NOTES ON THE
MASTER & COMMANDER SERIES
Compiled because these books
have consumed me like no others. The notes below may sometimes read like
criticism, but they are only as if observing that our beloved doesn’t share our
preference in pizza toppings.
What accent does Stephen have? No one spots him as Irish, even to
the extent of the Irish being insulted in his presence in Australia, Batavia
and the US. Nor as Spanish or Catalan: “I must have spent more time in
Catalonia than I did in Ireland”, M&C,
p30; “He had spent much of his childhood and youth in Spain”, Nutmeg, p121; “Catalan, the language he
had spoken most of his youth” Post
Captain, Chapter 3; “welcome to my land. We are in Spain. That is my house
below – we are at home” Post, Chap 4.
All we know is that he “speaks perfect French with a southern accent” (Surgeon’s, p328). How did he pick up a
(presumably) standard English accent?
POB overwhelmingly uses the the past tense for his story, as we’d
expect, but the present tense sometimes intrudes in descriptions of matters
that are buried just as deeply in history. For example, in M&C it is used to describe the way that sailors climb to the
main top: “they cling to them and creep like flies... until they reach the rim
of the top and so climb upon it”. During the loading of the Sophie with such
out-dated materiel as hard-tack, round shot and casks of beef we are told:
“Even a small vessel…needs a wonderful amount of stores.” In POB’s universe, we
are supposedly reading the book after the events it describes but before the
end of the age of sail. Perhaps he felt that a past tense for such matters
would put a wedge between reader and narrative: we would be reminded constantly
that the age of sail is long gone.
Is Stephen the best character in all literature?
He’s the best I know.
Is his friendship with Jack Aubrey the best in all literature?
It’s the best I know.
How much is POB influenced by CS Forester? They both borrow heavily
from Cochrane, and feature a captain who almost always commands a frigate and
is almost always engaged in single-ship actions. Some say there’s a wilful
distancing, so that Jack is the opposite of Hornblower, who is dour and
tin-eared. (Chap 12 of Post Captain reveals that J has met Cochrane.)
S often goes off to Ireland or Spain without us, and we see
nothing of Jack’s parliamentary life. We don’t meet the mining projector who
takes J’s money. We don’t see J producing his mathematical writings, and our
nearest knowledge of S’s works is that he mostly writes ashore (p261 Nutmeg), that he slopes off in Wine-Dark to write “Some Remarks on...”
(p289), and that he had unfinished manuscripts in his room at The Grapes
(Commodore, p38). We never find out what happened to his parents.
Lots of anti-Scottish stuff: Dr Graham, of course, humourless and
grudge-holding, but also the young naturalist McLean: he "rarely washed,
his table manners were offensive, he was extremely umbrageous; and finding that
Dr Maturin was an Irishman, he gave full vent to his dislike for the
English".
In response, Stephen feels that “Like some other Scots he knew,
McLean seemed to labour under some sense of inferiority; and to labour
rancorously. Strange: it could never occur to an Irishman.”
And of course McLean's stubborn indiscipline is responsible for a shipwreck.
Macdonald of the Marines says. “ ‘I have been thinking of
justification.’ Stephen’s heart sank: he knew the reputation of the Scots for
theological discussion, and he dreaded an outpouring of Calvinistical views.’ ”
And Macdonald adds, ‘I hate women. They are entirely destructive. They drain a
man, sap him, take away all his good: and none the better for it themselves.’
After a pause, ‘Nasty, nasty queans.’
And this stuff descends even to such minor characters as two separate land
agents: Clonfert's "Scotch agent looks after what rents he can rack out of
the tenants"; and Miss Trevor has "a Scotch Anabaptist vulture by way
of an agent, or bailiff".
All other Scots in the canon, I think, are at best neutral: none is
sympathetic, including a couple of admirals.
But it's not just that POB shows so many disagreeable Scottish characters
conforming to the usual cliches: they are dour, sour, humouless. Even more
striking are Stephen's disobliging generalisations, such as the above comment
about McLean, or his belief that Cochrane is "too much affected by that
Scotch love of a grievance".
If I were Scottish I'd be much put off by all this.
There are too many people on a ship for a novel to handle. We
don’t notice this with reference to the ordinary seamen, but it’s odd when one
of the senior men jumps out of the shadows: Jack exchanging words with his
secretary, perhaps, or with the purser: important men who are just too numerous.
You should read the books in order: you get the story unfolding of
course, but anyway the earlier ones are best, and can all be endlessly re-read,
apart from the first half of Desolation
Island – although the second half is excellent, including the scariest
of all the naval engagements.
Having read the series 20-plus times, I skip Clarissa Oakes. For the first 100 pages,
Blue at the Mizzen footles about
between Gib, Madeira and England. For three-quarters of its length, The Ionian Mission seems like a
treatise on futility: the French two-decker encountered in the Channel, Jack’s
assignation with Mercedes, sailing back and forth past the moored Frenchmen,
Stephen’s tramp in the marshes, the doomed pursuit of the French flotilla,
until at last we begin the eponymous mission.
Far Side has 16 pages of talk
about whaling (p73), and the early pages of The
Yellow Admiral (perhaps the weakest book in the series because of its
abrupt and unsatisfying incidents) feature lectures on the enclosures, on the
rules of prize-fighting, a 2½ page, one-paragraph account at second hand of th e engagement with The Droits de l’Homme (p109), and a similar account of a battle
involving the Eurotas.
