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Patrick O'Brian's Humor in the Aubrey-Maturin Series

New article to be entitled, "Humor in the Aubrey-Maturin Series by Patrick O'Brian" As noted in the article, Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian, humor is a prominent feature of the author's writing. This article examines his approach to humorous writing and lists examples of both polite and bawdy humor which are found in the series.

Humour update this copy/paste

Much of the humour in the series come from the two principal characters' malapropisms. Aubrey, though a genius at sea and with practical matters, has large gaps in his understanding of everything else, and should never be allowed within twelve fathoms of a metaphor.

Maturin, by contrast, though extremely erudite and a linguist, remains perpetually doomed in his occasional attempts to use naval slang, or to explain the working of a ship to someone — though his ignorance of naval maneuvers often serves as a useful device for some more experienced sailor to come up with a more correct technical description of the whole thing, suited "to the meanest understanding" — something that a reader who doesn't know starboard from larboard will come to appreciate over time.

So we have for example Aubrey's attempting to use the occasional word of French and describing a patois as a putain; and Maturin saying "if the Admiral proves inquisitive, I may toss him off with a round turn" (as opposed to the correct phrase: to bring someone up with a round turn). This also works as a bawdy modern-day double entendre, because "to toss off" is modern-day British slang for "masturbate." For similar examples, see the section "Bawdy humour," below.

Furthermore, O'Brian sets up an humorous contrast between Aubrey and Maturin. Aubrey, a masterful sailor and naval tactician, usually proves inept and unlucky in his affairs ashore, often relieved to undertake a voyage and leave behind his troubles on land. Maturin, on the other hand, while showing extraordinary subtlety and tact ashore, demonstrates clumsiness and ignorance when it comes to seafaring, contriving to fall out of various ships and boats and hopeless as regards the art of sailing.

O'Brian's bone-dry and cutting wit, present throughout all his novels, provides another principal source of humour in the canon. The delivery, whether in the form of narration or dialogue, seems often so forthright that the reader (or listener) may not perceive it at first. At times, however, O'Brian will spend a considerable portion of a volume setting up comedic sequences, perhaps most notably Jack's "debauchery" (by inadvertently making it drunk) of Maturin's pet sloth in HMS Surprise .

O'Brian will often have one character comment on another character's level of humour as a prime indicator of that character's emotional state. However, Aubrey's character seems much more complex. He has an almost oafish sense of humour with a heavy reliance on laborious puns, and a near complete ignorance of literature, natural philosophy and painting. On the plus side, he shows devotion to the more popular kind of opera, and plays the violin as a skilled amateur.

Frequently, O'Brian uses humour and jokes spoken or written by the characters to illustrate or develop character. Aubrey's delight in small witticisms, such as inducing Maturin to choose between "the lesser of two weevils" , recurs in the series, as does Maturin's concealed, acerbic wit — such as his statement that the shortest watches of duty on board the ship, the dogwatches, take their name because they are "curtailed" ("Cur Tailed", "cur" meaning "dog"). In another book, he suggests naming the bosun's cat "Scourge," a play on an entirely different cat, one used by bosuns to administer punishment.

When Stephen points out an interesting bird or animal to Aubrey, he sometimes asks, Can it be ate?' In Post Captain, on viewing a painting of Mary Magdalene hovering over a seascape, Aubrey notices (apart from her scantily covered bosom) that the direction of the wind indicated by her flowing garments means that a small craft detailed in the painting, "somewhat like a pink," with "absurd lateens," will soon find itself on a lee shore.

Similarly, in Treason's Harbour, when sailing past Ithaca and requested to stop there so various fans of Homer's epics can visit it, Aubrey rejects the idea, describing Ulysses as no seaman, having taken far too long to sail home to Ithaca from Troy, even with no chronometer but just log, lead and lookout. Besides, he behaved like "a very mere scrub" to Queen Dido, a reference to Aeneas' actions in Virgil's Aeneid.

While Jack often makes forcedly conscious attempts at humour, especially puns, sometimes abandoned as too strenuous, he will occasionally reach wit. After rescuing a sailor fallen overboard he minimizes the action to Maturin, "It don't signify" and then adds, "I might dive in after a dog. If the water was warm I might even go in after a surgeon. Ha Ha Ha!"

O'Brian assigns to Jack (instead of Maturin) the speaking role for authorial acerbic wit once in a while. After swimming to an island shore to assist Stephen in dragging his boat back to the water he responds to Maturin's astonishment in seeing his skiff high and dry, "Yes, I believe it is the tide. They say it happens twice a day in these parts." To this Stephen delivers his standard reply of vexation when caught "by the lee" in naval matters, "Your soul to the devil, Jack Aubrey!"

A sort of black humor appears even in perfectly ordinary situations. For example, it is mentioned that a strict nun, Sor (or Sister) Luisa, in charge of Maturin's education when he was a boy, was from a good family - a branch of the Torquemadas of Valladolid.

Bawdy humour

O'Brian inserts some toilet humour into the narrative, as for example when Jack, severely constipated and in no shape for a long series of official dinners, gets a dose of Blue Pill and Black Draught purgative from Maturin. He decides for himself that his huge frame requires a larger dose, and gets himself a second dose from Maturin's colleague Martin, leading to his spending several hours in the toilet, something that tickles his steward Killick's delight - "Which he's taken a ninety year lease of the quarter gallery" and "he's in his cabin now, snoring as loud as ever he..." Killick stops himself before the next word because the comparison is "not genteel."

Killick frequently expresses the hope that he might be able to serve out people he dislikes by shoving something up their anuses — in Desolation Island he fumes at the dockyard workers who improperly caulked the ship, making it wet and leaky, by wishing that he could "caulk them, with a red hot caulking iron, right up their _____ ." In another book, Maturin gives a purser whom Killick dislikes a clyster, and Killick says "How I wish I could have given it him, the b_____ ."

O'Brian occasionally makes use of dashes to express supposedly unprintable words, a device that 18th- and 19th-century authors frequently used, sometimes to excess. Patrick Tull's recorded versions of the entire canon for audio-publisher Recorded Books replaces these dashes by the words they obviously represent.

O'Brian also uses double entendre to good effect. He derives humour from words now thought of as "dirty," but quite acceptable in the early 19th century, or factually correct in a much different sense. In Master and Commander, O'Brian casually introduces his readers to the cunt splice. Maturin speaks to a colleague, opening a conversation after a lengthy separation (The Fortune of War) by asking, "How is your penis?" The reader soon learns Maturin is enquiring from a medical interest to a circumcision he previously performed. Again in Master and Commander, Lt. Dillon mentions that the Sophie's sailing master has a homosexual attraction to Aubrey, and if Aubrey doesn't realize it, he is perhaps "lacking in penetration." In Post Captain, with the Lively about to begin exercising the great guns, a midshipman charged with the safety of a lady guest asks her if she "mind[s] a bang' as he takes her below, and she replies "Oh no, I love it."

O'Brian displays more double-entendre, having fun with newlywed amour, when creating wedding announcements in the Chronicle (The Surgeon's Mate, p. 362): "...Captain Ross, of La Desiree, to Miss Cockburn...", and "...Lushington...to Miss Amanda Smith of Knocking Hall, Rutland..."

In The Fortune of War, Jack meets a British Admiral in the Dutch East Indies, and beautiful, bare-bosomed young women, whom the Admiral introduces as his native cooks, serve him drinks. As he says, "they answer very well for Country Dishes." Here, O'Brian uses a variant of the sexually charged pun that Shakespeare used in Hamlet, Act III Scene II, Do you think I meant country matters? (cunt-ry).

