'She is the Surprise,' said Stephen, and he whispered, 'The joyful Surprise, God and Mary be with her.'
Arms and the Man
CHARLTON HESTON
THE TROUBLE with writing about Patrick O’Brian’s books is that they are so engrossing. Dipping into one to find hooks to hang your comments on, you are mesmerised anew by his storyteller’s spell through twenty, thirty pages, simply for the sheer pleasure he gives you. Instead of writing about his novels, you read them again for the third time. Though rewarding, this is an inadequate response to your publisher’s deadline.
The fact is that O’Brian is one of the best writers now working in the English language. Though his range extends to biography and non-fiction, the fullest expression of his extraordinary gifts is in the series of novels chronicling the careers of Captain Jack Aubrey, R.N., and his friend and shipmate, Dr Stephen Maturin, in the English sea wars against Napoleon in the early years of the nineteenth century. They are, each one of them, superb.
They are also irresistibly readable, indeed all but impossible to put down. When a new volume appears, colleagues, close friends, even blood kin can turn testy, waiting their turn to read it.
From the beginning, critics compared O’Brian favourably with C. S. Forester, long considered to be the master marine novelist. Some years ago I was stranded, bookless, on a film location in Norway where the only novels available in English at the local bookshop were the entire Forester oeuvre, which I re-read over some weeks, from start to finish. O’Brian is the better writer, ‘by a long sea mile’, as Long John Silver, one of the greatest of all sea-going characters, put it. Not only in overall knowledge and a deeply saturated sense of character, dialogue and period, but with a sure feel for comedy totally absent in Forester’s work, O’Brian eclipses his distinguished predecessor.
'Arms and the man I sing'—Virgil set a high standard for those who would write of war. The best, from Homer through Shakespeare, Stendhal and Tolstoy to Hemingway in this century, wrote only of battle on land, often with tragic, edged eloquence. Melville and Conrad, the greatest writers inspired by the sea, never took up Virgil’s challenge. We can only speculate as to why.
Perhaps it had to do with the random nature of naval warfare in ancient times. Warships were barely more than floating forts full of troops. Nautical technology was so primitive that battles often dissolved into random naval scuffles, determined largely by luck, rather than by skill or enterprise.
This may be why there is very little serious writing about sea warfare in this period, none of it remarkable. Mark Antony’s defeat at the battle of Actium changed the course of history profoundly, yet Plutarch covers it thinly. Cervantes actually fought in the Battle of Lepanto, an historically crucial sea battle in which he was permanently maimed (fortunately his left hand, not his right). Yet he never wrote a word about it.
By the end of the eighteenth century, England, of all the great powers, had best learned the need for efficient ships and men trained to fight them. I am convinced Patrick O’Brian was somehow there when England held the seas against the French, so vividly real is the narrative which breathes life into Jack Aubrey’s crucial contribution in those years.
Ashore, afloat, in battle and in bed, in English country manors and in fetid French prisons, Aubrey leaps undeniably to life. He is the paradigm of a fighting captain in Nelson’s navy. With the deck of a frigate under his feet (even a sloop or a leaking dory), he is an instinctive and sagacious tactician, a steadfast and compassionate comrade and a leader to measure beside Alexander (or Nelson, his own idol).
But ashore, Aubrey, if not quite a fish out of water, is still more than a little out of his depth. On a quarterdeck, he almost never puts a foot wrong; on shore, he is touchingly, sometimes laughably, vulnerable. He makes mistakes a boy might avoid—unless, like Aubrey, he had spent most of his life at sea.
O’Brian, on the other hand, never errs, ashore or afloat. His ear for the nuances of English speech at the turn of the eighteenth century, with a smatter of French, Catalan and Latin as well, is uncanny. I have made a good part of my living sorting out the differences in accent and usage in English over the centuries and across national and regional boundaries. O’Brian does all this so effortlessly you would swear he simply wills himself back into the nineteenth century and takes notes: table talk that seems straight out of Jane Austen; fo’c’s’le hands ashore on liberty; Admiralty Lords in solemn convocation at Whitehall—he catches it all flawlessly. 'Yes!' you think reading the witty, textured exchanges. 'This is surely what they were like.' Only an extraordinary writer can do that.
For the sea battles crucial to the Homeric saga he sings, O’Brian made a brilliant choice, outlined in his preface to the very first volume in the series, Master and Commander:
When one is writing about the Royal Navy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it is difficult to avoid understatements . . . very often the improbable reality outruns fiction. Even an industrious imagination could scarcely produce the frail shape of commodore Nelson leaping from his battered seventy-four-gun Captain through the quarter-gallery window of the eighty-gun San Nicolas, taking her and hurrying on across her deck to board the towering hundred-and-twelve-gun San Josef, where 'I did receive the swords of the vanquished Spaniards, which I gave to William Fearney, one of my bargemen, who put them, with the greatest sang froid, under his arm.' (Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander)
O’Brian uses elements of this incredible action, immortalised in British naval history as 'Nelson’s bridge', in this first Aubrey novel. Indeed, he is careful to draw on Admiralty records. When describing almost every one of the myriad actions in his novels he meticulously details the weather, the relative strengths of the ships and the tactic used. And not only when fighting the French, Spanish, or American foes but also when up against the forces of Nature—storms, icebergs and lee shores—or pirate assaults and treacherous betrayals that beset Jack Aubrey throughout the years of his service.
