I read The Massacre of Innocents, the first book in Alan Lawrence's The Continuing Adventures of HMS Surprise series, back in 2014. As I said in my review then, I wanted to love the book because it's as close to a sequel to Patrick O'Brian's classic Aubrey/Maturin series as could ever come to pass. (Because O'Brian's estate forbids sequels, Lawrence created carbon copies of Captain Jack Aubrey and his best friend, ship's doctor Stephen Maturin, and installed them on the next generation HMS Surprise with the names Captain Patrick O'Connor and Simon Ferguson.)

Lawrence should have worked harder to differentiate his characters from O'Brian's. More importantly, he should have worked harder to craft a better book. Even so, after years of shuffling the sequel from box to box, I finally decided to give The Fireships of Gerontas a long-overdue try.

It's no better.

The action is slow to start. In fact, the first chunk of the book is taken up with the aftermath of the previous volume, and both captain and crew are immobilized by grief after several sailors were killed in that climactic battle. As I noted in my previous review, fatalities in a naval action were to be expected, and while some mourning might seem normal, this goes to an extreme; the captain's very public show of melancholy would destroy his ship's morale.

And I'm not exaggerating, the overpowering sadness lingers for more than 60 pages. Even the ship's surgeon loses himself in despair when a single patient -- one of more than two dozen badly injured men -- dies in his care.

It's more than 100 pages before anything resembling action occurs. And when Surprise does finally face the Turkish enemy, Lawrence greatly exaggerates the superiority of British sailors -- they might have been the best-trained seamen in the world at the time, true, but that doesn't mean a frigate can exchange broadsides with a ship of the line and do equal damage.

In action, HMS Surprise boasts incredibly fast and accurate cannon fire, while their enemies are at all times slow and sloppy. A broadside from the plucky British ship will invariably clear an enemy quarterdeck, unseat a cannon or two and rend the enemy's sails. A Turkish broadside on the other hand might knock down a spar.

It doesn't help that Lawrence has trouble keeping his story straight. In one frigate-on-frigate action, he notes that the ships were "so close together that even the poorest of gunners could not miss." In the very next sentence, he says the water between ships is marked with "huge white splashes (that) appeared constantly from balls striking the water" because, apparently, their opponents could, in fact, miss. Just a few pages later, menaced by the titular fireships, both combatants stop firing so they can take evasive action. In one sentence, Lawrence writes, "the ongoing barrage between the frigates ceased as every gunner on both ships felt the immediate hard rudder" ... but in the following sentence, the crew of the Surprise cannot hear the first lieutenant's shout because of "the roaring cacophony of firing unceasing."

That's disappointingly sloppy writing.

It's a shame, honestly, that Lawrence tied his fortunes so closely to O'Brian's. By writing a de facto sequel to one of the most highly praised writers of British naval fiction, Lawrence invites a critical comparison between the works and raises expectations to an impossible height.

To make matters worse, the long, slow introduction leads to a day of conflict, in which the Surprise is involved in three separate engagements. Badly battered by day's end, the captain and crew should be happy just to be alive, but again, captain and surgeon fall into deep melancholy because of their losses, and it goes on and on. And on. Here are two examples; the first is just one paragraph from Pat's litany of maudlin musings, and the second is Simon's.

Pat, in his anguish, heard nothing else; he had never in all his career at sea inured himself to the surgeons' news of distressing wounds and casualties, hence the simple report in its few words overwhelmed him, every ounce of his energy and strength deserting him in a tremor that passed throughout the whole of his body, from his head to his legs; his anxiety was so great that he could not move momentarily, could not reply, and he simply slumped back in his chair in shock. He exhaled deeply, wrung his hands together so hard that it was painful to himself until he relented his grip. He blinked and pulled out his handkerchief, blew his nose even as he wiped his eyes and cheeks. He strived to halt or at least conceal the warm tears beginning their desolate flow....

For every patient he lost he had felt less and less able to cope with his inability to save them, becoming increasingly depressed with the death of each one. In the relative quietude of the ship, not being in battle, the losses had been much harder for him to come to terms with, and as the days passed by he had sunk into an overwhelming sense of disappointment, into self-reproach, down into the deep pit of depression; he had engaged less and less with the others of the crew, his close friends particularly, for he did not know how to enter into any dialogue without he was swiftly become overwhelmed, and that onerous burden he had not wished to inflict upon his friends.

There is plenty more where that came from. Suffice it to say, Surprise is not a happy ship. And, as the reader, I was pretty depressed by this point, too.

Lawrence also tries too hard to instill a quaintly formal style of dialogue into his books -- a technique that O'Brian seemed to use effortlessly but here sounds forced. Like, for instance, this query as the helpless ship heads into a merciless hurricane and is in danger of making an unexpected landfall:

"Pray forgive my enquiry, doubtless ill-considered it is, but is the captain possessed of a sufficiency of knowledge of our precise circumstances, of our present situation vis-a-vis the coasts, the promontories and those shoals which doubtless abound all around us?"

Yeah, that's how someone would ask if they're about to strike rock and die.

Once they're in the thick of the storm, Lawrence spends many paragraphs telling us the captain and crew are terrified of sunset, when the last of the light fades away. Once gone, he tells us repeatedly that there's very little moonlight in the hurricane, and the ship pitches over and over again to a 30-degree slant in the waves. I understand the need to build tension in a storm, but endless repetition builds tedium instead. And on it drags, turning what should have been a thrilling battle against the elements into slogging boredom.

I'm sorry, Alan, I really wanted to like this book.