Jordan, Humphrey Day Without Evening

A heart-felt, at times profoundly moving, celebration of the British Mercantile Marine, as seen through the career of one merchant mariner, Bill Glan, a Cornish clergyman’s son who takes to the sea shortly after the Boer War. Jordan’s novel traces Glan’s seafaring and landside life from about 1905 through the middle years of the Second World War, as Glan moves from sail to steam and successively higher in rank aboard a variety of ships. Jordan’s broader canvas examines Britain’s changing social life during the early 20th Century, with a particular focus on public perceptions regarding the Merchant Marine itself. The last 70 pages of the novel treat Glan’s World War 2 experiences, much of spent in the Mediterranean, Suez Canal and Fart East, transporting troops, civilians and cargo aboard his most-beloved command, the fictitious liner M.V. ISLAND QUEEN. In one of the novel’s highlights, Glan and his crew survive a torpedo attack in the Indian Ocean which blows off the QUEEN’s bow. That they safely reach port, Jordan indicates, is due to a combination of grit and professionalism. The “evening” referred to in Jordan’s title probably originally was meant to allude to the gradual extinction of Britain’s large landowning class, the county-dwelling class of squires and gentlemen that the novel documents so well. It also suggests Glan’s last “day without evening,” a day in which he dies at sea when the liner he is commanding is attacked by German warplanes off the coast of Cornwall. Reading the novel today, one is struck by how the British merchant marine itself, such an important component in the Britain of 1944, has itself irrevocably suffered its own day without evening. One minor caveat: Jordan’s plot does suffer somewhat in believability from an over reliance of coincidence.