In The Ionian Mission, Babbington rescues several women from a pirate and gets scolded by Aubrey for "whoremongering." Babbington at once replies: "Oh no, Sir — they are Lesbians." Indeed, they hail from the Greek island of Lesbos, whose association with the poetess Sappho gave its name to sex between women. Another humorous term appears with complete seriousness in The Ionian Mission as a device much discussed by the scientifically-minded gentlemen aboard ship: the piece of sugar-refining equipment known as the "double-bottomed defecator."

Similarly, in Treason's Harbour Stephen describes the mechanism of a diving-bell to a pretty Italian double-agent and at one point offers to amplify his explanation with a sketch of the part which lets water in and out: "Will I draw you my little cock?" In another reference to the diving-bell, Stephen offers to search for a lost object with the quiet statement "It is well known that I am an urinator." "Urinator," of course, in the little-used sense of "diver."

Also, throughout the books, Stephen demonstrates a continuing predilection for boobies, that is, a genus of marine birds. Stephen expresses his fascination and scientific interest in them at some odd times and in odd ways, including during a visit to St. Peter and Paul Rocks, where a naked Maturin comments, "I believe this booby would suffer me to touch it." We find he has even written a paper about boobies. In addition, he admits he has been more fortunate with boobies than most men, in fact, has grown "intimate with most of the species."

His interest is further noted in The Surgeon's Mate (p.222) when he has hurried to dissect the breast-bone of a salted buzzard upon which he and Jack are dining. He explains to Jack, ostensibly as a natural philosopher, "I could not wait to the see the creature's sternum. I learned a great deal about sternums in Paris."

O'Brian takes the funny-words theme a step further, introducing similarly "funny" names of real or imagined people into the narrative, mostly puns and other plays on words, especially of sexual themes.

In Master and Commander, Jack and his crew stop a Danish brig called the Clomer, whose captain rejoices in the name of Ole Bugge. Jack barely stops himself from filling in an obligatory r at the end of Captain Bugge's surname. In the same book, Jack mentions his bankers: Hoares — while the midshipmen listening can barely restrain their glee at how the name puns with "whores."

More humorously-named bankers occur in The Thirteen Gun Salute where Stephen, seated at dinner with Jack and another (quite austere and religious) Post-Captain with a known distaste for swearing, laments the poor service his bankers give him — and wishes he could find a better banker — "another Fugger." This refers to the famous family of 15th- and 16th-century bankers of that name, with various members of the family getting themselves nicknames like The Fugger of the Deer and The Rich Fugger.

In The Ionian Mission, Jack meets a Post-Captain, the son of a Canon of Windsor. He immediately puns "Canon" with "cannon," jokingly labelling the man a "son of a gun." Not too surprisingly, this joke, with its implication of bastardy, doesn't quite amuse the captain concerned.

In The Surgeon's Mate, Maturin's godfather, the Catalan colonel in charge of Grimsholm island, has a party-piece — a long poem about his grandfather's campaign with Lord Peterborough, where he keeps mispronouncing "borough" to "rhyme with mugger" ... Lord Peterbuggah.

Jack's shipmates share his tastes in the "punning on names" line - M. Dutourd, in The Wine Dark Sea becomes not too popular with the old man-of-war hands on the Surprise, and Killick immediately shortens his name to Turd. In Desolation Island, the crew of an American brig, the Asa Foulkes, hail Barrett Bonden; and he hails them back, with, as O'Brian puts it, a deliberate mispronunciation of the brig's name.

Notes

O'Brian, Patrick (1972). Post Captain. (UK): Harper Collins. ISBN 0006136664. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

Master and Commander (1970) 0-00-612913-7 Post Captain (1972) HMS Surprise (1973) The Mauritius Command (1977) Desolation Island (1978) check for isbn on my copy The Fortune of War (1979) 0-393-30813-8 The Surgeon's Mate (1980) 0-393-30820-0 The Ionian Mission (1981) 0-393-30821-9 Treason's Harbour (1983) 0-393-30863-4 The Far Side of the World (1984) The Reverse of the Medal (1986) The Letter of Marque (1988) The Thirteen Gun Salute (1989) 0-393-30907-X The Nutmeg of Consolation (1991) Clarissa Oakes (1992) - (The Truelove in the USA) The Wine-Dark Sea (1993) 0-393-31244-5 The Commodore (1995) The Yellow Admiral (1996) The Hundred Days (1998) Blue at the Mizzen (1999) The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey (2004) - (21 in the USA)

for O'Brian article

The Road to Samarcand is a novel by Patrick O'Brian published in 1954 and set in Asia during the 1930s. It can be grouped with two subsequent novels also published in the 1950s, The Golden Ocean and The Unknown Shore. All three are directed at a younger readership. All three also precede O'Brian's oeuvre referred to as the Aubrey-Maturin series and may be seen as containing elements later developed in the series.

The Argument

The central character, a young teen-ager named Derrick, is the son of recently deceased parents on mission in China. His uncle, Captain Terance Sullivan, has taken Derrick aboard his ship and employed him in the crew; but he feels, as do his companion Ross and Derrick's other surviving relative, that the boy must leave the ship and attend school in England. The cousin, who hails from the other side of the family from Terence Sullivan, and whom neither he nor Derrick have met, is en route from England to meet the ship and accompany Derrick home to be matriculated. This cousin is Professor Ayrton, a highly educated man and an expert in oriental archeology. He also turns out to be older than Derrick's Uncle "Terry" Sullivan, in fact, elderly. Derrick is unhappy with the prospect of leaving the ship, and Professor Ayrton proposes "to gild the pill of education" by taking a route home via the famous road to Samarcand.

Nature of the novel

While structured with plot and subplots, and created with a cast of interesting characters, the novel draws its major appeal from a series of adventures in exotic locales. The story begins during a voyage on the South China Sea, where almost at once Derrick's ship encounters a typhoon. Surviving this perilous experience, the ship under Captain Sullivan reaches shore, and the rendevous is completed with Professor Ayrton. Subsequent adventures are set up by forming and equipping the party for the journey to the road to Samarcand. Members of the party will be his relatives, Cousin Ayrton and Uncle Sullivan; Derrick, himself; Sullivan's intrepid companion, Ross; the ship's Chinese cook, Li Han; and one of Captain Sullivan's seamen, Olaf. Horses and Mongolian guides are engaged: during the course of the story Derrick becomes a skilled horseman and learns to speak Mongolian. The party must follow a circuitous route in order both to travel safely and to satisfy Professor Ayrton's archeological wishes. This circuitous route allows O'Brian to reveal interesting aspects of the Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan cultures. Danger cannot be avoided, and there are adventures of imprisonment, escape, and hand-to-hand fighting. The party becomes involved in deadly skirmishes at a time in history when the old skills of warfare are bowing to superior firepower. As this situation turns dramatic, Professor Ayrton is forced to pass himself off as a Russian Army officer, a specialist in armament. In reality he is the opposite, and does not know how even to fire a gun when the expedition begins. Other adventures involve dangers crossing a glacier involving both blizzard conditions and inimical monks masquerading as yeti, and the loss and and eventual rediscovery of party-members, Li Han and Olaf. As the final adventure, in what can be described as a deus ex machina, the little group escapes disaster in a functioning helicopter. It has been abandoned near the monastery where the band has been virtually imprisoned. There is spare gasoline for the helicopter in a can, and the party is flown away by Ross. He is completely inexperienced as a helicopter pilot, but O'Brian has created him with mechanical prowess, bravery and a history as the captain of a ship. Airborne and finally out of danger, they see below on the ground the road to Samarcand.

