Master & Commander by Patrick O'Brian

[regshoe]

My endeavours to read boat books continue!

Master & Commander (1970) is the first in the Aubrey-Maturin series, which I am now fully and reliably able to distinguish from the Hornblower series, and so we progress. It opens in 1800 at Port Mahon in Minorca (a name which I recognised mostly because there's a local pub named after it, for some reason). Here Navy officer Jack Aubrey receives the news of his promotion to 'master and commander' of a ship; and also meets Stephen Maturin, a doctor sadly down on his luck and looking out for something to do. Jack soon befriends Stephen and persuades him to try life as a naval surgeon and come along with him; and from here the book follows the various exciting and dramatic adventures of Jack, Stephen, the brig Sophie and the rest of her officers and crew.

One of the first things Stephen does in the book is this:

'Did you see that hoopoe?' cried the man in the black coat [Stephen].

'What is a hoopoe?' cried Jack, staring about.

'A bird. That cinnamon-coloured bird with barred wings. Upupa epops. There! There, over the roof. There! There!'

'Where? Where? How does it bear?'

'It has gone now. I had been hoping to see a hoopoe ever since I arrived. In the middle of the town! Happy Mahon, to have such denizens...'

...so of course I liked him instantly. :D Stephen continues to have good priorities about natural history for the rest of the book, which I enjoyed very much. Jack I was less sure about—he's a generally nice and cheerful person, but oblivious of his considerable power over other people in a way I found pretty off-putting (one of the first things we hear about him is that 'his first serious wound had been inflicted by a woman in Deal with a flat-iron who thought her man should not be pressed' and I don't think my reaction to this was supposed to be 'good for her! ...and this is our hero?'; besides dubious naval recruitment and the Irish question discussed below, he also has multiple unwise and distinctly unappealing relationships with women). I gather that Jack and Stephen are widely shipped together; so far I like their friendship but I'm not particularly drawn to shipping it.

This is a slower and a denser book than The Happy Return. Through the device of Stephen being new to the Navy and not knowing any of the specialist terminology, O'Brian manages to explain some of it to the similarly-ignorant reader, which I appreciated! (and I now know where tgarnsl's name comes from :D ). The prose is very nice, with a good eye for detail—the quality of light over the sea, the movement of the water, the details of things on board ship, and Stephen's natural history. The pacing on a large scale feels like the more ambitious Rosemary Sutcliff novels—there's a lot going on, and the book moves continuously through a series of big events and the periods in between, without a single clear plot. I found the smaller-scale pacing kind of confusing: there's a lot of skipping-over and summarising after the fact of important events, and O'Brian has a habit of switching the scene or skipping a small interval of time without a scene break or any clear indication other than what's happening in the next paragraph, which was sometimes difficult to follow. And the ending was strangely chosen—the book ends right after an important decision affecting the characters' future, so that it's not a cliffhanger (what I thought it might be for a while), but neither is the ending given time to develop properly. I shall simply have to read the next book—and, given its title, I don't think there is any longer very much doubt over whether Jack will or won't be promoted to post captain... :P

Now, Stephen is Irish; so is the Sophie's lieutenant, James Dillon, and it soon becomes clear that Stephen and James were in the United Irishmen together a few years ago, a fact which leads to much drama. It's an interesting bit of history to include; I liked getting to see another angle on it after the role of the same situation in Broster's Ships in the Bay!, and I enjoyed the fraught political-interpersonal drama between Stephen, James and Jack as they work out the consequences of all this. But I was less happy with how it ends up going: James is killed off very abruptly and before anything has a chance to be resolved properly, and Jack never gets to understand what any of it was about. Perhaps O'Brian was going for a 'senseless tragedy of sudden death during war' thing here, but I just found it frustrating. And it makes Jack's character, and the dynamic between him and Stephen, less interesting and less likeable again: Stephen understands what it means that Jack is a fairly privileged Englishman while he is an Irish former rebel, and has complicated thoughts about it all privately and in his conversations with James, while Jack just remains oblivious, occasionally says thoughtlessly offensive things and doesn't get to understand or develop at all.

There are some entertaining side characters. The ship's master (different from 'master and commander', as we are carefully informed), Mr Marshall, is in tragically unrequited love with Jack and gets occasional moments of sympathy; on the one hand I was sorry for him, on the other, come on, he's clearly not worth it. I also liked Mowett, midshipman and budding poet (and I've only just realised that that rhymes; was O'Brian making a pun?), whose compositions enliven the Sophie's adventures.