Re-readers (though not readers) may also grow
impatient with some of S and J’s adventures on land, especially when they seem
so closely derived from research, such as their time in Australia in Nutmeg.
Ref. Diana’s mad relative in Post
Captain:
“Another strange tale, which this time ended less happily for the
heir presumptive, is that of the 3rd Earl of Darnley, an eccentric bachelor who
suffered from the delusion that he was a teapot. In 1766, when he was nearly
fifty and had held the family title and estates for almost twenty years, Lord
Darnley suddenly and unexpectedly married; and between 1766 and his death in
1781, he fathered at least seven children, in spite of his initial alarm that
his spout would come off in the night.”
The Pursuit
of the Heiress, by A.P.W. Malcolmson
Lovely asides in Surgeon’s
Mate: the anonymous couple holding hands in the prison in Paris and
(perhaps a little obvious) the freckled schoolma’am.
Stephen says that Byron writes “excellent doggerel with flashes of
brilliant poetry in it” (Treason’s
Harbour, p117). Pretty fair, I think.
Here’s a 55-minute video interview with POB where, for example, he
cites Fielding, Richardson and above all Jane Austen as influences on his
style. He confirms that some of Mowett’s poems are from The Naval Chronicle “and some I improved on”. He says he spent a
lot of time on square-rigged ships in the 1930s. (Hasn’t this been questioned?)
Praises Forester for his action sequences but, “I won’t say more about him
because I shall sound jealous or invidious.” Poor sound quality, tho.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtvSCndd0g4&feature=related
And an interview with the Paris
Review.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1628/the-art-of-fiction-no-142-patrick-obrian
A devastating Guardian
article about POB by his estranged son.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/28/fiction.film
Black’s, the London club, is a stand-in for the real-life White’s,
which still exists, complete with its bow window for inspecting passers-by.
It’s handy for POB to switch to the other POV for the dull bits,
so that in Surgeon’s Mate we are with
Stephen while Jack pulls the Minnie
free and then navigates past the Skaw.
No explanation of how James Dillon in M&C manages to turn from Irish revolutionary in 1798 to a Navy
lieutenant three years later.
“Incidentally” (M&C,
p111); the only misjudged word in the series.
“Buonaparte” is spelt thus in a number of the books,
this being Napoleon’s birth name before he changed it in his twenties to the
more French-sounding “Bonaparte” .
On p121 of Desolation
Island, “fucking” is spelt out; two pages later a dash is used in place of
an obscenity that could hardly be worse.
The “cur-tailed” joke is
very old, and attributed to Theodore Hook (1788–1841). Diana’s remark about the
farting horse is also unoriginal; I’ve heard it attributed to many sources
including the Queen.
Redundant uses of “even”, such as “hundreds and even
thousands of men” (p193, Mauritius), and “he did not know that he was a
traitor, nor did he even suspect it” (Far
Side, p20); this latter could be simply “he did not suspect he was a
traitor”.
“Stern sheets” is just the seat in the stern of a
boat. Heel taps are the dregs left in a glass, allegedly because they’re
similar in shape to the metal tags on the heel of a shoe.
POB usually refers to tons
of water, but it’s “tun of water” in Fortune,
p180; it’s the same thing, a tun being a volume of water that weighs a ton.
Remarkably few conversation in the series do not
include S or J, either as participants or subjects. One is when seamen talk to
the odabashi on p146 of Treason’s Harbour;
and when army officers talk at the bottom of p205 of Mauritius; and the two doctors waiting to attend on Mrs Williams;
and Pullings immediately before he spots Jack in the open boat in Wine-Dark.
During that conversation with the odabashi, there’s
another of POB’s odd uses of quotes around reported speech, one of the seamen
asking him: “ ‘Did the odabashi speak English’ ” (p147); similar is the voice
from the Grapes “asking ‘who it was’ ” (Post
Captain, top of p459); And in The
Commodore (Chapter 5) Stephen, after yet another ducking, is greeted with
“the usual sea-going questions – ‘Was he hurt? Did he not know he must always
keep one hand for himself and the other for the ship? Why had he not asked one
of them to help him?’ ”; see also Reverse,
top of p111. This retention of the grammatical forms of indirect speech inside
the quotations marks of direct speech is seen also in Pride and Prejudice, and so might be a deliberate anachronism by
POB. Likewise, POB once or twice uses old-style commas: “…first I must observe,
that he and I…” (Letter of Marque,
p170), just as P&P begins “It is
a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good
fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
POB likes to have S or J wandering through an empty
house. This isn’t always integral to the plot: eg, one of Jack’s homecomings,
and the time he enters The Crown in Mahon in Ionian Mission.
We feel superior to the characters in novels, and
they're especially endearing when we see their private frailties; S excusing
his laudanum, or looking at his tortured hands (“Left alone Stephen looked at
his nail-less hand, flexed it with great complacency”; HMS Surprise), or J preening to hear Miss Smith saying he's
handsome.
“Just when he reached
his decision is not clear, but it must have been before the first dog-watch”: Desolation Island. A rare refusal to
enter Jack’s head.
A builder’s rope hangs conveniently in HMS Surprise and Fortunes of War, athough not used in the latter.
Apt names: Admiral Haddock; Scriven, the jobbing
hack; Roger Horehound for a corrupt official (p136, Reverse); Starveacre for a pitiful piece of Mrs Williams’ land (the
term is used in its standard meaning on p291 of Nutmeg). After encountering a testy Maturin in Halifax harbour, an
Admiral miscalls him “Saturin”.