Relationship to Aubrey-Maturin series

The Road to Samaracand foreshadows aspects of O'Brian's later Aubrey-Maturin series. Like the novels in the nautical series, it begins with an adventure at sea. Furthermore, both Captain Sullivan and Professor Ayrton demonstrate traits and practices which may be seen later in Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. For example, Captain Sullivan exhibits superior courage, sailing and fighting abilities, just as Captain Aubrey does. Sullivan travels with a particular friend, Ross, just as Aubrey almost always travels with Maturin. Jack Aubrey eventually becomes the owner of his beloved ship, the Surprise. So, Captain Sullivan owns the Wanderer. Both ships are outdated: the Surprise is no longer large enough or sufficiently armed to compete in combat with contemporary navy vessels, and the Wanderer is being superceded by steam-powered ships.

Certain qualities of Professor Ayrton are found in an extreme degree in Stephen Maturin. Both men are learned and very well regarded in their specific fields and in general erudition. Despite high learning, both men encounter practical difficulties. Maturin, for example, is known inveterately to fall or bark his shins when attempting to cross between boats unaided, and in The Far Side of the World he even falls out of the ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean when attempting to net interesting specimens in the sea. In the process he becomes amazingly tangled in his net, and Jack Aubrey must dive in to rescue him. In the same incompetent manner, Professor Ayrton accidentally discharges his rifle as his small group prepares to spring an ambush, lamely stating, "It went off." In other incidents reminiscent of Stephen Maturin, the professor misplaces an important map in his robes, and it is discovered that the map has gravitated to a different area in his robe, and he has been sitting upon it. Continuing the incident mentioned from The Far Side of the World, Maturin's use of the South Pacific term,"taboo," nearly the extent of his linguistic knowlege of any Polynesian language, preserves Aubrey from castration at the hands of a crew of soley female mariners aboard their craft. This powerful incident is the remolding of a passage in The Road to Samarcand, when Professor Ayrton is forced to extend himself in an unfamiliar language to mislead a company of dominant Tibetan females. They have chosen a Swede from Captain Sullivan's company as a bridegoom, but Professor Ayrton is able to convince them his colleague is not only mad, but subject to supernatural influences.

There are further similarities between The Road to Samarcand and the Aubrey-Maturin series, though perhaps less important. In a singular instance, Captain Sullivan refers to "a very strong-minded woman, not at all unlike a Mrs. Williams..." This is an amazingly apt description, because the name is the same, of Jack Aubrey's mother-in-law. The novel and subsequent series can also be compared in respect to O'Brian's inclusion of animals. The certain horses associated with Mongols are described, as are one- and two-humped camels, and there are numerous references to yaks. In the Aubrey-Maturin series there is frequent reference to tiger-sharks and albatrosses, and these references echo incidents aboard the Wanderer. Finally, the relationship between Derrick and the dog he discovers, rescues and names Chang, is tenderly developed in the same way that human/animal relationships with dogs, cats and horses are treated throughout the Aubrey-Maturin series.

Sources

The O'Brian trilogy of Ross-Sullivan stories create the context and many of the characters later to appear in The Road to Samarcand. Still writing under his birth name as R.P. Russ, O'Brian published these stories in the Oxford Annual for Boys. They are "Noughts and Crosses" (1936),"Two's Company" (1937), and "No Pirates Nowadays" (1940). Ross and Sullivan are created in the earlier two stories, and Wanderer crew members Derrick, Li Han and Olaf are introduced in the last. All five of these characters, as well as the Wanderer, appear in the first chapter of the The Road to Samarcand.

for footnotes

THREE CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS: naval historian Oliver Warner wrote in Time and Tide magazine, "It is not very probable adventure but it keeps admirably within its own convention. There is a splendid hurricane for good measure, and it would be a jaded creature who complained of a lack of things happening."

July 1 Times Literary Supplement "the denouement of The Road to Samarcand is as absurd politically as it is geographically."

Scout magazine called "the year's best story-book so far....Filled with real adventure and quick with incident."

these three from Dean King book, p.174

KIRKUS REVIEW: This adventure story, set in the Far East, was originally published in 1954; it predates the naval warfare novels that made O'Brian (1914 - 2000) famous. Derrick, an American teenager in China between the World Wars, recently lost both his missionary parents, but don't feel badly for him; he's a spirited lad, enjoying his apprenticeship on a schooner in the South China Sea. He's there because its skipper Sullivan, a resourceful man of action, is his uncle. They're on their way to meet Professor Ayrton, an elderly English archaeologist and Derrick's cousin; Ayrton wants the boy to attend school, the one thing Derrick dreads. As a palliative, the kindly prof suggests postponing school until they've made an overland journey to Samarcand, the legendary Central Asian city; there will be archaeological digs en route. The schooner is dry-docked, and the group sets off from Peking, joined by two sailors, a Scot and a Swede, the ship's cook Li Han and three Mongols with their pack animals. They will travel the Old Silk Road on horseback, crossing the Gobi desert and Mongolia; the principal danger will be rival warlords. Sure enough, Sullivan and Ross, the Scotsman, are soon taken prisoner by the villainous Shun Chi, who's in league with the Russians. The frail professor, discovering in himself a "transient thirst for blood," leaps into action. By impersonating a Russian he frees the two men, and threatens a warlord with his own revolver. This is dramatic, but only up to a point, for we know the good guys will emerge unscathed. Only much later, when the group is forced to enter a valley in Tibet haunted by the Abominable Snowman and three of the group are left for dead, does the action have real bite. A miraculous escape in a Russian helicopter from some hostile monks completes the story. A likable if far-fetched jaunt; O'Brian lacks the mastery of his material which he will show in the Aubrey/Maturin series. (Kirkus Reviews)

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-6607497_ITM

Patrick O'Brian's naval mastery.(Critical Essay) Publication: New Criterion Publication Date: 01-MAY-05 Author: Messenger, Robert

O'Brian had a fine ear for dialogue, too.

O'Brian's clarity in writing character makes him a peer of the great nineteenth-century novelists: Tolstoy, Dickens, Flaubert, George Eliot, all of whom wrote historical novels.

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) written for the National Catholic Register. By Steven D. Greydanus

vivid in characterization

http://books.google.com/books?id=XrstZSI7_FAC&pg=PA12&lpg=PA12&dq=%22Patrick+o'brian%22++dialect&source=bl&ots=MO-RssZiUz&sig=W_Alba6t_pmaX0lT9T0f9z0GC_4&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result

Patrick O'Brian by Arthur E. Cunningham, p. 12 W.W. Norton 1994

O'Brian has a very subtle and light touch with dialect. ....

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6433436.html?q=draft+of+a+letter

Fiction Reviews: Week of 4/16/2007 by Staff -- Publishers Weekly, 4/16/2007

The Road to Samarcand Patrick O'Brian. Norton, $25.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-393-06473-5

This stand-alone adventure novel from O'Brian (1914–2000) saw British publication in 1954, before the Aubrey/Maturin historicals that made his name. In the years before WWII, the teenage Derrick, orphaned by his missionary parents, sails the China seas aboard the schooner Wanderer with his American uncle Terrence Sullivan (who is the captain), his elderly English cousin Ayrton (a professor of archeology) and Sullivan's business partner, Mr. Ross. Ayrton wants Derrick to leave the sea and attend school, but first they'll all embark on an archeological expedition to Samarcand (in what is now Uzbekistan). Marauding rebels capture Ross and Sullivan early on, and Ayrton (the most intriguing of the adult characters) pretends to be a Russian weapons expert to free them. Earthy, sly humor keeps the action set pieces perking along: frigid temperatures, militaristic Tibetan monks and even the Abominable Snowman await. Six decades later, O'Brian's richly told adventure saga, with its muscular prose, supple dialogue and engaging characters, packs a nice old-school punch. (July)

http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1992/6/1992_6_84.shtml "My Favorite Historical Novel" American Heritage Magazine, October 1992, Vol. 43, issue 6 Patrick O’Brian has written fifteen historical novels set during the Napoleonic Wars chronicling the friendship of Jack Aubrey, an officer in the Royal Navy, and Stephen Maturin, an Irish-Catalan physician and spy; one of these books—The Fortune of War—takes place in America, and others include Americans. I have read most of these novels five times and recommended them to every friend I possess, seven of whom have found them as exhilarating as I have, and no historical novelist has given any of us a remotely comparable amount of pleasure. O’Brian is an immensely intelligent and extremely funny writer with a considerable array of talents, but I think his great achievement as a historical novelist is his re-creation of the intellectual and moral universe of Enlightenment gentlemen, with Jack and Stephen each incarnating a portion of the spirit of the age. O’Brian has invented a wonderful, slightly archaized language to evoke both his historical subjects and his timeless ones; I have never seen anything like it, or him. These are splendid books.

