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Bookchat: The Greatest Sea Stories Ever Told [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-06-12  

Welcome to bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and audio books. You don’t have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.

My marriage did not end well.

That it ended was probably inevitable; Wingding and I may have enjoyed the same books, hobbies, and music, but our attitudes toward trivialities like money, employment, marital fidelity, and household chores/maintenance were so different that it was a miracle we lasted nearly twenty years. My aunt Betty was delighted when we finally split, and if she couldn’t resist a bit of “I told you so,” well, she had tried to warn me.

No, the problem was that Wingding was (and likely still is) pathologically afraid of confrontation. Sitting down to have an adult discussion, like how to split our accumulated possessions, divide our bank accounts, and decide which pet he was going to take when he left, was simply not in his makeup. I should have realized this — his previous girlfriends, relatives, and roommates all had tales to tell — but somehow I thought he’d moved past this until the day I came home to find the his car absent, his personal possessions and favorite cat gone, and a two-page bullet point memo detailing my flaws tacked to the bannister.

Adding insult to injury, the house looked like a cyclone had blown through it. He’d literally thrown everything he wanted into boxes higgledy-piggledy, loaded up a U-Haul, and booked it for parts unknown while I was at work. Books, records, trash, and a surprisingly large collection of sexually explicit magazines were strewn about, and thank God for my friend Alan, who insisted on taking the porn to the trash himself.

“You don’t need to see this,” he said, and that was that.

I’ve long since moved beyond Wingding, his tastes in jolly-time reading, and his inability to act his age. My life is not perfect — nothing is, especially in these parlous times — but I’ve seen and done things over the past quarter century that I never dreamed were possible while we were still together.

There’s just one thing that still annoys me, though, and it circles back to the day Wingding left. For I realized pretty quickly that not only had he taken everything he owned, he’d taken quite a few things that we had jointly acquired over the years. Artwork we’d picked up at SF conventions...records and CD’s we’d purchased at concerts and music festivals...knickknacks, cooking utensils, small electronics...camping equipment...furniture...he certainly had a claim to some of what he’d taken but not all, and despite me replacing much of what he took over the past twenty-four years, it was all so unnecessary.

Worst of all? Wingding took our entire collection of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin books.

Those of you who’ve already made the acquaintance of Lucky Jack Aubrey, pride of the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, and his BFF Stephen Maturin, physician, naturalist, and spy, will understand why I was so upset when I realized that he’d taken every single copy we owned (including duplicates purchased for road trip reading).

Those of you who haven’t...well. All I can say is “Are you in for a treat, you lucky people you!”

Historical fiction abounds, and has for literally centuries; starting with Chretien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach, the list of authors who’ve at least dabbled in books set in the past is a virtual history of literature, with authors as disparate as Jane Austen and Stephen Crane penning what we’d now call historical fiction. Charlotte Bronte...Charles Dickens...Victor Hugo...General Lew Wallace...Sigrid Undset...Honore de Balzac...they’ve all written historical fiction, some of them among the finest books ever written. Even post-modernists like Thomas Pynchon and John Fowles have written historical fiction, and is there a medievalist alive who hasn’t read The Name of the Rose?

That’s just the cream of the crop. Lesser authors churn out historical mysteries, romances, thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, children’s books, etc., etc., etc., to the point that’s a wonder the average Barnes & Noble hasn’t collapsed under the weight of all the stories featuring Viking warriors, Renaissance alchemists, Victorian detectives, Regency rakes, and 1940s codebreakers. I even wrote one myself, and if I hadn’t been sidelined by major surgery I would be busily writing a sequel instead of this diary.

As popular as historical fiction is, alas, most of it is what one might call “books of the moment,” not “books for all time.” The story might be compelling, the characters sharply drawn, the setting meticulously researched, but odds are that even smash hits like Forever Amber, Anthony Adverse, and The Winds of War will be forgotten within a decade or two.

And then there’s the Aubrey-Maturin series, which is to historical fiction what Sherlock Holmes is to detective stories:

Master and Commander and its sequels, by Patrick O’Brian — Patrick O’Brian was not originally named “Patrick O’Brian.” Born Richard Patrick Russ in 1914, he had published his first book at the age of fifteen (!), then spent several years trying and failing to join the Royal Navy. He married young, had children, and despite good reviews of his first book, tried and failed to establish himself as a novelist and short story writer.