In Master and Commander
(p19) POB closes one paragraph with a quotation mark around a thought of J’s, and
opens the next par with a quotation mark around a spoken comment of J’s,
meanwhile having moved him to a different location, viz:
“Lord what a fine thing it is to play the
great man once in a while.”
“Mr Baldick? . . . ”
The same thing (tho without the change of venue) happens with
Stephen at the bottom of p175, and elsewhere in the series. On p87 of Reverse Jack says “…pass the word for
the officer of the watch.” “Mr Allen…”; ie, there is a contiguous opening and
closing of direct speech from the same individual within the same paragraph.
This is so odd as to seem like a mistake.
The two women:
At the beginning of Post
Captain, POB tells us rather than shows us the characters of Mrs Williams’s
family. We don’t see this style elsewhere in the series. It’s Austenish of
course; Mrs Williams is the hysteric with an excess of daughters and an
obsession with marriage, just like Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, although with added malice.
We are told that Sophie is “capable of a sudden dart
of sharpness, of a remark that showed more intelligence and reflection than
would have been expected from her rudimentary education and her quiet
provincial life”, and that she has an “occasional expression of secret
amusement, the relish of something that she did not choose to share” (p22-23).
But we see nothing of this in the books. We do see anger. She rows with Diana
in an early book, and with Jack once or twice over Clarissa Oakes: Killick declares to Bonden (The Commodore, p172) that “nobody ever thought she had so much
spirit or fury in her”, and we are for once shown a hint of this in a snappy
exchange in the Yellow Admiral
(p75-76). But generally she is remarkable only for her beauty, a quality that
readers can only know at second hand. At the time of her marriage she has no
notion of sex, despite an upbringing in the country. She calls herself “an
ignorant country girl” (HMS Surprise,
p192).
In HMS Surprise
(p12), we have the longest insights into Sophie’s feelings towards Jack,
notably how “Never was there anyone with whom she had had such fun.” But we
never see this. When Jack writes to Sophie there are a few conventional
endearments, but the letters are mostly (always?) used by POB to narrate some
seaborne incident (eg, the refitting of the ships at the end of The Mauritius Command; p293); compare
S’s wide-ranging chats with Diana. (The letters we read between S and his new
beloved, Christine Wood, are likewise entirely naval; Blue at the Mizzen, p136.) However, Jack and Sophie share very
charming scenes together at their house from p90 of Surgeon’s Mate, their mutual happiness very comfortable and
convincing – at least until the arrival of the first letter from Miss Smith.
Diana the huntress: indeed, S calls her “the solitary
huntress" in Surgeon's Mate; she
is one of the great female characters in literature. Sophie is the archetypal
blonde, Diana the brunette – passionate, promiscuous, dangerous, brave,
impulsive. And beautiful (of course). Crucial to note that POB writes her out
of the series towards the end of the very book in which she is introduced (Post Captain), Stephen definitively
falling out of love with her when her physical grace becomes affected and
flirtatious. But he is back in love in the next book, reasoning that she has a
pagan purity that explains and justifies everything (HMS Surprise, p175), an echo of an earlier thought: “Surely style
and grace beyond a certain point take the place of virtue – are virtue indeed?”
(Post Captain, p79). The only thing that
matters to us, of course, is that his love for Diana is credible.
(This falling out of love happens also in Fortunes of War when she is ill-humoured
and humiliated in Boston because of Mr Johnson and Mrs Wogan: “He did not love
Diana Villiers any more, and it was death to him” [p196]. But this reads like a
mere plot twist.)
Diana is subject to the greatest act of brutality in
the series: brutal but, as we’d expect, understated, reported at secondhand at
the beginning of 100 Days and
scarcely referred to thereafter. In the same book, there is an equivalent fate
for Bonden, revealed in a phrase buried in the middle of a sentence (p263), and
referred to only once more in the book. POB’s wife, Mary died in March 1998;
Diana died between Yellow Admiral and
100 Days, which was published in
1998; was Mary ill while he wrote 100 Days?
In the afterword to Wine-Dark (p305), John Bayley says the two women “are as vigorously
and subtly portrayed as the men”, but that they can’t work properly in the
series because there’s no way of weaving together their lives and the lives of
J and S at sea. Agreed, but also POB isn’t able to do much with them; Sophia is
constrained by her home and family and is anyway placid; Diana, tho a
wonderfully vigorous and complex character, has (as she so often complains)
little independence, her movements being towards or away from men; indeed, over
the course of the series we may balk at the convenient machinery that brings
Diana and Stephen together in America, India, Paris, Sweden and – most
startling of all – in Ireland at the end of The
Commodore, though these coincidences aren’t jarring in the individual
books.
“…whatever she might suppose, the ceremony that Diana and Stephen
had passed through aboard HMS Oedipus
was legally binding,” thinks Stephen in Reverse.
But I’ve read somewhere that a Royal Navy captain could only perform a marriage
if the vessel was more than 500 (or was it 600?) miles from land, which Oedipus on its voyage across the Channel
certainly was not.
How subtle are POB’s hints to the reader, and what unreasonable
pleasure we get in spotting them.
In HMS Surprise,
after they sail away from Bombay, Stephen is distraught over the death of
little Dil, but Jack thinks S is upset because of Diana; we are expected to
notice for ourselves how Jack repeatedly declates that “salt water will wash it
away”. As I write this, I’m reading Yellow
Admiral for the dozenth time; for the first time I’ve noticed the social
lie that Sir Joseph practices on Stephen on p12-13 and, at the bottom of p13,
the cause of the lie – that Sir Joseph hates the din of children.
