cornwell?

Rifleman Dodd has all these heroic adventures when cut off from the army - and basically everyone around him dies. He himself though gets back to his unit - and is neither rewarded nor punished; his life just continues as before as if nothing had happened. No-one even knows what he has done, and, as a matter of fact, his heroism changes absolutely nothing - he burns a bridge the French were laboriously making, and it turns out the French had orders to destroy it anyway!

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[QUOTE=Raguleader]
To be fair, Hornblower has on occasion had a rough time of it. I nicknamed “A Ship of the Line” “Horatio Hornblower Gets Shafted”, but then, ASotL WAS the Hornblower equivilant to Empire Strikes Back (although to fully fit that mold, El Supremo would have to turn out to be Hornblower’s father)

Actually, one thing I liked about the original Hornblower trilogy was how each book had him dealing with a different nobleman (maybe Father figures, but it doesn’t quite seem to fit that way).

Beat to Quarters had El Supremo, the insane rebelling land owner, A Ship of the Line had Sir Admiral Leighton, the arrogant and not-terribly-loved-by-his-men CO of Hornblower’s squadron, and The Happy Return had the French nobleman who let Hornblower and his boys crash on his couch for a few months.

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What I liked was how Hornblower felt a sense of almost psychic kinship with both the psychotically insane El Supremo and that cultured French nobleman.

The scene where the Spanish show off the captured El Supremo - now totally mad, and chained to the deck in his own filth - as he transforms from imagining he is sitting on a golden throne to realizing where he is, is one of the most bizzare, horrible and moving scenes in the series.