regshoe

Here we go, then! I'm up to fifteen books in my reviews backlog, so I'd better post it before it gets any longer...

( Thoughts on books of the last couple of months )

There we go! That is rather too many recent dates, I think; perhaps I should read something nicely Victorian (or earlier?) next.

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: ( spoilers ) 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!