Though his style is very lovely in some ways, O'Brian himself doesn't feel like a very strong presence as an author, and I was unsure about the book's general mood and attitude, which felt somewhat uncaringly cynical in places, though there is a lot of love and admiration shown for the general setting. He's not D. K. Broster, is what I mean.

So, on the whole, a mixed one, but I liked it overall, and I certainly intend to keep going with the series!

Comments

[isis]

Yay, I'm glad you enjoyed it. Stephen is my favorite - there is a lot about his background and his hidden depths as you get into the series. There's a lot of sly humor which I also really enjoyed. I found the books best read in bursts, a few at a time with breaks between for other reading.

[regshoe]

That sounds like a good way to approach the series—and I'm looking forward to the later books :D

[muccamukk]

The series picks up pretty dramatically as it goes. They start to get actually good around HMS Surprise, though they often don't have plots, per se.

[regshoe]

I quite like this plotless events-over-time style of historical novel, although it makes each book feel very extensive. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the later books in the series!

[sovay]

...so of course I liked him instantly.

I have read maybe two and a half books in this series and I adore Stephen.

[regshoe]

'Stephen <333' seems to be the general opinion in the fandom, from what I gather so far :D

[sanguinity]

Through the device of Stephen being new to the Navy and not knowing any of the specialist terminology, O'Brian manages to explain some of it to the similarly-ignorant reader, which I appreciated!

That is in fact my main memory of the first book (which I read thirty years ago), but my feeling was precisely the opposite of yours: ANYTIME anything was about to happen, the story would come to a dead halt so that someone could explain it all in small words to Stephen. Halfway through the book I was ready to pitch Stephen overboard myself, in the hope that that would let anybody actually get ON with anything! :-P

As I recall, the tutorials stop after book one, but I couldn't say now whether it's because the reader has been given their lessons and are now expected to remember them, or whether it's because the explanations become less intrusive.

BTW, there's a good companion reference to the O'Brian books called A Sea of Words, if you can lay hands on it. It's a combo glossary and encyclopedia of the nautical terms in the novels (plus maybe some of the natural history?), with explanations and pictures.

Lobscouse and Spotted Dog is good, too, which is a culinary reference to the novels: recipes and commentary for many of the dishes described in the text.

[regshoe]

Hee—I have a high tolerance for slow pacing and exposition, but I think that's an understandable reaction :P

Ooh, thank you for the recs! The copy of Master & Commander which I read has a little labelled diagram of a ship at the front which explained some of the terms, but a more extensive glossary would have been handy, and I see my library has a copy of A Sea of Words in the reference section.

[theseatheseatheopensea]

I hope you like the other books when you get to them! I think that Jack grew on me more as I read/re-read the books, partly because of his Aubreyisms XD and partly because I appreciate a deeply flawed character who's still, deep down, a good person. I guess that the same could be said about Stephen, but I loved him immediately! And I love their friendship, and how it grows with each book. Looking back, I think I saw it as a sort of queerplatonic relationship, years before I heard that term.

[regshoe]

I just wish his deep flaws and deep-down goodness had a bit more chance to develop and work out in interesting ways—well, I'll look forward to seeing how they do so in later books... And also the development of Jack and Stephen's friendship, as I love the sound of that interpretation :)

[hyarrowen]

The series gets going with HMS Surprise; the first two are a slog. I've been informed that P O'B didn't sail on a tall ship until quite late into the series, which I can believe; and I spotted two straight rip-offs of actual battles in which actual people died, and I don't even know all that much about Napoleonic Wars sea battles, so there are probably more. There are other reasons why I dislike the man. He kept a low profile for a reason. Still, some of the books are enjoyable reads and they're funny from time to time.

/has Opinions

[regshoe]

Huh, I suppose that puts the exposition into an odd context!

The book has a foreword in which O'Brian discusses his research material and seems to be defending doing just that: 'the admirable men of those times... are best celebrated in their own splendid actions rather than in imaginary contests; that authenticity is a jewel... I don't know the history at all and couldn't recognise anything, but I would raise an eyebrow at some of what he says (does historical fiction aim to 'celebrate the admirable men of those times', through ripping off their historical actions or otherwise???).

Perhaps I shouldn't ask further about your Opinions until I've read a few more of the books... it does sound like the later ones are more worth reading, anyway. :)

[hyarrowen]

Yes, the later ones are an enjoyable light read.

