Post Captain by Patrick O'Brian

[regshoe]

I continue with the Aubrey-Maturin series; Post Captain (1972) is the second book in the series, following the further adventures of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin during the Peace of Amiens and the naval warfare at the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars.

I was amused by the opening section as a contrast to Lieutenant Hornblower; while his promotion is interfered with, Jack at first has a much easier time of it during the Peace of Amiens than poor Horatio, renting a comfortable house in Sussex and living there in domestic bliss with Stephen. Later, some bad luck about his prize-agent alters Jack's fortunes dramatically and he spends much of the book having to take the evasion of bailiffs into account when planning all his movements (they can't get him at sea! or in the Duchy of Lancaster, apparently); however, before that happens he and Stephen get to know the ladies of their new neighbourhood, particularly Sophia Williams, a reserved and thoughtful local girl, and her cousin Diana Villiers, a bold and adventurous widow who lived in India during her marriage. Now, I had osmosed that this series involves love interests named Sophie and Diana, but I had failed to osmose who was whose, so I amused myself by predicting purely from the initial descriptions of the two of them that the endgame ships would be Jack/Diana and Stephen/Sophie. We'll see how that prediction goes.

When his unexpected debts oblige him to leave Sussex Jack, accompanied by Stephen, flees to France and then to Spain (including a bizarre interlude where they disguise themselves as a dancing bear and its keeper, respectively, using a real bear-skin acquired by Stephen); then they get on a ship to England, are briefly captured by a French ship which is itself promptly captured by the British, and hence finally get back to England. By now war has begun again and Jack, eager to keep away from those inconvenient bailiffs, endeavours to get a new command... but he keeps going back to land anyway to visit Diana... but he's also in love with Sophie, who's pining away for love of him, though they are unaware of each other's feelings... also Stephen, who's in love with Diana, has become a spy and is keeping it secret from Jack... One of the things I said about the last book was that its pacing was meandering and kind of structureless, moving through a series of dramatic events without much of an overarching plot; this was even more of the same, and I sadly suspect that O'Brian is not the kind of Rosemary Sutcliff who can really pull that sort of thing off. By a certain point it got a bit tiring. I also said about the pacing at the level of sentences and scenes that O'Brian has a confusing habit of not using scene-breaks or other indications of time passing or location changing where they would really help; that also continues in this book, and caused quite a bit of confusion over things like this:

'Dialogue,' said Character A.
'Dialogue in agreement,' said Character B.
'More dialogue, not obviously unconnected with the previous line,' said A.
'Reply to A's previous line,' said Character C, who was not present during the previous exchange.
'Something he probably wouldn't say in front of B,' said A.
Finally a narrative line suggesting that perhaps B isn't here anymore, it's several hours later and/or we're in a different part of the ship, maybe.

It's at least partly my fault, but this sort of thing, combined with a lot of things like characters lying or dissembling without any narration making it clear what they're doing or why (I am slightly better at working out things like that in fiction than I am in real life, which is to say merely terrible) made for a distinctly confusing reading experience.

I was also annoyed by some other features of O'Brian's writing style, especially his fondness for sentences like this:

A keen, pale, wintry morning in the Downs: the hands at breakfast, Jack walking up and down.

Now, I'm unfortunately not pedantic enough to go round saying things like 'every sentence must have a verb', but I do think that if you're telling a story you should tell it, not just put images in front of the reader like you think you're a cinema screen and leave the actual narrative to be worked out in suggestion. I get that this is done for effect—just that kind of effect, a cinematic one—but it gets very annoying when overused, and O'Brian does overuse it.

This book does seem to have confirmed impressions from the first one in general; the troubling cynicism and secretiveness in Stephen's character and handling of his affairs, which begin to sit rather oddly alongside the charming scientific eccentricity of some of his actions (the bees on board ship were good fun!), were very much present again here, both in his spying and in the Jack-Diana-Stephen love triangle. I really do want to like their friendship, but more and more I feel that Stephen does not really trust Jack, and the more he holds himself back emotionally the more I hold back from any real investment in the relationship.

(Also, there's a bit where Stephen is seasick, he tries to pretend he isn't out of embarrassment and Jack makes fun of him for it, which is just about my anti-id in terms of potential hurt/comfort scenarios. Why can't you be more like D. K. Broster!)