—Fredric Smoler, professor of history and literature, Sarah Lawrence College

THIS FOOTNOTE FOR Catalans: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/18/specials/obrian-catalans.html

http://www.decentfilms.com/sections/reviews/masterandcommander.html Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) written for the National Catholic Register. By Steven D. Greydanus ...they’re cracking good yarns, elegantly written, thrillingly plotted and satisfyingly shaped, vivid in characterization, memorable in incident, impeccably authentic in period detail. Aubrey and Maturin are as distinctive and persuasive a pair of characters, and their unlikely friendship is as compelling, as any I have encountered in fiction.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9802E2DD1E3AF934A25752C0A9669C8B63

The Humble Genre Novel, Sometimes Full of Genius

By DAVID MAMET Published: January 17, 2000 For the past 30 years the greatest novelists writing in English have been genre writers: John le Carre, George Higgins and Patrick O'Brian.

Each year, of course, found the press discovering some writer whose style, provenance and choice of theme it found endearing. These usually trig, slim tomes shared a wistful and self-commendatory confusion at the multiplicity of life and stank of Art. But the genre writers wrote without sentimentality; their prose was concise and perceptive; in it the reader sees the life of which they wrote, rather than the writer's technique.

For to hell with this putrid and despicable Graduate Degree sensitivity. Le Carre had been a spy, Higgins was a working lawyer and district attorney, and God knows what Patrick O'Brian had not been up to in his 80-plus years.

Recently I put down O'Brian's sea novel The Ionian Mission and said to my wife, This fellow has created characters and stories that are part of my life.

She said: Write him a letter. He's in his 80's. Write him and thank him. And when you go to England, look him up, go tell him.

How wonderful, she said, to be alive, when he is still alive. Imagine living in the 1890's and being able to converse with Conan Doyle.

Well, I saw myself talking with Patrick O'Brian. Sir, I would have said, what a blow, the death of Barret Bonden. (Bonden, the coxswain, half-carries the wounded Captain Aubrey from the deck of a sinking privateer: We'd best get back to the barky, sir, as this ship's going to Kingdom Come, the closing sentence of the novel.)

Sir, I would have said, I've read your Aubrey-Maturin series three or four times. When I was young I scoffed at stories of the Victorians who lived for the next issue of the Strand and the next tale of Sherlock Holmes; and I scoffed at the grown women and men who plagued Conan Doyle to rescind Holmes's death at the Reichenbach Falls. But I am blessed in having, in my generation, an equally thrilling set of heroes, and your characters have become a part of my life.

Your minor characters, I would have said, are especially dear to me: the mad Awkward Davis; Mrs. Fielding, the inexpert spy; old Mr. Herapath, the cowardly Boston loyalist; Christy-Palliere, the gallant French sea captain; and, of course, Barret Bonden, Captain Aubrey's coxswain. And I will not say I cried at his death, but I will not say I did not.

And, Sir, I might have said, I hope I do not overreach myself, but your prose is clear and spare as anyone could wish, quite as ironical as Mark Twain. . . . And I hoped I should have the reserve to refrain from burdening him with a fan's fulsome, needless interpretation: that I could repay my debt with a straightforward statement of thanks.

The perfect medium for such, of course, is not the meeting, but the concise note.

So I sat at the breakfast table composing my note, and leafed through the newspaper and read of Patrick O'Brian's death.

His Aubrey-Maturin series, 20 novels of the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars, is a masterpiece. It will outlive most of today's putative literary gems as Sherlock Holmes has outlived Bulwer-Lytton, as Mark Twain has outlived Charles Reade. God bless the straightforward writer, and God bless those with the ability to amuse, provoke, surprise, shock, appall.

The purpose of literature is to Delight. To create or endorse the Scholastic is a craven desire. It may yield a low-level self-satisfaction, but how can this compare with our joy at great, generous writing? With our joy of discovery of worth in the simple and straightforward? Is this Jingoism? The use of the term's a wish to side with the powerful, the Curator, the Editor. The schoolmaster's bad enough in the schoolroom; I prefer to keep him out of my bookshelf.

Henry Esmond was a genre piece, as were the Waverly novels, Shadows on the Rock and, if you will, both Don Quixote and War and Peace.

Ivan Albright's That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do is a genre painting: the decayed, grotesque door, hung with a funeral wreath. As a child I used to gaze at it, in the Art Institute in Chicago. Yes, I would say to myself, aha, yes, I understand.

I didn't, but I understand now.

Shel Silverstein said that there were some authors whose books one wanted literally to hug to oneself: with thanks, and in unavailing protest that, at some point, the works had an end.

Trollope wrote that his imaginary Barsetshire was as real to him as any place in England, and that he was loath to leave it, but that that story was now done.

Patrick O'Brian, rest in peace.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E2DC1F31F933A05757C0A9669C8B63

New York Times Books in Brief: Fiction & Poetry; O'Brian Dry Shod

By LINDA BARRETT OSBORNE Published: April 30, 2000 In the 1930's, decades before he won fame for his seafaring Aubrey/Maturin series, Patrick O'Brian published two small, entertaining novels. Each is set in Asia, but the land they truly inhabit is that of the imagination. CAESAR: The Life Story of a Panda Leopard (Norton, $21.95) is about a mythical animal who relates his tale with touching simplicity. O'Brian was only 15 when the book was published, but he already possessed an instinct for deft plotting and uncomplicated narrative. Caesar hunts prey, survives attacks in the wild and later lives in captivity with a benign master. His observations are generally limited to what an animal might actually perceive, yet there is never any sentimentality about the natural world. In HUSSEIN: An Entertainment (Norton, $23.95), published eight years later and set in India, nature also challenges the young hero, although human intrigue and emotions seem far more unpredictable and treacherous. Hussein is a young mahout, or elephant trainer, who sets out to make his fortune and to win Sashiya, the woman he loves. With courage, cunning and luck, he eludes everything from wild dogs to assassins, and he cleverly adapts himself to a number of professions, including snake charmer, storyteller and spy. O'Brian times the narrative perfectly; there is barely a moment to catch your breath before Hussein dives into another adventure. Love is treated with dry wit in this novel, and loyalty (man to man, man to elephant) is paramount. Although O'Brian had never been to India at the time he wrote Hussein, he convincingly conveys a sense of time and place. The pleasure O'Brian himself takes in the storyteller's art is evident in the energy and inventiveness in each of these early novels. Linda Barrett Osborne

Man of Letters. The Extraordinary Life and Times of Literary Impresario Rupert Hart-Davis by Philip Ziegler. Carroll & Graf Publishers. New York. 2005. p194

"Fortunately, not all scholarly books or books of literary quality were for that reason unprofitable. Michael Howard's brilliant study of the Franco-Prussian War made nobody rich but brought the firm cash as well as credit. Patrick O'Brian's The Unknown Shore, the last of his naval books before he began on the great Aubrew/Maturin series, was aso comfartably in the black; he was one of the staff's favourite author's - "punctual, courteous, deferential and realistic in his expectations." quote: Patrick O'Brian, Dean King, London, 2000, p187

