Patrick o'brian
BOTTUM, J.
Fiction The Passion of (and for) Patrick O'Brian By J. Bottum No one ever loved Graham Greene, though many thought him as fine a novelist as we've had these last 50 years. No one ever made a...
...The hardest part of a popular series with continuing characters is finding a way to end it...
...The novelist is not without his longueurs in this regard...
...But O'Brian seems to have a clear idea of the value of what he has created and the responsibility he owes it...
...Common wisdom had not yet been divorced from specialized knowledge, nor art from science, nor communal bonds from industrial relations...
...Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy to awaken deep stirrings of that strange extra-literary phenomenon, a reader's love...
...The series is at its best when it deals with men and morals: the study of leadership in The Mauritius Command, the study of professionalism in The Ionian Mission, and the study of diplomacy in The Thirteen-Gun Salute...
...No one ever made a shrine of Erich Segal's boyhood home, though his 1970 Love Story sold in the millions...
...And he is able to do so by working within a frame in which readers are willing to accept such instruction— a leisurely narrative of the naval wars between the British and the French at the beginning of the 19th century...
...There was a moment in England, at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, when many things seemed possible and life was as rich as it has ever been...
...Stephen Maturin fighting the Napoleonic sea-wars...
...His books, like Sir Walter Scott's Waverley, Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, and the neglected 20th-century adventure novelist Rafael Sabatini's Scaramouche and The Sea Hawk, fall squarely within the highly stylized category of popular historical fiction...
...Byatt, and Iris Murdoch...
...But O'Brian manages to suggest the entire historical world that surrounds his adventures and provides an astonishingly vivid frame for his moral pictures...
...he knew her through and through...
...Captain Aubrey, who has been assigned to blockade duty in the English Channel, is well aware of the Navy's coming (shall we say) downsizing and fears his impending promotion will landlock him and cause him to be "yellowed"— that he will be made an admiral in title only, "without distinction of command...
...a true thoroughbred, very fast in the right hands, weath-erly, dry, a splendid sailor of bowline, and a ship that almost steered herself once you understood her ways...
...And as a result, he is unwilling either to sacrifice a major character (as Jack's first lieutenant, James Dillon, was killed in the first volume) or to withdraw any character from the series (as Jack's parson, Nathaniel Martin, was surprisingly dismissed to recover in South America from mercury poisoning in 1993's The Wine-Dark Sea...
...The American publication of a novel, Testimonies, in 1952 led to a succession of writing assignments in which he gradually demonstrated a mastery of subjects as various as botany, music, late-18th-century medicine, British naval history, and the religious disagreements of English Protestantism—all of which would become recurring themes in the Aubrey-Maturin series...
...It is no accident (as others have remarked) that O'Brian's present popularity comes at the same moment Jane Austen's novels have undergone an enormous resurgence...
...He has become more forthcoming about his life and working techniques in recent years...
...May Sinclair's mostly forgotten works may have been better written, and Charlotte Yonge's utterly forgotten novels were certainly more popular in the 19th century, but it is the Orchard House of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women in Concord, Mass., that literary pilgrims continue to visit...
...Midshipman Easy, and formalized in our century by C.S...
...Long little-known and very private, O'Brian provided a biographical blurb for his first book, The Last Pool and Other Stories (1950), that read only: The Spectator for 1 March 1710 begins, "I have observed, that a reader seldom peruses a Book with much Pleasure, till he knows whether the Writer of it be a dark or a fair Man, of mild or choleric disposition, Married or a Batchelor...
...After service with British intelligence during World War II, he settled in France to eke out a living as a writer and translator...
...Adoration from readers does not belong to authors to command, and neither acknowledged greatness nor demonstrated popularity is quite the same as love...
...Though O'Brian does allow one new midshipman to plummet to his death, the boy seems from the beginning a lamb marked out for slaughter...
...The point, however, is not that he does what he does so much better than anyone else...
...Marry-at's Mr...
...But usually he hits it right, giving enough clues that the reader can puzzle it out in a kind of triangula-tion from known words and context...
...To gratify this curiosity, which is so natural to a reader, we may state that Mr...
...O'Brian admits a continuing fascination with Austen, and the naval officers in her Persuasion would surely recognize a shipmate in Jack Aubrey...
...Much of that was poisoned by the French Revolution, by the equivalent English Revolution that never quite happened, and by 20 years of Napoleonic war...
...And yet the Aubrey-Maturin series does descend in a straight line from the Boys-Own-Paper brand of serial adventure and from the old-fashioned historical romance...
...he has become part of a plot to free Chile from Spanish rule...
...And in Jane Austen's clear-eyed girls and Patrick O'Brian's common-sensical sailors, there is a vanished world of sweetness and light (as Matthew Arnold put it) we need very much to recover...
...Altogether, The Yellow Admiral is more a continuation of the series than a coherent book in its own right...