Sometimes the trust may be carried too far. I’ve
often wondered when and how J and S cancelled their duel over Diana in Post Captain. We know why: because J saw
her with Canning. But when was its ending declared? … And now, on the twentieth
reading, I see it. On p387, their first time ashore after the triumph with the Fanciulla, they walk into the dunes (the
place already discussed as a venue, and where S had practised his shooting)
Stephen saying, “a little dell, a place I know, convenient in every way”; but
it turns out to be the carriage to carry Jack secretly to London. So this is
the resolution of the duel, with a tease of the reader so subtle that I missed
it for years.
Sometimes he prefigures an action, and perhaps we are
disappointed. In Nutmeg Stephen has a
pointless wrangle with Killick about wearing the sword which he then uses to
fight the obnoxious Army officer. In Wine-Dark,
there are several references to the discomfort of salt-encrusted clothing (eg,
Vidal tells Stephen, “The salt is devilish severe on the parts,” and Stephen
himself likens his clothes to a penitential sackcloth), a thing never mentioned
elsewhere in the series; then we learn of Martin’s delusions about VD.
Perhaps Clarissa Oakes
and to a lesser extent Wine-Dark are
dull because the Pacific is big and empty.
“Lucky” Jack Aubrey – not only because of his multiple opportunies
to fight and his success in those fights, but perhaps also because POB has to
acknowledge the improbabilities of his career, akin to the startling mayhem
around Miss Marple.
Jack is regarded with awe by younger officers and
with envy by the likes of Clonfort, but reckons that anyone would have been as
successful with the same opportunities. Bonden, the nearest we can imagine to
an honest broker, says he’s “the finest fighting captain in the fleet” (Desolation Island, p169).
How much of the pleasure is that the Brits win – individual
victories for Jack and Britain, and the steady background complacency of who
won the war? The giveaway is how I flinch from reading about the ugly failure
of Clonfort’s battle in Mauritius Command.
Stephen seems closer to POB’s heart than J, his learning, physique
and general outlook more in line with that of his creator – as is his secrecy
and downright lying.
Unlike J he keeps a diary, tho its every appearance
is preceded with haverings about how unsuitable this is in a spy; very
suitable, tho, if you’re a novelist wanting to explore your favourite
character. In Mauritius Command, he writes there that his use of laudanum
is to allay a feeling of disgust, and he wonders how common is “disgust for
oneself, for one’s fellows and for the whole process of living”, and says that
his own seems to grow (p217).
Being a spy, why does
he never use an assumed name?
“From his boyhood, Jack had been an
open, friendly creature, expecting to like and be liked.” (Far Side, p54). “Jack Aubrey thoroughly enjoyed life; he was of a
cheerful sanguine disposition, his liver and lights were in capital order, and
unless the world was treating him very roughly indeed, which it did from time
to time, he generally woke up feeling pleased and filled with a lively
expectation of enjoying the day.” (p159, Far
Side). He’s endearing, but not very challenging for a novelist, being
delineated so often by his limitations – of wit, social understanding,
learning. His mangling of the language is almost overdone: “gabardine swine”
(though elsewhere he gets this term right). But there are mentions of hidden
depths only revealed by his musical ability, which we’re told he generally
keeps hidden so as not to embarrass S: “Jack certainly concealed his excellence
when they were playing together, keeping to Stephen’s mediocre level.” (Commodore, p78). “In his own way he is
the secret man of the world,” thinks Stephen (p79). So perhaps Jack is limited
because he chooses to be.
Although Jack and Stephen “were almost as unlike as
men could be, unlike in nationality, religion, education, size, shape,
profession, habits of mind, they were united in a deep love of music, and many
and many an evening had they played together”. (Ionian, p144)
S contemplates J’s “integrity” on p162 of 13-Gun: “in all the years Stephen had
known him, he had never known him act a part”. The most complete account of S’s
opinions of Jack starts on p147 of Mauritius,
where he talks of J’s lack of role-playing and his “cheerful courage” like that
of a lion. Jack is never recorded as being afraid, though he is shocked to see
his Dutch pursuer close by at dawn in Desolation
Island. Me too. Stephen is never afraid in battle, I think, tho maybe
during his captivity in Paris: he confesses in Mauritius: “Every man would be a coward if he durst: it is true of
most, I do believe, certainly of me.”
Cast an eye over one of the Ramage novels, and boggle at the
difference between POB and Dudley Pope. This is the meaning of talent.
Lots of things for writers to envy in the books, including the
fact that S and J become like our family and friends: we’re interested even
when they’re doing nothing much – no great need for plots.
“You might almost be describing Mrs Villiers,” says Stephen in
connection with Mrs Wogan in Desolation
Island. Did POB originally envisage Diana as the American spy, and did he
change his mind because it might make her participation in future books so
awkward?
You might argue that the whole Wogan/Herapath story
is meant as a comment on the Stephen/Diana relationship: two unpreposessing
intellectuals in thrall to two dashing women. But what would such a comment
serve? Surely POB’s exploration of the S/D relationship is adequate without
this milk-and-water pair.
The more often I read Desolation, the more the first notion seems plausible.
Other books I’ve read a dozen times: The Maneaters of Kumaon, The
Purple Cloud, Despatches, The
Flashman series, the George Smiley series, The
Ginger Man, Catch 22 (when I was
young), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance, Success.