Check "Kirkus Reviews US" http://www.mightyape.co.nz/product/The-Road-to-Samarcand/1694859/ O'Brian lacks the mastery of his material which he will show in the Aubrey/Maturin series Kirkus Review is May 15, 2007, listed here (http://www.kirkusreviews.com/kirkusreviews/search/search_results_taxo.jsp?searchType=ARTICLE_SEARCH_PAGE&startDate=01/01/2007&endDate=12/26/2008&cf=&ct=&cu=&rpp=10&sb=REFERENCE_DATE&so=DESC&ti=2&tp=vnuTaxoPool&numRet=200&src=&showAbs=true&srchMeta=true&shwTotal=true&metaSrchNum=250&numMeta=20&pi=&pubList=Kirkus%20Reviews&kw=Patrick+O%27Brian&au=&mt=&mv=&esindct=false&pageNo=6) but you have to subscribe. General webside for Kirkus is http://www.kirkusreviews.com/kirkusreviews/search/search_results_taxo.jsp?searchType=ARTICLE_SEARCH_PAGE&startDate=11/05/2007&endDate=02/03/2008&cf=&ct=&cu=&rpp=10&sb=REFERENCE_DATE&so=DESC&ti=2&tp=vnuTaxoPool&numRet=200&src=&showAbs=true&srchMeta=true&shwTotal=true&metaSrchNum=250&numMeta=20&pi=&pubList=Kirkus%20Reviews&kw=inheriting+the+trade&au=&mt=&mv=&esindct=false&pageNo=2

http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2008/07/30-road-to-samarcand-patrick-obrian.html

1. 30: The Road to Samarcand -- Patrick O'Brian

"Impress ... an archaeologist, huh? Well, Ay reckon Ay would strike him just behind the shoulder with a twenty-four pound harpoon. Strike hard and fast, not too far back, see? My old man, he chanced on one of them things north-east of Spitzbergen in the fall of, lemme t'ink, 1897 was it, or 1898? It chawed up his long-boat something horrible, but they got fifty-three barrels of oil out of it."

This little-known early novel by O'Brian was first published in 1954, before The Golden Ocean and The Unknown Shore and well before the first Aubrey/Maturin novel, Master and Commander: I'd never heard of it, and snapped it up as soon as I noticed it in a Cambridge remainder shop.

It's a boy's own adventure, set some time in the 1930s (from internal evidence: the year is never stated). Protagonist Derrick, the orphaned teenage son of American missionaries, is learning seamanship aboard his uncle's schooner, the Wanderer, as they roam the South China Sea. He's all set for a life on the ocean wave until his elderly academic cousin appears with plans to send him off to school in England, sugaring the pill by promising that they'll journey by way of Samarcand.

Samarcand is, of course, about as landlocked as you can get: fans of O'Brian's nautical writing be warned. Apart from the first couple of chapters, the action is relentlessly terrestrial. Derrick and his companions (his uncle Sullivan, and Sullivan's good friend Ross; the Wanderer's Chinese cook, Li Han; three Mongol brothers, direct descendants of Genghis (or Chingiz) Khan; Professor Ayrton, Derrick's cousin and a great authority on Oriental archaeology; Olaf, Svensson, a Swedish sailor; and Chang, a disreputable hound rescued from shipwreck) encounter Mongol warlords, perfidious -- yet stupid -- Russians, bellicose lamas, priceless jade treasures and unseen monsters above the snowline. It's all very wholesome and heroic.

O'Brian's gentle mocking of idiosyncrasy, verbal and otherwise, is already there: the Professor describing himself as a 'hep cat' and gently correcting Derrick's attempts to teach him actual (i.e. non-grammatical) American slang; Li Han's surprising, self-taught English vocabulary; Olaf's long Swedish vowels and knack for anecdotes (there's a lovely one about a camel). There are aspects of the Professor that remind me of Stephen Maturin, and aspects of Sullivan (and Ross) reminiscent of Jack Aubrey, though they're at best prototypes.

It's a quietly bloodthirsty novel, informed by the attitudes of the period: physical punishment, quiet courage, perhaps a hint of racism. O'Brian's prose, though not as polished as it later became, is measured, and his dry wit is evident. An entertaining read, but a shadow of what the author later achieved.

Can't help wondering why The Road to Samarcand was never reissued, or even really mentioned, during O'Brian's lifetime (presumably he objected?) and why it's taken rather longer than his other early works (Hussein, Caesar: both published under his birth-name, Richard Russ) to appear posthumously.

NEXT

http://jfinnera.www1.50megs.com/Pirates.htmNo Pirates Nowadays

From: Susan Wenger Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2000 07:26:44-0700 (PDT) Subject: No Pirates Nowadays, a short story by Patrick Russ Before the great Patrick O'Brian got his name . . .

he wrote several short stories for "The Oxford Annual For Boys" as Patrick Russ.

"No Pirates Nowadays" is a story based on the adventures of Sullivan (an Irish captain of a small private schooner, "The Wanderer"), Ross (his Scottish first mate), and the boy Derrick (Sullivan's nephew), along with two supporting characters, Li Han, the Chinese cook, usually in the role of comic relief, and Olaf Svenssen, a Swedish crewmember. These same characters appeared in several of Russ' stories, and later were the main characters in his book "The Road to Samarcand," which he published under the name "O'Brian." So these stories are sort of a cross-over link.

"No Pirates Nowadays" is an adventure story, clearly written for a youthful audience, about how these intrepid seaman set off to kill sea otters for their pelts, and nearly get hijacked and killed by a Malay pirate ship. All the typical stereotypes of the nationalities involved are humorously included, right down to stereotypical dialects and sentence structures. As in "The Road to Samarcand," it is usually the young boy Derrick, I'd guess aged 13, who gets the good ideas which save the day.

Patrick Russ had not yet mastered the art of dialog when he wrote this story. It does not show any trace of the subtlety of his later stories. There are no layers, no ambiguities, no literary allusions to decipher, no sly jokes or puns. It's a thrill-a-minute adventure, with dangers looming and averted, and even though Derrick is severely wounded, he manfully keeps fighting and saves the day.

Quite a fascinating insight into the development of the author. I have no trouble seeing how the author could cheerfully abandon these earlier works upon taking up a new name - these are not the tales he could have wanted lumped in with his more serious short stories as part of an anthology of his life's work. Yet, for the fan, it is a wonderful tale written by a young man for the enjoyment of young boys. Patrick Russ shows a lot of early talent with words; one image I especially liked was: "he heard three shots fired so rapidly that you could hardly have got a blade of grass in between them." He clearly enjoys writing about faraway places, different cultures, sea-going yarns.

And yes, just as Speilberg generally has a flying bicycle or a flying cow, just as Schwartzenegger generally says "I'll be back," . . .

. . . the word "prodigious" appears in the story.

Susan Wenger

http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jul/14/entertainment/et-book14

O’Brian’s `Road’ is worth the trip By Anthony Day July 14, 2007 in print edition E-6

IN reissuing Patrick O’Brian’s 1954 novel “The Road to Samarcand,” the late British author’s publishers remind us of the secret of his success. He knew how to tell a story.

Maybe it’s a talent special to those islands off the northwest coast of the European continent, watered by Atlantic mist and three major and a few minor supple languages. Maybe it’s a way of passing the long, damp seasons. More likely, as the anthropologists tell us, storytelling is a device to make some sense of multiple perceptions that, taken individually, produce childhood confusion.

Perhaps, too, this storytelling talent shared by generations of British writers has something to do with empire. Since there was very little in the world the British did not control, there were few boundaries to the play of their imaginations.

