He spent hours in a turret window of the house...

We're reading Flying Colours at bedtime, mostly because I now have a snazzy 1939 edition that bookherd brought me. Flying Colours is my second-favorite Hornblower novel, mostly because of all the hurt/comfort and handholding and bed-sharing (Is it Fic or Is It Forester?), and it was due for a re-read. I was reading it in bed last week, and a sleepy grrlpup said, "Read to me," and so I did. Happily, I had already gotten past the h/c (which is too upsetting for Grrlpups), and so she came in just-in-time for the midnight escape on the river.

Bush, lying on his stretcher in the darkness of the coach, heard the door open and a heavy load drop upon the floor.
     "Mr. Bush," said Hornblower, — the formal "Mr." came naturally again now the action had begun again, — "We are going to escape in the boat."
     "Good luck, sir," said Bush.

Grrlpup: Pfft! You're coming too!

     "You're coming too. Brown, take that end of the stretcher."

Anyway, she asked for it the next night and the night after, and I stopped reading it between times, so now it's the official bedtime book, I guess? I am secretly very pleased. During the fall, I read Midshipman, Lieutenant, Hotspur, and the first part of Crisis to her (up through where Bush and Hornblower part ways, because who cares about the spy plot, really?), but when we reached the end of that sequence, we agreed that we wouldn't read any more Hornblower at bedtime, because the prequel novels are the best, and also she finds boaty-stuff hard-going: Hotspur was an uphill battle for her, and there were parts of Midshipman that we just out-and-out skipped. But Flying Colours has very little boaty stuff -- we're on page 143 and there hasn't been a ship yet, and won't be until the bitter end -- and the plot developments have mostly been super-easy for her sleepy-brain to keep track of. In fact, her sleepy-brain seems to quite enjoy being trapped by the weather in the Chateau de Gracay, playing whist to pass the time. Any page now they're gonna start doing chores, and she will be over the moon with delight.

ANYWAY. That was all preamble. I generally admire Forester's prose (although more in the later, prequel novels than in the earlier ones, which can run a bit clunky), but last night there was this humdinger of a sentence that completely boggled me. It reads perfectly smoothly when you're in the middle of it, but when I go back and look at it, I cannot for the life of me work out its grammar, nor the choice of semicolons vs. em-dashes. (The commas preceding the em-dashes seems to be a conceit of the American publisher, Little, Brown, and Company; you'll notice them in the excerpt above, too, but they're not in my PDF of the book.) Anyway, Grrlpup was too sleepy last night to dissect it with me, so y'all get it instead:

He spent hours in a turret window of the house, with a spyglass which the Count found for him, gazing round the countryside; the desolate vineyards in their winter solitude, the distant towers of Nevers — the ornate Cathedral tower and the graceful turrets of the Gonzaga palace; the rushing black river, its willows half-submerged, — the ice which came in January and the snow which three times covered the blank slopes, — that winter were welcome variations of the monotonous landscape; there were the distant hills and the nearby slopes; the trace of the valley of the Loire winding off into the unknown, and the valley of the Allier coming down to meet it — to a landsman's eye the prospect from the turret window would have been delightful, even perhaps in the lashing rain that fell so often, but to a seaman and a prisoner it was revolting.

I suspect that the comma + em-dash combo between "blank slopes" and "that winter" is a printer's error, as it's not in my pdf edition, but as to the rest of it... What say you? A travesty of a run-on, or an accomplished tumbling act that miraculously lands on its feet?

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