“It was strange to see how quickly this progress took on the
nature of ordinary existence … so that it seemed normal to all hands that they
should travel endlessly over this infinite and wholly empty sea” (p153, HMS Surprise). One of POB’s favourite
tropes (and even used of the imprisonment in Paris); so is tar dripping on to
the deck, the tedium of dinner parties, the corruptions brought by age and
power, cold water for blood stains, and how food improves our mood and thus
undermines the notion of free will (“…nothing grieves me more than this
dependence of the mind upon the body’s nutriment. It points to a base
necessitarianism,” says S in Desolation
Island, p271).
An enemy describes Jack as “that great fat yellow-haired
post-captain…that red-faced ox” (Treason’s
Harbour, p12). POB says he is big, blond and “rather fat” (M&C, p74); like Boris Johnson, then.
(Interesting, POB’s “like so many sailors, Jack was rather fat”, as is the
occasional “of course” in connection with some bit of naval arcana; POB
claiming our agreement about a matter on which he knows we have no views.) In 100 Days, a young girl exclaims of Jack,
“Oh, isn’t he beautiful,” (p6), and in M&C
Diana says, “he is a handsome fellow”.
Stephen is indirectly described as, “a poor, short,
bent, meagre, ill-looking little creature” (ibid, p82). “Stephen was a plain
bastard at the best, sallow with odd pale eyes, sparse hair and meagre limbs
and rather poor” (Fortune of War,
p15); “a short, disagreeably plain man” (Desolation).
In Post Captain, Stephen calls
himself “a little ugly small man with no name and no fortune”. But Cissy in Post Captain says, “He really would be
almost handsome if he held himself up.” The French secret service describes him
as: “Five foot six, slight build, black hair, pale eyes, muddy complexion,
three nails on the right hand torn out, both hands somewhat crippled: speaks
perfect French with a southern accent” (Surgeon’s,
p328).
I was surprised by the “black hair”, having vaguely
expected it to be as pale and meagre as his flesh. And S’s face is usually a
“lifeless olive brown” (Fortune,
p173). We thus have the picture of a small, thin, balding Spaniard.
Stephen’s night landing in Spain in M&C is not explained until the next book, so POB must have
already considered a second book, and identified S as a spy even tho there’s no
other hint of it in M&C.
A good discussion of “Which it is” construction, used by so many
of his working class characters:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=26898
The film of M&C is
good, I think. A clever choice of lines and incidents from throughout the series,
but also some neat additions: the man overboard who has to be cut loose, S in
the Galapagos on the edge of an evolution theory, the Fr captain pretending to
be the doctor, etc. Lots of good credible unobtrusive detail, too, such as (in
the scenes of extreme cold) the man shivering on the head and charcoal burners
swinging from the ceiling. The film also looks wonderful.
Startling that Paul Bettany (excellent) is taller
than Jack and that the sturdy Bonden is a little ex-Hobbit (and even more startling
that he is called “Mr” by Tom Pullings). But the big problem is that Russell
Crowe plays Jack as just another hearty hero, without the endearing
simplicities which make him interesting. But Killick is perfect.
The film has made little money, apparently, and there
are no plans for a series.
Does anyone know why Jack “choked” while being asked about his
past battles on the last line of p427 of Post
Captain?
S’s recourse to religion is limited. It’s a consolation, a
cheerer-upper, a sense of community in far-flung places, but his examinations
of himself are hardly touched by it. However, he prays sincerely for Diana in
the “bee hive cell” in Paris. (Surgeon’s,
p344).
We can imagine him committing suicide (he prepares
for this during that same Paris imprisonment), but he would not be driven there
because of religion like the captain who shoots himself from guilt about
killing Christians.
Jack often visits me and needs modern things explained: plane
journeys fascinate him, and the shower. I never see Stephen; too intimidating.
Genre writing is easier because invention is expected only in
incident. Literary novels at least aspire to a thoroughgoing originality, so in
theory every word is up for questioning.
Others swear in the books but Stephen doesn’t, and Jack’s bad
language is rare and is anyway blanked out. “He rarely swore, apart from an
habitual damn or unmeaning blasphemy” (M&C,
p307). “But you never do talk bawdy,” Stephen tells him (Ionian Mission, p39). Perhaps POB felt that it might drive a wedge
between them and the reader.
POB, though, has a taste for smut. Early in M&C, J mistakes putain (prostitute)
for patois and there is mention of a cunt splice (in modern maritime speech
it’s bowdlerised to “cut splice”), and throughout the series there are random
bawdy asides, such as the place name Swiving
Monachorum. Jack’s misunderstanding of Ganymede (in 13-Gun?) is so long and toiling that it recalls a Carry On film.
Cacafuego
(shitfire), the ship captured by Jack in M&C,
might seem to belong in this company, and indeed in contemporary slang it meant
a braggard: but in fact it’s attested as far back as a Spanish treasure galleon
taken by Francis Drake in 1579.
A sentimental, simplifying view of seamen.
There’s the odd mention of “hard cases”, and plenty
of warnings about “not topping it the knob”, but these issues are never
demonstrated, so that the only downright nastiness is during the evacuation of
the Leopard in Desolation Island. (I
suppose that the rebellious talk from men ashore in Gibraltar in Blue at the Mizzen might also qualify
because it’s upsetting to Jack, but it seems pretty reasonable to modern ears.)
Of the time when he was punished by being sent before the mast, Jack says, “My
messmates on the lower deck were as kind as could be, except for one” (Nutmeg, p95); compare the treatment of
the clergyman fallen among the sailors in Rites
of Passage (Golding was ex-Navy, of course). Overwhelmingly, seamen are
shown as brave, resourceful and uncomplaining.