O’Brian was the kind of British writer with a special taste for adventure among people who speak exotic tongues and live in places that appeal to the imaginations of adolescent boys. Not that he wrote just for “young adults,” though people of that age may happily enjoy his work along with octogenarians.

O’Brian’s specialty, displayed to best effect in his series of 21 Aubrey-Maturin novels (including the swashbuckling “Master and Commander”) is the classic weaving of plot and character presented in a tapestry of elegant 18th century English richly (and sometimes roughly) drawn from the Royal Navy, whose struggles with Napoleon set the stage for a panoply of action on the high seas.

It will be of interest to see how well “The Road to Samarcand” sells in an age when Central Asia is not merely a playing-board square for a fireside game of strategy but a real region of blood, tears and death for Briton and American alike.

The novel opens in the style familiar to all fans – may we say friends? – of O’Brian: “The Wanderer ran faster with the freshening of the breeze; her bows cut into the choppy sea, throwing white hissing spray into the sunlight. The schooner was carrying every stitch of canvas that she could spread, and she was so close into the wind that the boy at the wheel kept glancing up at the sails, watching for them to shiver and spill the breeze; but they remained taut and full, and presently his attention faltered. His gaze went up past the dazzling white triangles of the sails to the great albatross above them.”

This reveals the essence of O’Brian’s style, to which he held fast until his death in 2000: a rattling good adventure story, generally set at sea, told with a sharp eye for the revealing detail about a human being in an uncertain setting in which danger would certainly be revealed. Who could fail to accept an invitation to curl up with such a book?

When O’Brian wrote “The Road to Samarcand” in the 1930s, he had not yet settled on the Royal Navy in the age of Adm. Horatio Nelson as the arena for his characters. So instead of chronicling England’s fight to master the seas, and thus the world, the author takes us from the South China Sea to East and Central Asia, to Tibet and China’s satisfyingly mysterious interior in search of ancient treasures.

We travel with Derrick, a teenage orphan of missionary parents, who accompanies his captain uncle and an elderly cousin on an archeological expedition in the 1930s to the Mongol despot Tamerlane’s 14th century capital (now a city in Uzbekistan). Along the way, they are hijacked, endure the heat of the Gobi Desert and the frigid snows of Tibet, and encounter Russian agents and Chinese bandits.

The novel’s first chapter alone is worth the price, a description of a typhoon that Joseph Conrad himself would have been proud to publish.

“[T]he Wanderer was climbing the back of a huge wave, with her nose pointing at the sky, and the water on the fo’c’sle surged back and carried him with it

No one was quite like Patrick O’Brian. Now W.W. Norton shares his rich, adventurous storytelling with a new American audience.

Anthony Day is a former editor of the Los Angeles Times editorial pages.

Hart-Davis material

Catalogue of the Caricatures of Max Beerbohm by Max Beerbohm; Rupert (Editor) Hart-Davis PUBLISHER HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS , © 1977 ISBN-10 0674100751 ISBN-13 9780674100756 FORMAT Hardcover

Electric Delights by William Plomer; Editor And Introduction Rupert Hart-Davis PUBLISHER DAVID R. GODINE , © 1978 ISBN-10 087923248x ISBN-13 9780879232481 FORMAT Hardcover

Hugh Walpole: A Biography by Rupert Hart-Davis PUBLISHER MACMILLAN COMPANY , © 1952 ISBN-10 1299054129 ISBN-13 9781299054127 FORMAT Hardcover

Last Theatres, 1904-1910 by Max Beerbohm; (Introduction) Rupert Hart-Davis PUBLISHER TAPLINGER PUBLISHING COMPANY , © 1970 ISBN-10 0800845641 ISBN-13 9780800845643 FORMAT Hardcover

Letters of Oscar Wilde by Oscar Wilde; (Editor) Rupert Hart-Davis PUBLISHER HARCOURT, BRACE & WORLD, INC. , © 1962 ISBN-10 119992654x ISBN-13 9781199926548 FORMAT Hardcover In this extraordinary collection of 1,098 letters, most now published for the first time, Oscar Wilde reveals his heart

and mind.

Letters to Lady Cunard, 1895-1933 by George Moore; (Editor & Introduction) Rupert Hart-Davis PUBLISHER RUPERT HART-DAVIS , © 1957 ISBN-10 1499584938 ISBN-13 9781499584936 FORMAT Hardcover

Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters: (V.1) Correspondence of George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis, Volume One: 1955-56 by George Lyttelton; Editor Rupert Hart-Davis PUBLISHER ACADEMY CHICAGO , © 1984 ISBN-10 0897331052 ISBN-13 9780897331050 FORMAT Hardcover

Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters: (V.2) Correspondence of George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis, Volume Two: 1956-57 by George Lyttelton; Rupert Hart Davis; Rupert Hart-Davis(Editor) PUBLISHER JOHN MURRAY , © 1979 ISBN-10 0719536731 ISBN-13 9780719536731 FORMAT Hardcover

Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters: (V.5) Correspondence of George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis, Volume Five: 1960 by Rupert Hart-Davis; (Editor & Introduction) PUBLISHER JOHN MURRAY , © 1983 ISBN-10 0719539994 ISBN-13 9780719539992 FORMAT Hardcover

Max Beerbohm's Letters to Reggie Turner by Max Beerbohm; (Editor) Rupert Hart-Davis PUBLISHER J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY , © 1964 ISBN-10 1399650629 ISBN-13 9781399650625 FORMAT Hardcover

More Letters of Oscar Wilde by Rupert Davis-Hart PUBLISHER VANGUARD PRESS , © 1985 ISBN-10 0814909000 ISBN-13 9780814909003 FORMAT Hardcover

More Theatres, 1898-1903 by Max Beerbohm; (Introduction) Rupert Hart-Davis; (Foreword) Louis Kronenberger PUBLISHER TAPLINGER PUBLISHING COMPANY , © 1969 ISBN-10 1299119999 ISBN-13 9781299119994 FORMAT Hardcover

Power of Change by Rupert Hart-Davis PUBLISHER SINCLAIR-STEVENSON LIMITED , © 1991 ISBN-10 1856190773 ISBN-13 9781856190770 FORMAT Hardcover

Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde by Oscar Wilde; (Editor) Rupert Hart-Davis PUBLISHER OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS , © 1979 ISBN-10 0192122053 ISBN-13 9780192122056 FORMAT Hardcover

Siegfried Sassoon: Diaries 1923-1925 by Rupert Hart-Davis PUBLISHER FABER AND FABER , © 1985 ISBN-10 149945175x ISBN-13 9781499451757 FORMAT Hardcover (1985). 8vo. 1st edition. Fading to d.j. spine and extremities. VG/VG.

War Poems by Siegfried Sassoon; (Arrangement & Introduction) Rupert Hart-Davis PUBLISHER FABER AND FABER LTD , © 1999 ISBN-10 0571202659 ISBN-13 9780571202652 FORMAT Paperback Of these 113 poems, ninety-three come from the poet's published books, seven from periodicals & thirteen from

manuscripts. 154p. Pap.

http://www.antiqbook.co.uk/boox/thorn/12540.shtml

Bookseller "a scarce book and the first children's book that Patrick O'Brian wrote,8vo 255pp First Edition."

COD, works listed with his name

The Catalans. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1953; subsequently published as The Frozen Flame, London: Hart-Davis,

1953.

The Road to Samarcand. London: Hart-Davis, 1954.

The Walker and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955; subsequently published as Lying in the Sun and

Other Stories, London: Hart-Davis, 1956.

The Golden Ocean. London: Hart-Davis, 1956; New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.

