An Extraordinary Saga Reaches Its Final Port

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On the face of it, what is surprising is not that Patrick O’Brian was able to write a 20-novel epic of combat and naval camaraderie set in Nelson’s day, but that others had not done so. Great Britain’s war with France, which from time to time included war with Spain, Denmark, and the United States, provides an author with a 23-year canvas on which to paint stirring scenes from the great age of sail. The Royal Navy at that time had a thousand ships – “storm-tossed ships” as Alfred Thayer Mahon famously described them – multiply those ships by 23 years and there is more than enough material to keep a novelist from having to overdraw on his imagination.


Not only was this a time of plentiful military action, it was one of those rare periods in British history when the man in uniform was actually feted – the “tars” of the Royal Navy especially. His Majesty’s ships were England’s “wooden walls,” and the Service enjoyed a respect, and even affection, equaled only by the Royal Air Force in 1940 and perhaps the British Army today. These were heroic years, with simple certainties: Whatever the initial British ambivalence towards revolution in France, by the time of Trafalgar it was clear to most of the King’s subjects that Napoleon Bonaparte would be tyrant of Europe – if not the whole world. Every true Englishman, with his love of beef and liberty, had a duty to oppose the Great Disturber.


Fighting the King’s enemies is instinctive for O’Brian’s hero, the English Tory Jack Aubrey, just as it was for Nelson – instinctive and visceral. For the other of O’Brian’s permanent duo, the Irish-Catalan ship’s surgeon (and intelligence agent) Stephen Maturin, op posing Bonaparte is a coolly cerebral concern. He has just enough of a potent admixture of un-Anglo-Saxon temperament to make him occasionally as fiery as, and even more lethal than, the combative Aubrey. Their never-ending war is a huge canvas on which an author may liberally apply his paint – paint from a huge box of colors – thence to lay it before a worldwide audience.


The shelves of naval fiction – in British bookshops at least – are long, perhaps longer than any other category of fiction. In this huge fleet of books, C.S. Forrester’s tops stood highest for half a century, although Captain Marryat had laid the keel, so to speak, a century before. In good trim next to these are ships of different ratings, those of Alexander Kent, Richard Woodman, James Nelson, to name but a few authors still writing. All are extraordinarily well found and seaworthy. Their creators know how to sail a man-of-war, how to lay on the cat, how to cook lobscouse, how to beat to quarters, how to gain the weather gauge, how to fire on the upward roll. There is action to satisfy the blood-thirstiest readers, because action is what they set out to provide; action is indispensable in a book about war.


In this review, however, O’Brian’s ships do not sail in line ahead but stand off from the rest of the fleet like frigates sailing under Admiralty Orders. O’Brian did not so much situate his books in action as recount, like an indefatigable captain’s secretary, where in their odyssey through life at war and at sea – and occasionally (usually sorrowfully) on land – events and the routine passage of time happened to find Aubrey, Maturin, and their faithfuls. O’Brian never takes liberties with real events; the river of time never runs uphill. In fact, with O’Brian the river of time flows exceedingly gently. One of his singular attributes is the ability to convey the routine, the monotony even, of life at sea without the narrative drifting into the doldrums, becalmed.


To his fans, the current is exactly the right speed: There is rarely whitewater, but when it comes it is with surprising, sometimes shocking, force; occasionally the river is downright torpid. The flow does not suit everybody, of course. The eminent military historian Sir John Keegan prefers Forrester’s “Hornblower” books because with O’Brian, he says, “nothing ever happens.” I know one of the most literary of London’s literary editors has tried several times, dutifully but without success, to find the O’Brian magic. And I know several lovers of film who ultimately found Peter Weir’s – to my mind truly admirable – “Master and Commander” lacking in narrative drive or satisfying action.


What is the O’Brian attraction? Perhaps it is the admittance to an enclosed world, distant as much in form as time, with arcane technology and procedures at once primitive yet perfectly identifiable – whether gunnery or surgery – and an idea of precise order and routine, of summary discipline. Above all, perhaps it is the temporary entry to a club otherwise too exclusive to join: the “band of brothers,” whether of quarter deck or gundeck. Perhaps there is something, even after all these years, in Dr. Johnson’s observation that “every man thinks meanly of himself for never having been to sea, nor having been a soldier.” The books portray the hell of a man-of-war in a broadside duel, and perhaps, especially at two o’clock in the morning, a man – or a woman, for many are O’Brian readers – shivers, and asks himself, secretly, “Could I have done this?”


O’Brian offers all this, but not uniquely. The same has been provided by the pens of competent artisans. O’Brian was a master craftsman. His work delights the senses rather than merely serving them. It does not show its technique or the difficulties that had to be overcome to create it. The publication of the fragment of the unfinished 21st novel, however, offers a tantalizing suggestion.