All this is of a piece with the respect they show to
J, so that the books show an acceptance of the social contract, even though
that contract involves an extreme disparity in privilege. A captain who breaks
that contract can indeed be murdered by his men as in Mauritius Command, and the murder will be accepted by J and S as
rough justice. But generally the workers will behave well if they are treated
well. Middle-class attitudes to the working class always seem like a decision
about whether Man is essentially good or evil.
However, no seaman is shown as intelligent, including
Bonden, who never rises above common sense: “I don’t go for to set myself up as
a King Solomon,” he says (Desolation,
p169). Instead, the hands are faintly comic creatures of superstition (Reverse of the Medal, pp60-61) and habit
(“It was what they were used to and they prized what they were used to”; p159, Far Side).
Stephen says that seamen are generally “unthinking
and illiterate” (p147, Mauritius): the
latter is fair, but not the former. However, he and Jack respect the men’s
collective wisdom: S compares it to that of a village, and Jack “had a profound
belief in the lower deck’s corporate opinion.” (Ionian, p185).
Most novels give us an indecent level of access to the characters.
Perhaps this is part of their pleasure: perhaps we have an inbuilt desire to
understand other people, perhaps because it’s of evolutionary advantage. We
understand fictional characters but also I think feel superior – because we
read them like a book.
With J and S, this sense of superiority is compounded
by their failings; so Jack is a genius by sea and a child on land, and Stephen
has all the world’s learning but is an incurable lubber. (Perhaps it should be
a rule for fictional characters that they have a contradiction: a megalomaniac
caresses his white cat, the captain of industry is henpecked.)
Does POB overdo this? Sometimes. J’s mangling of
idiom can be a stretch (“I have been like a bear in a whore’s bed these last
few days”: Wine-Dark Sea, p138), and
S’s ignorance of naval matters is a sad handicap in a spy, and one he would
surely have tried harder to correct. “There must be some weakness, some
imbecility,” he says of himself on p159 of Reverse.
However, he occasionally shows a sudden fluency on
naval matters, such as in Surgeon’s Mate
when explaining Baltic navigation to Jagiello and then, bizarrely, delivering a
cogent account of the very obscure club haul. And, in Master and Commander (p322), his volunteering to steer the ship
sits oddly with his incompetence as a seaman. Like J’s cry of “Another fifty”
it is taken from Cochrane’s memoirs. Perhaps S’s entire existence grew out of
this incident.
Cochrane seems also to be responsible for Jack’s habitual “hawsers
to the masthead” tactic (Ionian,
p224).
We feel that other novelists are flat wrong, and that it takes a
20-volume work to delineate character.
The action may be why we read the books, but we reread them for S
& J.
Is there a more original portrait of a fictional character than
that of Awkward Davies – notably from p148 of Ionian Mission?
J uses the word “scientist” in Blue
at the Mizzen, but it was coined in 1833 by William Whewell as a deliberate
neologism, so it’s unlikely to be one of those words that was circulating
before it was made accessible to lexicographers by being written down. I’m also
suspicious of “elevenses”, used in Surgeon’s
Mate, chapter 6 (I think it’s used again in that book); my rather old copy
of the OED has no knowledge of the
word, listing only the dialect words “elevens” (1865) and “elevener” (1875) for
this snack. The OED also has the
mid-19th century (it’s unclear) as the earliest written appearance of “spotted
dick”, tho the OED is surely remiss
here.
In Post Captain, when S & J argue and determine on a duel, J says
‘when a man comes back from leave as brown as a Gibraltar Jew, and says he had
delicate weather in Ireland, he lies.’ But S hadn’t mentioned the weather in
Ireland. Dundas goes to Jack as Stephen’s second: why didn’t he explain to J
that it was he who asked S to raise the matter of Diana?
William Babbington’s beloved, Mrs
Wray, consistently calls him Charles at the end of Reverse (p236-7), and
has to deliver a far-fetched explanation in the next book (Letter, p55).
I’m not really fussed about the alleged errors in the
main battle in The Ionian Mission (http://web.mit.edu/hwebb/www/ionian.html).
But in the battle in the bay towards the end of Treason’s Harbour, I’m not convinced that the French ship couldn’t
batter the Surprise as they race
towards the Brothers.
In “The Final Unfinished
Voyage” we find: “ ‘Rear-Admiral to flag: very happy,’ said Jack in italics.”
Why does Jack put Bonden in the towed boat when
confronting the mutiny in Post Captain?
Directly after bemoaning the unreliability of
Britain's allies, Sir Joseph Blaine says, “Napoleon is not alone in having
unreliable allies.” (Surgeon’s Mate,
chapter 4)
In the opening of The Ionian
Mission POB describes the semi-detached marriage of Stephen and Diana as
“the best possible arrangement for a pair with nothing in common but love and
friendship, and a series of strange, surprising, shared adventures”. Just like
S and J, of course. This opening is perhaps the most charming in the series
(the rest of book doesn’t live up to it) – although we besotted fans will have
a special place for the meeting at the start of M&C.
In Fortune of War,
Stephen attends a man “lying on his own liver” (p112), but such horrors are
little mentioned. Men are cut in half and Jack helps to push them overboard,
but these nightmares are never closely described, nor does anyone in the books
register them, although such reactions are prominent in contemporary accounts.