The Unknown Shore. London: Hart-Davis, 1959; New York: W. W. Norton, 1995.

trans. Papillon, by Hcnri Charriere. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1970.

antique and out of print http://ukbookworld.com/cgi-bin/search.pl?s_i_DLR_ID=sanditon&s_i_author=O%

27Brian&s_i_title=&s_i_publisher=&s_i_keywords=&minprice=&maxprice=&bin=&ssi=12075741019647&pg=0 O'BRIAN,Patrick The Road to Samarcand Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955. First. Hardcover. Near Fine/Near Fine. First edition. Advance review copy.255 pages. orange

cloth with spine titles in silver. top edge slightly dusty and fox-specked. jacket (design by Ralph Thompson) slightly

faded on spine, with light foxing on white reverse not showing on face. 1cm closed tear top edge back panel. scan

available. an unread collevctor's copy, with Hart-Davis's review request slip enclosed, slightly foxed at bottom edge,

title and publication date typed in 18th February, 1955. (Book ref. 000588) £295.00 Offered for sale by Alan & Joan Tucker

Gunroom links

good links of appreciation from gunroom:

http://archive.salon.com/people/obit/2000/01/13/o_brian/index.html?CP=SAL&DN=110

note on "wry humor"

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/01/10/DD82830.DTL&type=books

Comic conversation and broad slapstick

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3948365,00.html

http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/010700obit-obrian.html (unabridged of above: http://www.io.com/gibbonsb/pob/times-unabridged.html)

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/remember/jan-june00/obrian_1-10.html

Interview with Richard Snow

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/18/specials/obrian.html?_r=2

O'Brian's ship comes in. "His next novel failed." The one after Testimonies. Samarcand? http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/18/specials/obrian-comesin.html 2 other NY publishers had tried and failed with O'Brian before Norton took him. Exellent, long article.

"It was funny. Every page shone with humor." Richard Snow http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/18/specials/obrian-plank.html author of "the best historical novels ever written" statement

the Richard Snow article

An Author I'd Walk the Plank For By RICHARD SNOW uring the late 1960's and early 70's I spent much of my time reading about wars, and the rest trying to keep out of one. I was in college then, and the war I wanted to avoid was, of course, Vietnam; I liked reading about any conflict remote enough to be harmless. I found particularly absorbing novels about the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars when -- much as during the early days of World War II -- all Europe had fallen to a seemingly invincible conqueror against whom England fought on alone. In 1940 the Royal Air Force stood in the breach; in 1800, it was the "wooden walls," the fleet of Lord Nelson.

Those were big times, and they have produced a steady stream of literature that began to be published not so very long after the wars ended. By the 1830's Capt. Frederick Marryat was writing about frigate actions and cutting-out expeditions in "Peter Simple" and other brisk, lively novels that remain readable to this day. Marryat knew what he was talking about (he had joined the navy as a 14-year-old midshipman in 1806), and his works were drawn upon in this century by the best-known of all naval novelists, C. S. Forester, whose shy, self-doubting, indomitable Capt. Horatio Hornblower will last as long as the genre endures.

A good many other writers have followed in Forester's wake. There is Alexander Kent, with his robust hero, Captain Bolitho, and Dudley Pope with Captain Ramage, and a dozen others -- all of them producing burly, straightforward action stories, full of deadly peril, high courage and warmhearted Cockney understatement. And then there's Patrick O'Brian.

I first came across O'Brian 20 years ago in my local library. The book was called "Master and Commander," and its cover bore the reassuring image of a blue-coated officer standing beside a cannon, shouting defiance and waving a sword. But from the first page, I felt something was wrong. The people spoke oddly. There was a strange, allusive, parenthetical quality to the writing. One of the officers in the book composed poetry. There were some good battles, to be sure, but the whole thing made me uncomfortable. I returned to the bracing predictabilities of Alexander Kent.

And yet, something about the book stayed with me, because when I found a copy at a street fair a few years later, I bought it at once. By then I was working for a magazine of history, and perhaps my sensibilities had been somewhat sharpened by that; or perhaps it was simply that I was older; but in any event, this time I understood what I was reading. For one thing -- and I had managed to miss this completely on my first go-around -- it was funny; every page shone with humor, sometimes mordant, sometimes wise, and always growing naturally out of the situations it illuminated.

But behind the humor, behind the storms and the broadside duels that I had understood on my first encounter, loomed something larger: the shape and texture of a whole era. Without ever seeming antiquarian or pedantic or showy, O'Brian summoned up with casual omniscience the workaday magic of a vanished time. The furniture of life was all unobtrusively here: clothes, curtains, the sauce on the fish, the absent-minded politeness of daily intercourse with grocers and friends, everything whose inconsequence insures its almost immediate oblivion, and which is so hard to retrieve without an ostentatious show of "research." In fact, the story was told with such scrupulous respect for every nuance of the world in which it unfolded that I might have been reading the prose of Jane Austen's seafaring brothers (two served in the Royal Navy), had they shared her gifts. Before I finished the book, I was convinced it was the best historical novel I'd ever read.

"Master and Commander" ended happily; was there a sequel? Yes. I was delighted to find the story picked up in "Post Captain," and continued splendidly in "H.M.S. Surprise." Shortly after I finished this last, a complex and fascinating successor appeared -- "The Mauritius Command" -- and after that, "Desolation Island." Each seemed richer, funnier and more humane than its predecessor. And then they stopped publishing them in the United States!

O'Brian, who lives in France, has written contemporary novels, published several volumes of short stories and has translated many modern French writers into English. Through the past 20 years ("Master and Commander" was published in 1970), along with all of his other work, he has kept turning out sequels in his saga and successfully publishing them in England -- but he couldn't find anybody to issue them here. It puzzled and frustrated me, the more so when an American editor friend of mine explained why he had turned down the American rights to "Desolation Island." Here was a wholly gripping, beautifully written book that offered treachery, sexual tension, shipwreck at the very bottom of the world, an exploration of natural science that was at once historically illuminating and highly interesting, and a murderous pursuit in a gale that made the hair stand up on the back of your hands. Or so I thought. My friend described it this way: "Oh, they sail all over, and there's a sort of a fight in a storm, and then they hit an iceberg or something -- it was all kind of boring."

I was somewhat comforted later to find that even in his homeland O'Brian is occasionally met by this curious opacity. The British critic Peter Wishart has written, "The relative neglect of Patrick O'Brian by both critics and the book-buying public is one of the literary wonders of the age. It is as baffling as the Inca inability to invent the wheel; or conversely, it is as baffling as the Inca ability to possess an ordered, sophisticated society without the wheel."

But this vexing situation may be coming to an end over here. After more than a decade, O'Brian's novels will once again be available in America. This fall W.W. Norton brought out in hard cover a recent addition to the series, "The Letter of Marque," and at the same time began issuing its predecessors in handsome paperback editions. Sooner or later they are bound to find the audience they deserve.

"Master and Commander," the first installment in O'Brian's epic, opens during a musicale at the Governor's House in Port Mahon, Minorca, off the Spanish coast, with a beefy lieutenant listening so raptly to "the triumphant first movement of Locatelli's C major quartet" that he is unaware of his actions until the weedy little man next to him whispers, "If you really must beat the measure, sir, let me entreat you to do so in time, and not half a beat ahead."

Annoyed and rather hurt, the officer sinks back into the music until, beating time again, he feels an elbow jab into his ribs. "A nudge, a thrust of that kind, so vicious and deliberate, was very like a blow. Neither his personal temper nor his professional code could patiently suffer an affront: and what affront was graver than a blow?" So it is to be a duel. As the concert ends, the two men grimly introduce themselves: the lieutenant is Jack Aubrey; the little man in the rusty coat is Stephen Maturin.