...Norton, 262 pages, $24)—has come to receive serious attention and lavish praise from fellow novelists as diverse as Robertson Davies, Mary Renault, A.S...
...In between the boredom of blockade work and Aubrey's troubles ashore, the oddly matched Aubrey and Maturin manage to play their usual ration of violin and cello duets, see most of the old friends and family readers will recognize from earlier volumes, and carry on their curious and dangerous sea-bound life as they await Napoleon's final defeat...
...The key to what O'Brian has managed with his Aubrey-Maturin novels lies rather in the fact that he writes within such a narrow set of inherited conventions...
...It's easy enough at this point to identify the features that make O'Brian's books seem so good...
...From an almost unnoticed beginning in 1969 with Master and Commander, the series—now in its 18th volume with the publication of The Yellow Admiral (W.W...
...Though O'Brian has left himself the possibility of carrying on post-Napoleonic adventures in the South American rebellions against Spain, the series is clearly winding down...
...This is escapist fiction as unyieldingly conventional as Agatha Christie's mysteries, Louis L'Amour's westerns, or Robert Heinlein's science fiction...
...It's no 'Boys Own Paper,'" a British reviewer assured readers about the series in 1981...
...Forester's ten tales of Horatio Hornblower...
...To say that his books are a cut above the average historical novel is to miss the point," Terry Teach-out recently wrote of The Yellow Admiral...
...The familiar characters are being preserved lovingly by their author as he brings the war to its conclusion...
...Historical fiction is often thin, the author's knowledge limited to a well-defined field and an occasional odd fact outside it...
...it isn't really the right volume to begin with if you are interested in beginning a reader's affair with O'Brian...
...With Patrick O'Brian, we have found the opposite (and the answer) to the modernist insistence that real artists forge with their art utterly new, utterly unique forms for expressing their utterly new, utterly unique truths...
...She was the ship he loved best...
...Financial and artistic temptations alike—as writers from Charles Dickens to Arthur Conan Doyle have discovered—conspire to induce the author to bring them back, again and again, for one final star turn...
...And then there is the sheer joy O'Brian takes in using all the glorious vocabulary of wooden ships...
...He translated 28 French bestsellers into English between 1961 and 1978, the best known of which is Henri Charriere's Papil-lon...
...As The Yellow Admiral opens, the year is 1814 and the war is coming to an end...
...For the first time since Dickens and Trollope in the middle of the Victorian age, we have a major artist working, without any ironic intent, in a popular, rigorous, and intensely conservative literary form...
...It's even possible to discern the features that put each new installment instantly on bestseller lists...
...hat contributes most to making the novels work, however, is their richness of life...
...It's true that with his literary skill and vast learning about sailing, medicine, music, science, and art, O'Brian towers above all our other popular writers...
...This pulls the reader along, as in this passage from The Ionian Mission: "It does my heart good to see her," said Jack...
...The series begins on April 1, 1800, and concludes, for now, with Napoleon's flight from Elba on February 26, 1815...
...early in Master and Commander, he gives a two-page description of the swaying up of a sloop's mainyard that conveys almost no meaning...
...O'Brian is a dark man, choleric, and married...
...But exist it did...
...Meanwhile, his longtime friend and ship's surgeon—a half-Irish, half-Catalonian secret agent, Stephen Maturin—is not merely engaging in espionage this time out...
...O'Brian writes in an extremely strict sea-novel genre suggested in the 18th century by Tobias Smollett in Roderick Random, established in the 19th century by Michael Scott's Tom Cringle's Log and Capt...
...O'Brian is able to paint a compelling and completely satisfying picture of some very old truths about courage, luck, and honor— about how men live both with and without women—about the impossible demands placed on all those who go down to the sea in ships and do business on great waters...
...Part of what makes the series work so well is O'Brian's compulsively readable style, featuring a prose technique in which the voice of the last character who speaks or thinks continues to influence the narrative voice for several sentences...
...Now 82, the novelist is unlikely to complete many other volumes...
...And even at its best, this way of life existed among iniquities, brutalities, and discomforts we cannot imagine bearing today...
...What's hard, however, is to describe what has led to the formation of O'Brian clubs in several cities, has made the first editions of his books worth a lot of money, and has kept his publisher's website a much-visited stop on the Internet...
...Wellington is advancing on France from the Spanish peninsula, Napoleon reeling in defeat from the disaster on the Russian front...
...But after all the booming encomiums and talk of sales, there remains the question of what makes his Aubrey-Maturin novels the first books since J.R.R...
...For almost 30 years now, the Irish novelist Patrick O'Brian has been publishing historical tales of Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr...
...Patrick O'Brian is indeed both very good and very popular...
...The answer lies, I think, in what O'Brian's literary admirers have been at some pains to downplay: the extremely traditional origins of his work...
Vol. 2 • November 1996 • No. 10