Of course, as film-makers know too well, the best-laid action scenes, however accurately depicted, will not a movie make, never mind a novel. In the end, it all depends on the people in the story, and whether you care about them. Patrick O’Brian crowds his pages with richly complex and eminently memorable characters you do indeed come to care about deeply, from admirals to aborigines, Siamese sultans, Spanish sergeants, Dutch merchants, Boston revolutionaries, and wonderfully drawn women of every kind and condition, including two disparate English ladies, whose function I shall not reveal, and a touching pair of ten-year-old Polynesian orphan girls who end up as surgeon’s mates. You would swear any one of them could have stepped out of history. Indeed, some have.
The most rewarding of all are the sailors who run through the novels. Aubrey’s crew, some beginning as pubescent midshipmen later promoted to other ships and higher rank, some of whom you come to know so well that you mourn their deaths in action or accident as you would a friend.
There is Tom Pullings, whom we first see as a gangly boy midshipman determined to rise, serving steadfastly through desperate disfigurement caused by a sabre cut through the hinge of his jaw, yet somehow preserving his youthful good humour and rock solid balance as a rated captain.
Bonden is Aubrey’s coxswain, the essence of the British ranker from the Wars of the Roses through Desert Storm, and Awkward Davies, an immensely strong and able but clumsy seaman, devoted to Aubrey who saved him from drowning. With Bonden, he flanks Jack in every boarding action, armed with a butcher’s cleaver and literally foaming at the mouth in the sweet, obscene ecstasy of battle.
There’s also Preserved Killick (O’Brian has a lovely instinct for names), Jack’s personal steward. Killick is an absolute Jewish mother of a man, nagging, sulking, forever complaining and conniving for the Captain’s good, as he sees it:
Coat torn in five places—cutlass slash in the forearm which how can I ever darn that? Bullet ole all singed, never get the powder-marks out. Breeches all a-hoo, and all
this nasty blood everywhere, like you’d been a-wallowing in a lay-stall, sir. What Miss would say, I don’t know, sir, God strike me blind. Epaulette acked, fair acked to pieces. (Jesus what a life.) (Patrick O'Brian, H.M.S. Surprise)
Finally and triumphantly, though, the heart of the novels, lifting them to literature of the first order, is the friendship between Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. Appropriately, they meet in the first paragraph of the first novel, where they soon seem headed for the duelling ground. Instead, they become shipmates and, in Jack’s phrase, 'particular friends'.
Though they could hardly be more unlike, you understand at once why they become friends: they complement each other so well. Where Jack is open, sanguine, a highly physical doer and shaker, Stephen is reserved, intellectual, and secretive. Stephen is in fact a spy, serving British Intelligence to superb effect. He is also a surgeon on most of Jack’s ships, an anatomist, biologist, cryptographer, a deadly duellist with a sword and a crack shot. He is also a hopeless landlubber and an innocent afloat.
As he does with Jack Aubrey in making him totally plausible and meticulously accurate as a Nelsonian frigate captain, O’Brian goes to great pains, either through exhaustive research or a well of natural wisdom, to make Stephen Maturin not only a fascinating and many-faceted man, but the essence of an early nineteenth-century physician and scientist, no easy task. He is, in fact, the most complete doctor in fiction. Doyle’s Dr Watson, Shaw’s and Chekov’s several doctors are interesting characters with medical bags, but rarely functioning as physicians. Dr Zhivago is a well-drawn protagonist, but not significantly a doctor. Maturin’s medical skills are called on again and again, in a whole variety of circumstances, always in accord with the science of his time and usually crucial to the plot.
Aubrey and Maturin, though very different, also share in common a high degree of physical and moral courage, a firm interest in women, and a love of music; both are competent amateur musicians. All this, of course, with much more. Suffice it to say, as friends and shipmates, the two are more than the sum of their parts.
Their friendship is, in fact, the most appealing and interesting I know of in literature. Most fictional friendships are simply declared by the author. Damon and Pythias, Athos and D’Artagnan, Huck Finn and Nigger Jim are all wonderful characters, but their friendships are not significantly explored. Even that famous pair, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, which I have experienced as an actor, do very little as friends beyond pursuing Conan Doyle’s plots together. With Aubrey and Maturin, the readers come to understand and cherish their friendship perhaps as much as they do themselves.
The wonder is that it has taken so long for O’Brian’s talents to be adequately recognised. Happily, I think that is now happening. He is more than a merely popular writer. He is a very, very fine one.
Table of Contents
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Arms and the Man
The Far Side of the World Page 38