Jack Aubrey goes off into the night brooding not only about the encounter, but about all the frustrations of being an officer without a command, on half pay and deep in debt in a foreign port. Then, back at his lodging, the world changes, for he receives word that he has been given command of His Majesty's sloop Sophie. In the ecstatic hurry of errands the next morning (the first being to "pledge his now elastic credit to the extent of a noble, heavy, massive epaulette, the mark of his present rank") he runs into his newfound enemy. " ' -- Maturin. Why, there you are, sir. I owe you a thousand apologies, I am afraid. I must have been a sad bore to you last night, and I hope you will forgive me. We sailors hear so little music -- are so little used to genteel company -- that we grow carried away. I beg your pardon.'

" 'My dear sir,' cried the man in the black coat, with an odd flush rising in his dead-white face, 'you had every reason to be carried away. I have never heard a better quartetto in my life -- such unity, such fire. May I propose a cup of chocolate, or coffee? It would give me great pleasure.' "

Jack, discovering that Maturin is a physician, quickly recruits him to serve as his ship's surgeon. Thus begins a friendship and -- in effect -- a partnership that endures and deepens through a hundred triumphs and calamities across every ocean, in the fever-ridden jungles of the tropics, in the streets of Boston and the dungeons of Napoleon's Paris. The two men could not be more different. Jack is sanguine, open-hearted, merry, a perfect fool ashore and a superb and dauntless commander afloat. Stephen Maturin, half-Irish, half-Catalan, is brooding, sardonic, subtle and brilliant. A "scientific philosopher," he is an ardent naturalist who collects specimens of the local fauna wherever he goes (to his disgust, his three-toed sloth becomes addicted to Jack's navy grog), a gifted physician -- and a highly effective spy dedicated to the overthrow of Napoleon. It is in this last capacity that he serves with Jack, although everyone else aboard knows only that they are fortunate enough to be sailing with the finest ship's surgeon in the Royal Navy.

Maturin is given to bouts of despair, but through the worst of his woes keeps intact a sharp, deadpan wit. When a windy colleague remarks, "You might say that Duns Scotus stands in much the same relationship to Aquinas as Kant to Leibnitz," Maturin replies, "Sure, I have often heard the remark in Ballinasloe" -- a market town in County Galway known for its cattle fair -- then goes on to declare, "But I have no patience with Emmanuel Kant. Ever since I found him take notice of that thief Rousseau, I have had no patience with him at all. . . . Gushing, carefully-calculated tears -- false confidences, untrue confessions -- enthusiasm -- romantic vistas. How I hate enthusiasm and romantic vistas."

There is not a chance in the world that Jack Aubrey would ever have heard of Emmanuel Kant. The only intellectual common ground the friendship enjoys is the mutual love of music that almost proved fatal at the outset. Yet the two men's understanding of each other is warm and instinctual.

A scene from "The Letter of Marque" (which was reviewed here by Newgate Callendar in October) suggests the subtlety and depth with which O'Brian renders their relationship. Aubrey and Maturin, both amateur musicians as well as men of action, indulge their love of music in occasional duets of cello and violin. One night as they sit talking, an astonished Aubrey asks Maturin if he is picking out the tune of the "Marseillaise." "Stephen had his 'cello between his knees and for some time now he had been very quietly stroking two or three phrases with variations upon them -- a half-conscious playing that interrupted neither his talk nor his listening. 'It is not,' he said. 'It is, or rather it is meant to be, the Mozart piece that was no doubt lurking somewhere in the Frenchman's mind when he wrote it. Yet something eludes me. . . . '

" 'Stephen,' cried Jack. 'Not another note, I beg. I have it exactly, if only it don't fly away.' He whipped the cloth off his violin-case, turned roughly, and swept straight into the true line. After a while Stephen joined him, and when they were thoroughly satisfied they stopped, tuned very exactly, passed the rosin to and fro and so returned to the direct statement, to variations upon it, inversions, embroideries, first one setting out in a flight of improvisation while the other filled in and then the other doing the same, playing on and on."

On the foundations of this friendship, O'Brian reconstructs a civilization. The Royal Navy at the beginning of the 19th century was a world of extraordinary breadth and complexity. Its hundreds of ships, the larger of them regular floating cities with close-packed populations of 1,200 souls, allowed Britain first to survive and then to prevail in a struggle whose cost and size would have been unimaginable only a generation earlier. These sailing ships -- today reduced to quaint and soothing images on wall calendars -- were in their time the most complicated machines on earth, and the deadliest.

Patrick O'Brian presents the lost arcana of that hard-pressed, cruel, courageous world with an immediacy that makes its workings both comprehensible and fascinating. All the marine hardware is in place and functioning; the battles are stirring without being romanticized (this author never romanticizes); the portrayal of life aboard a sailing ship is vivid and authoritative.

But in the end it is the serious exploration of human character that gives the books their greatest power: the fretful play of mood that can irrationally darken the edges of the brightest triumph, and that can feed a trickle of merriment into the midst of terror and tragedy. O'Brian manages to express, with the grace and economy of poetry, familiar things that somehow never get written down, as when he carefully details the rueful steps by which Stephen Maturin falls out of love.

These are peculiar precincts for an adventure novelist to visit, but O'Brian comes to the job with unusual credentials. He is, for instance, the translator of both novels and memoirs by Simone de Beauvoir, and perhaps something of her clear-eyed account of the years with Nelson Algren has seeped into Maturin's disentanglement from the brave and reckless Diana Villiers. O'Brian's interest in Catalonia is reflected in his going ashore for long enough to write "Picasso," a book considered by no less an authority than Lord Kenneth Clark to be the finest biography of that artist. And his understanding of the temper of Jack and Stephen's Gallic foes is suggested by the fact that he translated Jean Lacouture's recent, highly acclaimed biography of Charles de Gaulle.

There are 14 Jack Aubrey novels in print in England, and the latest to be released over here, "The Letter of Marque," is a self-contained and satisfying story. But begin with the first of them, "Master and Commander," and there's a good chance you'll find yourself at the final installment all too soon. You will have read what I continue to believe are the best historical novels ever written. Along the way you'll not only have witnessed the unfolding of a tremendous story, but the very beginnings of the world we inhabit. In one of the books Maturin nearly propounds a theory of Freudian psychology; in another he falls just shy of the immense implications of evolution. His is the kind of questing mind that made the late 18th century such an age of revelation; his counterpart Jack Aubrey personifies the raw energy that fueled the epoch. On every page O'Brian reminds us with subtle artistry of the most important of all historical lessons: that times change but people don't, that the griefs and follies and victories of the men and women who were here before us are in fact the maps of our own lives.

Thoughts on source and Dean King refs

Expand source section of article.

"No Pirates Nowadays" 1940. R2S 1954. Why 14 year gap?

Both Sullivan and Aubrey play violin. Sullivan in Two's Company quote King p67

add to always sail together: Relationships so important in O'Brian. Sullivan-Ross, 1st exploration of human relationship where men are on equal footing. King, p64. O'Brian to a reporter: "The essence of my books is about human relationships and how people treat one another" quoted in King p65

"The three-part story [No Pirates Nowadays] can be read as a prequel to Patrick's postwar novel The Road to Samarcand, which also involves Ross, Sullivan, and Derrick and begins on board the sailing schooner Wanderer.

CHANGE 1ST KING REF IN ARTICLE

Writing under his birth name, P.R. Russ, Patrick O'Brian published three stories in the Oxford Annual for Boys which involve Sullivan and Ross. They are ___ Although he had appeared in print previously, "Noughts and Crosses" marked the first time O'Brian created a relationship between men of an equal footing, an incident his biographer Dean King describes as a "watershed." Fourteen years elapsed between the writing of "No Pirates Nowadays" and The Road to Samarcand; still, the short story may be considered the "prequel" to the novel. It opens with the same characters aboard the same ship in the same general locale that were left at the conclusion of the short story. It followed that O'Brian would continue writing in the style of the prequel and would maintain his target of adolescent males.