Edit: Oh - and the pub might have been originally named by a seaman who fought there or was stationed there. There are, I believe, a number of Lord Nelsons and Admiral Benbows amongst British pub names, set up by sailormen who won good prize money.

[regshoe]

Oh, that's a good thought! Hehe, if I remember correctly there was actually a bit in the book where a sailor, anticipating prize-money, thinks about the cost of setting up an inn.

[lilliburlero]

I think O'Brian thought of Stephen as the real protagonist of the series (and who certainly I think has the aspirational, Mary-sue-ish elements), but I think he's actually better at writing Jack. He suffers from the Englishman's vice of assuming that a True Irishman is a Catholic and that leads him to some odd contortions in writing Stephen, who I think has the soul of a Dissenter (and could more plausibly have been that as a disappointed United Irishman) but O'Brian wanted the romantic European side as well... I am still raging that he killed off James Dillon because he didn't really know what to do with him, though. He has a tendency to create good ideas for female characters and then not really follow through as well. I will forgive him a lot for his little details - Jack is a better musician and mathematician than Stephen despite his inferior abstract intellect, Dillon's terrible teeth, the fact that no-one ever, I think, actually says Mowett-the-Poet.

I kind of appreciate that - and I think quite often inadvertently, I agree that O'Brian hasn't really done any more thinking about the injustice of the press gang etc. than Jack has - some of the grossest prejudices of the period are reproduced in a character who is in other ways admirable and not wholly without introspection, and we sometimes see him coming to reconsider as the result of experience, and sometimes not. It feels more textured than the standard Man of His Times defence, but he's also never improbably enlightened for a British naval officer at the turn of the 19th century.

[regshoe]

Oh, Stephen is Catholic! I thought so, but the book seemed oddly evasive about it, even in the bits from his POV—and I think I agree that he'd have worked better as a Dissenter (and O'Brian mentions the mix of denominations in the United Irishmen—hmm).

(I was also slightly surprised to hear that Patrick O'Brian was English, given the name and the Irish protagonist, so I went and looked up his Wikipedia page and it has a whole section about him changing his name and other 'controversies'—oh dear, apparently quite a lot there...)

James Dillon had so much wasted potential, in his own right as well as vis-a-vis Jack and Stephen! A shame.

the fact that no-one ever, I think, actually says Mowett-the-Poet.

:D

Interesting thoughts about Jack and the problems of historical attitudes, too—I'll have to keep this stuff in mind while reading the later books.

[lilliburlero]

Sorry for the spoiler, even if it was fairly minimal - I forget how little we get told in Master and Commander! No more, I promise.

I think O'Brian (O'Brien is the more common Irish spelling, so I hesitate; once I found myself flitting between writing about him and Flann O'Brien, a proofreading shitshow) was rather an old fraud, and not in the amusing way. I still don't know if some of the impenetrability of the descriptions of naval manoeuvres and engagements is just me being dense and not very good at spatial visualisation or O'Brian cogging furiously from accounts of Thomas Cochrane's exploits without really knowing what he's talking about. Por qué no los dos, I guess!

[regshoe]

Oh, no worries—I hadn't realised it was a spoiler :D (I'll have to see how the revelation plays out in later books).

I tend to assume with those detailed naval descriptions that the author must know what they're talking about, but frankly I don't know enough to be able to tell if they're not. Oh well...

[luzula]

I meant to comment on this, but didn't have time until now! Anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed the book, even if you also had some reservations. In fact it has been so long since I read this first book that I don't at all remember the plot of it...also I know nothing about the author's private life, and am not sure how much I want to know?

The prose is very nice, with a good eye for detail
Yes! Very much agree. I love his prose.

And I thought you'd like Stephen. : ) I don't ship him and Jack romantically or sexually, either, but I do very much like them as friends. Though I will read shippy fic about them when it's well-written, as I don't mind it, and that is what is mostly on offer in the fandom. I do have some good gen recs for you later on though, if you continue!

[regshoe]

Thank you for recommending these books, you were quite right about the things I'd like :D

I know nothing about the author's private life, and am not sure how much I want to know?

I think I will try reading the next few in the series without attempting to learn any more, at least!

And yeah, I think that's pretty much how I feel about Jack/Stephen so far—I prefer them as friends, but I don't mind the ship and would happily read fic if it's good. And I look forward to those gen recs also :D