The nearest to such a response is Jack’s recollection
of the Chinese crewmen slitting throats in HMS
Surprise, which he decides not to mention to Sophie. So we are to POB as
Sophie is to Jack, though POB’s motives are presumably artistic; perhaps he
thinks that such an emotion serves no narrative purpose and is therefore a dead
end, its unpleasantness a distraction. Besides it’s a matter that the reader
can easily deduce.
In Mauritius,
Young Hobson dies in the night after being emasculated and is “thankful to go”
(p311): another of those resonant asides.
An odd tone on p40 of 100
Days where Jack is pointing out to Stephen that they have often sailed with
women aboard; is POB acknowledging that he has mentioned women sailors less
often than would be accurate for naval ships of the era, rather like the
(apparent) teasing of the reader in Jack’s longwinded insistence in Fortune of War that he has been a
lifelong friend of Captain Broke?
Similar teasings: S’s praise of tobacco (p177 Mauritius and p202 Ionian); Jack feeling better after a bloodletting; S’s unknowing
sterilisation by daubing the skin with alcohol before an operation (100 Days?); the claims that the English
are too given to emotions; and the abuse of Argentina that was written around
the time of the Falklands conflict (p145, Far
Side, and elsewhere).
O’Brian uses the scanning adjective-heavy construction: “pale
glare of reptilian dislike” (M&C);
“cold, reptilian glare” (Treason’s
Harbour, p278); “a contained reptilian ferocity in Stephen’s pale eye” (Far Side, p167).
The chelengk worn by Jack is like that awarded to Nelson by the
Sultan of Turkey for the Nile victory. It likewise had a clockwork mechanism
which revolved the central diamond. It was designed for a turban and thus
looked a little oversized when Nelson wore it in his hat.
POB refuses to touch the big events of the naval war against
Napoleon. No involvement in any of the big sea battles, nor in the threatened
invasion of Britain, and – despite J’s love of Nelson – not a mention of his
death except by the the wretched Miss Smith in the Surgeon's Mate.
Jack on suet pudding: “So let us enjoy it while we may – damnably
mouldy a hundred years hence” (13-Gun;
p152). Jack and Stephen are long dead, and we’ll never know about their old
age, or even if they had one. But they are so realised in their vanished era
that the books are almost frightening in showing life to be vivid but
temporary.
POB is coy about ages for any of his characters (and
sparing of physical descriptions, or at least of repeating them), although
there is often talk of Jack or Stephen looking older or younger. “I cannot
remember my age without I do a subtraction with pen and ink,” says Stephen (LofM, p276). Later in the series, as
years in the books become out of step with actual historical years, an
obscurity over ages becomes almost obligatory.
But we are told that J & S met “in the spring of
the year one” (Post Captain, p54),
and M&C suggests they are
approaching 30 – not too dissimilar to Lord Cochrane, the inspiration for some
of J’s activities, who was born in 1775 and died October 31, 1860.
There’s a mention of 1814 in Yellow Admiral (p226), perhaps because it matters that the story
leads up to Boney’s first exile. And there’s much talk of impotence, perhaps
because POB was of a certain age.
“I rarely work out any of those detailed sequences that
constitute a plot,” says POB in the Paris
Review interview. Martin says, “I remember Bourville’s definition of a
novel as a work in which life flows in abundance, swirling without a pause: or
as you might say without an end, an organized end.” S seems to agree: “The
conventional ending, with virtue rewarded and loose ends tied up is often sadly
chilling” (Nutmeg, p265).
Sure enough, the books are often “one damn thing
after another”: they start, continue through pretty random events, then stop.
Arguably this accords with such aspects of the books as the unexplained naval
jargon and the expectation laid on the reader to penetrate issues of character
and action with little help from the narrator. In other words, we are being
presented with unmediated slices of the lives of J and S; in plot, as in other
matters, we cannot expect these lives to be shaped for our convenience.
But I don’t like this. I’d prefer the kind of
book-length structure that’s routine in Forester and George McDonald Fraser.
Certainly there are plot twists, often (as I say) presented with great
subtlety, but these are rarely co-extensive with an individual book. The only
books I can think of with a proper shape are M&C, which we can regard as an airing of the question, “How
will Jack fare in his first command?” and The
Mauritius Command, which follows a real and individual campaign like those
in Fraser.
Elsewhere, entire campaigns can turn out to be
pointless. Jack declares that the South American expedition in Wine-Dark is a failure in all respects.
In HMS Surprise, a diplomatic envoy
carried all the way from England dies in the Pacific before reaching his
destination, his only purpose (I’ve just realised on this tenth reading) being
to bring S to Diana in India; “We came on a fool’s errand,” says Jack. In 100 Days, Stephen treks across the
desert to reach an agreement with a chieftain who is at once murdered. In Treason’s Harbour there is a chase down
the Red Sea which produces only a lead slab scratched with the words, “Merde a
celui qui le lit”; and Jack sums up the entire story as a “total failure in
every respect, without the least alleviating feature or favourable
circumstance” (p198), and declares he has “made a complete cock of it” (p208).
The first two thirds of Ionian is all futilities, from Jack and his nearly-but-not-quite
adultery, to Stephen's meeting with Professor Graham in the marsh, to the
failed attempt to engage the French fleet: at last we get to the campaign that gives
the book its name.
(It doesn’t much matter, I think, that the mission to
Port Jackson in Desolation Island is
revealed in Fortune of War to have
been futile.)