When O’Brian died in January 2000, he left 63 handwritten pages of the untitled 21st novel in his naval epic. He had also begun typing the manuscript and had made some revisions to the typescript. In “21: The Unfinished Twenty-First Novel in the Aubrey/Maturin Series” (W.W. Norton, 144 pages, $21.95), the revised typescript has been reproduced together with a facsimile of the manuscript. The typescript and manuscript are the first touch of paint on canvas, with all erasures, additions, changes, and marginal notes. But to those who love his work, and the man himself (for his following has taken on the nature of discipleship, reverencing the man in all his complexity), they will provide an exceptional opportunity to see the master at work.


Some of the alterations are of style, preference, simple change of mind. Others are more fundamental. I smiled, for instance, at seeing O’Brian, after so many novels, first putting “Napoleon” in the mouth of an Englishman, then immediately crossing it out and writing instead “General Bonaparte.” But it is essential to remember that this is by no means the revised, final, polished typescript: That would have taken many more months of sailing before a fair wind. We cannot know for certain which of these words would eventually have passed the hawk eye of this most perfectionist of writers. Lord Waldegrave, in his foreword to the British edition, suggests that within the fragment of the manuscript and typescript O’Brian is working at different levels of completion – rather as Nelson’s ships might have put to sea with carpentry, painting, and sail-making still in-hand.


One passage stands out as wholly shipshape and Bristol-fashion, however, varnished and polished to a hard and impressive gloss. It has taken 20 novels for Jack Aubrey to reach the rank of rear-admiral on the active list, and O’Brian wanted the reader to savor the ceremony along with him. At the end of the 20th book, Captain Jack Aubrey receives his orders to proceed aboard HMS Suffolk, with the South African squadron in the River Plate, there to hoist his flag – “blue at the mizzen.” It is “blue” because he is made rear-admiral of the junior of the three divisions of the British fleet (red, white, blue), and “mizzen” because the mizzen (aft) mast is where an admiral flies his flag of rank. This first hoisting is a supreme culmination: From now on Aubrey can advance in seniority within the grades of admiral, but the act of being made admiral is like priesting – a sacred moment, never to be repeated. In this unfinished draft we see that moment in which the “act would turn him into that glorious creature a rear-admiral.” And glorious, sacred act that it is, O’Brian works in the finest detail:



The folded bundle soared aloft, followed with the utmost concentration by all hands: at exactly the right moment, the exact height to an inch, the coxswain snapped the tie and the rear admiral’s blue flag streamed out bravely in the wind, instantly greeted by the first of thirteen solemn guns, enormously loud, salutes from all the members of the blue squadron, distant cheering from Surprise and clouds of wheeling, discontented gulls.


Two changes from manuscript to typescript in this passage perfectly illustrate O’Brian’s genius for atmosphere and tempo. In the manuscript he writes that all hands follow the hoisting “with intense concentration.” The substitution in the typescript “with the utmost concentration” – on the face of it a terribly minor thing – slows the line significantly, extending the moment, and changes the degree of the crew’s concentration from relative to absolute. It is a masterly refinement. And those birds: The manuscript has “clouds of uneasy seagulls complaining.” In the typescript they become “discontented gulls.” O’Brian has taken Occam’s Razor and excised the unnecessary “sea,” so that with the four syllable “discontented” followed by the hard, short “gulls,” he ends the sacred passage with a perfect cadence. It is doubly clever, as well as elegant, since the gulls are not merely in a state of discontent: They have been positively blasted from their previous sup posed state of contentment by “the thirteen solemn guns”; so we have adjective and verb past-participle.


We therefore come to the inevitable question (laying aside the propriety of making public these fragments – a question for ethicists and lawyers): What did O’Brian intend with this novel? He did not write synopses; he had in mind the broad shape of things, where the voyage might take Jack and Stephen (as, with unusual intimacy for that time, we know them); then he set sail, letting wind and tide and the fortune of war take the story to an ending. He did sometimes sketch his intention for his editor, a sort of written appreciation of the narrative possibilities, but for this last novel there is none (or rather, none has been found). I am bound to ask: Did he intend to complete it?


The circumstances of his life – the death of Mary, his wife and literary companion, disclosures about his origins and private life – had been intensely painful, and to take to sea again in the company of old friends would have been delightful to him. But the existence of fragments does not prove an intention to finish: scholars are famously divided on the question of whether Schubert’s eighth symphony is indeed “unfinished” (as, no doubt, Jack and Stephen, both fine musicians, would have been divided). Undoubtedly in “21” O’Brian was dealing with unfinished business. Though the canon is admirably closed by the last paragraph of “Blue at the Mizzen,” when Jack learns of his promotion (and learns of it, perfectly, from Stephen), O’Brian, like his readers, would have wanted to see that blue flag hoist – which now, at last, it is.


Death, especially death in uniform, is invariably messy and inopportune. For a privileged few, falling at the very moment of victory adds a touch of glory to an otherwise brutish and nasty affair – Wolfe at Quebec, Moore at Corunna, Nelson at Trafalgar. Might it not be too much to suggest “O’Brian at ’21’?”



Allan Mallinson’s fifth novel in his series set in the Duke of Wellington’s cavalry, “The Sabre’s Edge” is published in the United States by the Overlook Press.


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