What about those romances, then? Again, they play out in confusingly unstated implication—who is in love with whom? why? I often felt I didn't know—and with quite a bit of cynicism. The ending so far doesn't really resolve whether my prediction was correct, though it's looking like probably not: Jack and Sophie are unofficially engaged, and Stephen is getting over his feelings for Diana—who has become the mistress of a man who is neither him nor Jack—but is still sad about it. I will say now that I really hope Jack/Sophie isn't actually endgame; I like Jack fine as a character, he's quite possibly a good friend for Stephen, but I would not wish him as a love interest on any female character I liked, and I like Sophie. I do not like Diana (she's horrible to Sophie; there's plenty of character flaws I love in my faves, but deliberate cruelty to people who don't deserve it is not one of them), but I begin to see that she perhaps could suit the less sympathetic bits of Stephen. Who knows? We shall see how things really work out; my osmosis suggests we haven't seen the last of Diana, anyway.

All things considered, then, I'm not greatly happy with this series so far. However, this book did have its moments (there are some good birds, particularly what I have only just identified as a Wilson's storm petrel); and I understand that it improves from the third book onwards, so I am looking forward to seeing where it goes next.

Comments

[tei]

A keen, pale, wintry morning in the Downs: the hands at breakfast, Jack walking up and down.

Oh god. I just borrowed Master and Commander from my dad and promised myself (& him) that I was actually going to read it this time, and this is not an encouraging sign about my ability to do so :P WHOSE hands? Disembodied hands? Jack's hands? "Hands" as in servants serving breakfast? Walking up and down the stairs? A road? A leisurely stroll? Or pacing in agitation? WHY??

[muccamukk]

Hands as in deckhands, if that helps.

[tei]

OH. Okay, that at least probably would have been clearer in context :P

[regshoe]

Yeah, as muccamukk says, that particular line probably sounds worse out of context than it really is—it's clear enough in context that the 'hands' are the ship's crew and that Jack is pacing the deck—but there are a lot of that kind of verbless-descriptive-image sentences in general.

[muccamukk]

Yeaaaah. I've read that one once and not looked back. I'd say if you don't like HMS Surprise, just bail on the whole thing. The writing gets somewhat less bloated as it goes on, but everyone's still kind of a dick.

[regshoe]

That is disappointing—there's such potential in the bits where they're not being dicks!—but I'll see how I like HMS Surprise and go from there, I suppose...

[philomytha]

Ah, I’m not alone! I tried to read this series and had a lot of the same experiences - there were enough things I liked that I kept going with them, but I also found the plot and pacing meandering, the narration confusing and the romance annoying. I loved Jack and Stephen, and when it was good it was very good and also funny, but it was definitely a mixed experience.

[regshoe]

I do like the funny moments—and the natural history, of course!—though I wish O'Brian made more of them, and could do less of the other stuff I don't like.

[osprey_archer]

I've hovered on the fence about reading this series for years - actually tried it when I was a teenager, but I found the style just a little too hard to parse and gave up only a couple chapters in. But I think most of things that bother you would also bother me, so maybe I'll just give it a miss.

[regshoe]

That's probably a wise decision! I think I will try another book or two to see how far it improves, but we'll see.

[ljm]

I read Post Captain in June, and I agree with what you say about the confusing descriptions/scene transitions, and the somewhat disjointed pacing of the story. I didn't have those specific thoughts when I was reading it- it's more like I felt something was vaguely "off" and your post spelled out exactly what was causing that. (I have to say, I didn't actually mind the lack of overarching plot, possibly because I was reading the book before falling asleep at night, and the wandering narrative sort of helped with that?)

[regshoe]

Yeah, it took me a while to pinpoint what wasn't working for me about the style. I think the plotlessness would be less annoying on its own—there are other historical novels structured like that that I've really liked—but combined with everything else I didn't like it just becomes one more thing.

[luzula]

Awww, I loved these books when I read them, so I'm sorry you're not feeling it! But opinions differ, of course, and that's fine.

I've only read them once, and it has been far too long since I read this particular book (probably 10 years or so?), so I can't speak to the various plot points in this book. I enjoy O’Brian’s style a lot, and my overall memory of the series is a sense of warmth, especially towards Jack and Stephen. In my memory, Stephen is not cynical, but does suffer from periods of melancholy and substance abuse. I will say that O’Brian does something in one of the last books that I can’t quite forgive, and I reject it as canon. But I still have a very fond memory of the books, and will probably reread them some day. It will be interesting to see if my impression of them changes then.

[regshoe]

Of course! :) And there is a lot I like, and more I want to like, about them, and I do intend to read one or two more and see if they're more to my taste. So far I don't get that impression of warmth at all (to the point that there were parts of this one that felt weird because it seemed like there should have been a sense of warmth and there wasn't). Opinions do differ—I suppose you read more modern books than I do, and perhaps authors from the 1970s express that sort of thing differently to e.g. Broster.

(Well, and now I'm curious to know what this unforgiveable thing O'Brian does in one of the last books is...!)