This lack of planning is present also in individual
incidents. Like a soap opera, the series must maintain a degree of status quo,
but nevertheless many incidents seem gratuitous: the first sea-borne event of
the series is the failed attempt to fit 12lb guns to the Sophie; there’s no point to the burning down of The Grapes,
“rebuilt without the smallest change”; in 13-Gun,
Stephen is equipped with powerful magnets, then with a reason to use them to
deflect the Surprise’s compass, then
with the notion that such a strategem wouldn’t work, then with the conclusion
that the strategem isn’t anyway needed; finally, having never been seen before,
the magnets are never seen again; and this entire incident is a rehash of James
Dillon’s dilemma in M&C.
In The
Surgeon’s Mate, Jack digs an escape route through the jakes in their
Parisian prison cell (requiring elaborate ropework, which requires materiel
smuggled in by a French cook, which in turn requires unearthly beauty,
established over many pages, in a Swedish soldier), yet they are promptly
released via a secret stairway. Indeed, The
Surgeon’s Mate is a catalogue of absorbing incidents (Halifax and Jack’s
love affair; evading the American privateer; Grimsholm; the wreck on the French
coast; imprisonment and escape) but they are pressed together like strangers in
a lift.
A notable example of all this is Bangs on the Head.
(I don’t refer to Stephen’s skill at trepanning.) Both Jack and Stephen are
prone to this misadventure. Naturally, their BotHs can’t have lasting
consequences; recovery will follow. Which BotH has any importance to the plot?
Maturin:
Far Side: he falls aboard ship and Aubrey takes him to an island, leading
to the discovery of the US shipwreck. S miraculously recovers just before the
trepanning.
Letter of
Marque: in tower in Sweden; leads
to a bonding with Diana.
Fortune of
War: he self-diagnoses
“something very like a crepitation along the coronal suture” and “a clear
contra-coup effect”, and then exhibits the classic effects of such a trauma.
Yet he is fully recovered in a couple of days after a “profound and
restorative” sleep. Pointless.
Aubrey:
Surgeon’s
Mate: with lead of depth gauge
so that he’s not to blame when a subordinate runs the ship aground in France.
The
Commodore, p31: falls off horse cos
of blackbird. Pointless.
“What a fellow you are!” A rebuke, but somehow endearing. So
common from Jack to Stephen, usually on the latter’s ignorance of some naval
technicality, that it’s very pleasant when for once S can direct it at J in Mauritius Command, p27. (But J gets to
use it again on p99.)
Equally characteristic is “with some asperity” used
of S. The expression turns up in Pride
and Prejudice when Mr Collins is checked by Mrs Bennet for suggesting that
her daughters have any role in the kitchen.
Killick is the best of the subsidiary characters. His first
mentions are references to his “version” of coffee (M&C, p155), described by Jack as “a sad brew” (p51); but he improves,
and is later recorded as having only two virtues, “polishing silver and making
coffee”; for these “it was worth putting up with his many vices” (Commodore, p20). His full sourness,
officiousness, insubordination aren’t developed until Post Captain, where also we see the first jab at him (Jack’s
“happily my steward does not care for burgundy”, p267). PC also sees the emergence of Awkward Davies. (Or does it? Am I
getting confused with the similar Bolton?)
Bonden is mentioned on p215 of M&C and his character is given on
p238.
“An egg, an egg,” says a hen in HMS Surprise (p92). “An egg, an egg, an egg,” in Fortune of War (p281). In Mauritius Command, S says: “we instantly
inform the world, like a hen that has laid an egg” .
Mowett’s poems (copied by POB from contemporary publications)
demonstrate how the tricks of Dryden and Pope with the heroic couplet had
thoroughly entered the culture. Mowett’s works are doomed by their content, but
the technique is excellent.
We’ve all heard how the two central characters in The Unknown Shore prefigure
Aubrey/Maturin, but it's remarkable how far the similarities run. The book is
set 60 years earlier than Master and
Commander, and the twosome are teenagers – yet one is called Jack and
serves in the Royal Navy, the other is an eccentric naturalist and (initially
at least) a mere lubber, and they progress through one of POB’s rather random
plots.
Unfortunately, this
younger Jack is a cypher. Apart from the odd flash of ill temper, he
illustrates the difficulty of giving an interesting character to a youngster.
He is only notable for a couple of echoes of Jack Aubrey: he “carved his
initials upon the topmast cap”, and POB writes: ‘ “There you are, Toby,”
said Jack; and to this valuable observation he added . . . ’ (His captain also echoes Jack Aubrey on the Sophie by changing the Wager from a ship that kept watch and
watch to a three-watch ship.)
This younger Jack also
echoes that very odd POB trope: a suspicion of Scotsmen. He describes one
Campbell as “a dismal Scotch crow, who is never content unless he is slighted
or put-upon”, POB explaining that “at least some of [Campbell’s] unattractive
ways were due to the fact that he was Scotch, and that he felt slighted and put
upon because of it . . . He often laboured under a sense of grievance, which
made him a tedious companion.”
But how familiar is his
friend Tobias Barrow. He is no respecter of rank, enters the masthead through
lubber hole, brings wild creatures into their cabin, is impatient with seamen's
superstitions, and is short (5ft 5½in), “meagre, narrow-chested and stooping;
his dull black hair made his white face even paler, while at the same time it
made a startling contrast with his almost colourless light green eyes”.
He was also a mere
lubber: ‘Tobias belonged in this last hopeless category, and that he would go
on looking for guns on the gun-deck out of mere ill-will and brutish stupidity
to the end of his days.’ Unlike Stephen Maturin, however, he soon finds a
measure of seamanship.