Then came World War II, and everything changed. Russ, patriotic to the core, became an ambulance driver and may (or may not) have been involved in intelligence work. He fell in love with a married woman, Mary Tolstoy (mother of novelist Nikolai Tolstoy), and after their respective divorces were finalized, they married and stayed together for the rest of their lives. Russ also legally changed his name to “Patrick O’Brian,” which led many readers to believe that he was originally Irish, not English.

O’Brian, who was immensely intelligent, intensely private, and something of a snob, never bothered to correct this impression. He had begun to write again after the war, and this time his books sold. He translated numerous works from French to English (including best sellers like Henri Charriere’s Papillon), wrote young adult thrillers and the occasional biography, and published novels, biographies, and the occasional essay.

So far, this could be any skilled, reasonably talented midlist author. Then O’Brian wrote a book called Master and Commander, about a Royal Navy officer during the Age of Sail, and what initially seemed to be nothing more than a knock-off of C.S. Forrester’s Horatio Hornblower stories turned out to be the beginning of a twenty-book saga that former American Heritage editor Richard Snow called “the best historical novels ever written.”

One might quibble with this statement — Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles comes immediately to mind — but it’s hard to dismiss Snow out of hand. For O’Brian, who had studied the Nelson-era Royal Navy so closely he actually wrote a short book about daily life aboard a man-of-war, took the standard swashbuckling sea story and turned it into art. From Master and Commander to Blue at the Mizzen, Patrick O’Brian spent the next thirty years exploring the life, deeds, and relationships of Jack Aubrey, Stephen Maturin, and their friends, associates, lovers, and enemies in rich and memorable detail.

You think I exaggerate? Here are but a few reasons why these books are so loved, and so acclaimed:

Research. O’Brian didn’t merely write about the Age of Sail. He wrote as if he were living in the Age of Sail. Nautical terms, medical jargon, spycraft, social norms, the characters’ speech patterns — not only are they period-accurate, but deployed so deftly that the reader quickly forgets they’re reading historical fiction.

Style. O’Brian’s plots sometimes creak, especially in the later books, but the Aubrey-Maturin books are some of the most perfectly written novels it’s been my pleasure to read. The chapter in HMS Surprise where Jack has to stage a raid on an enemy fort to rescue Stephen is one of the most quietly suspenseful sequences imaginable, followed by a twist that you will never, ever see coming. There’s plenty of derring-do, of course, but there’s never a wasted word or unnecessary metaphor.

Characterization. O’Brian stated that one of his great influences was Jane Austen, and it’s easy to see why. Every character in the Aubrey-Maturin books, from ordinary seamen like Awkward Davies to Jack Aubrey’s horrifying mother-in-law Mrs. Williams, the doomed Lord Clonfert to loyal Tom Pullings, Sophia Aubrey and her cousin Diana to Molly Harte and Clarissa Oakes, is as sharp and distinctive as any character in fiction. Best of all are Jack Aubrey, brilliant at sea and unlucky on land, and Stephen Maturin, a master spy and physician who never quite learns the ways of the sea despite years afloat. The relationship between these two, who bond over their shared love of music and later become closer than brothers, is one of the great friendships of fiction.

Humor. All too many great books are, shall we say, somewhat deficient when it comes to humor, especially if one is writing about Manly Men Doing Manly Things. But when a main character adopts a sloth which promptly decides that the rigging of a Royal Navy frigate is a fine substitute for the Amazonian jungle, or an arch-enemy gets the full Burke & Hare treatment, or the chaos of married life includes an astronomical observatory just past the vegetable garden, or a main character has a tendency toward malapropisms that somehow doesn’t make him ridiculous...need I say more?

Famous fans. Richard Snow wasn’t the only well known person to love the Aubrey-Maturin books. Iris Murdoch, Eudora Welty, and Tom Stoppard all loved and praised O’Brian’s work, while science fiction author David Drake stated that his Republic of Cinnabar series was directly inspired by Aubrey and Maturin.

Patrick O’Brian died just after New Year’s in 2000. He had been deeply shaken by the death of his wife Mary in 1998 and a scathing expose by the BBC later that year that revealed the details of his early life and questioned much of his biography. He had kept writing, however, and had begun work on his twenty-first Aubrey-Maturin novel shortly before his death. For all the controversy about his private life, his place in the literary canon was secure, and that is all that truly matters.

As for me, I recently was given a complete set of the Aubrey-Maturin series by a friend who had read them but was downsizing her book collection. I’ve been reading them over the last few weeks as I recovered from surgery, and if anything, I like them even more now than I did when Wingding threw our copies into a box and drove into the sunset. They’re books to be savored, and I’m beyond grateful that I’ve had this second chance to enjoy them.

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