“How many orchids are there in the Amazon? Trillions? They’re beautiful. No one ever sees them, but they’re there. Value is independent of recognition. It must be. If a tree falls in the forest, of course it makes a sound. What kind of idiot would think it wouldn’t? A sound is not defined by its being heard.”

“This may be the most difficult and perhaps for some the last thing you will ever do. You’re doing it for others, for principle, for decency, and, in essence, out of love. Our actions and imperfections will always be with us. It’s impossible to kill a man, no matter how evil he may be, without a perpetual debit to one’s own conscience and a trespass against God. Anyone who tells you otherwise is blind to himself and the world. But we take on such a burden so that those at home need never bear it, nor even understand that for the sake of the innocent we protect, we accept the stain….”

Mark Helprin has released a new novel, and it hardly needs saying that it’s wonderful. I think The Oceans and the Stars may be one of my favorites from his pen.

Stephen Rensselaer was once a staff officer under the Secretary of the Navy, but he couldn’t resist telling the president what he really thought. So he was demoted and condemned to serve as commander of the innovative small ship whose design he defended to the commander in chief – the PC, a fast, nimble, heavily armed vessel intended for coastal service. When war breaks out with Iran (it was weird to read this in the wake of recent events in the real world), Stephen is assigned to the Athena, the only PC in existence, and dispatched with his crew to the Middle East.

This is awkward, because Stephen, in middle age, has just found Katy, the love of his life. But duty is in his blood, and he must go to war.

Under Stephen’s inspired command, the Athena punches well above its weight, even destroying a much larger ship. It takes a while for his crew to warm to him – they think him old, they don’t understand his jokes or his Shakespeare quotations, and sometimes his actions make no sense to them (as when he forbids porn aboard his ship). But when a group of Somali pirates hijack a French cruise ship off the horn of Africa, and begin executing prisoners at the rate of one per hour, Captain Rensselaer and the Athena meet their destiny. Because their orders are to stay out of it, but there’s a higher law – a law that may demand the highest price from a warrior.

I saw echoes of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in The Oceans and the Stars, and also of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. No doubt there were other references I missed. The book engaged me entirely, keeping me up when I wanted to go to sleep. It bears comparison with Helprin’s excellent earlier anti-war novel, A Soldier of the Great War. But that book focused on the futility of war, where the finest souls and most heroic deeds were thrown away in a meaningless cause. In The Oceans and the Stars, the cause is not meaningless, but the souls and the deeds are unappreciated or even punished. Nevertheless, there is no question that right is right, and that moral choices matter in a Higher Court.

I loved it. I recommend it highly. Cautions for chilling descriptions of terrorist atrocities.