'Do you expect a Highland gentleman to produce his manuscripts upon compulsion?' said Macdonald to Stephen, and to Jack, 'Dr Johnson, sir, was capable of very inaccurate statements. He affected to see no trees in his tour of the kingdom: now I have travelled the very same road many times, and I know several trees within a hundred yards of it—ten, or even more. I do not regard him as any authority upon any subject. I appeal to your candour, sir—what do you say to a man who defines the mainsheet as the largest sail in a ship, or to belay as to splice, or a bight as the circumference of a rope? And that in a buke that professes to be a dictionary of the English language? Hoot, toot.'
'Did he indeed say that?' cried Jack. 'I shall never think the same of him again. I have no doubt your Ossian was a very honest fellow.'
'He did, sir, upon my honour,' cried Macdonald, laying his right hand fiat upon the table. 'And falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus, I say.'
'Why, yes,' said Jack, who was well acquainted with old omnibus as any man there present. (Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain)
Not only do the natural passions—indeed obsessions—present in any small community receive at the author's hands the most skilful and sympathetic testimony, but he makes graphic if unobtrusive display of the diversity of types, interests, and nationalities always present in a naval context. The hazards too. A day or two later Stephen has to amputate Macdonald's arm after a cutting-out expedition, and they take up their conversation again in the hospital.
O'Brian is equally and fascinatingly meticulous on questions of geography and natural history. The Nutmeg of Consolation is embroidered with the flora and fauna of the East Indies; and an extraordinarily gripping sequence in the previous novel, The Thirteen-Gun Salute, recounts the danger to a sailing vessel of approaching too near in a calm to the nine-hundred-foot cliffs of Inaccessible Island, which rise sheer out of the depths of the South Atlantic not far from Tristan da Cunha. Whalers had been drawn by the mountainous swell into the giant kelp at the cliffs' foot and perished with all hands. The crew of the Surprise are enjoying a routine Sunday morning when this danger threatens, and are plucked from divine service by the urgent need to get out the boats and row the becalmed frigate clear into safety. It is then revealed by a white-faced carpenter that the long boat had a couple of rotten strakes which he has cut out, and not yet had time to replace. Like the young captain in Conrad's The Shadow Line, who fails to check that what is inside the bottle in the ship's medicine store is indeed quinine, Jack Aubrey is faced—and not for the first time—with the implacable crises of life at sea, to survive which every last detail must be kept in mind and under eye. There is nothing in the least approximate or merely picturesque about O'Brian's handling of any marine situation, or even the most conventionally spectacular kind of naval action. In Master and Commander he took us, together with the unskilled Sophies, through every detail of the drill required to fire a single gun of the broadside.
Of course he has his failures—what novelist embarked on so amply comprehensive an undertaking could not have them? The women are a problem; although it seems unfair they should turn out to be, for Jack's amiable fiancée and then wife, his far from amiable mother-in-law, and Stephen's own heartbreaker, Diana Villiers, with whom he is on and off through several books, are as vigorously and subtly portrayed as the men, and come alive as much as they do. No more than Conrad is O'Brian what used to be called a man's man, and he has as many women as men among his fans. Nonetheless it is with a feeling of relief that we leave Jacks' Sophia in the little house near Portsmouth, or Diana in May fair, and embark upon our next commission. The reason is plain. It is not that O'Brian's women are less interesting than his men, but that a single domestic background is essential to the richness and vivacity of the work. Not being a bird, as the Irishman said, O'Brian cannot be in two places at once; and he cannot successfully locate the women in one background and his seagoing population in another. Were he able to take his ladies to sea (he does have some memorable gunners' wives and East India misses) it would be another matter, but there history is against him—naval wives often took passage but could not be closely involved in the life of the ship—and O'Brian has total respect for the niceties of contemporary usage and custom.
Another important narrative theme is more suitably ambiguous. Almost unknown to Jack, at least in the earlier books of the sequence, Stephen is an undercover agent of naval intelligence. Nothing improbable in that, and it does lead to some interesting situations, although the reader may feel that such goings-on are there more for the benefit of plot and adventure than real assets to the felt life of the fiction. The two traitors inside the Admiralty who are a feature of the later novels bear a not altogether comfortable resemblance to more recent traitors like Burgess and Maclean. There are moments, too, when Stephen's erudition and expertise in all matters except love become a little oppressive, as does Jack's superb seamanship and childlike lack of business sense. But these are the kinds of irritation we feel at times with those who have become old friends. Stephen and Jack have their occasional quarrels too, and their moments of mutual dissatisfaction.
For indeed the most striking thing about the series is the high degree of fictional reality; of Henry James's 'felt life', that it has managed to generate. This may be partly because we grow accustomed and familiar, as in the homelier case of the comic strip; and yet the more surprising and impressive virtue in the novels is their wide range of feeling and of literary sensibility. At least two tragic characters—Lieutenant James Dillon in the opening novel, and the erratic Lord Clonfert who makes a mess of things in The Mauritius Command—have their psychology subtly and sympathetically explored; and there are some scenes too in the series of almost supernatural fear and strangeness: two pathetic lovers seeking sanctuary on a Pacific island, or the weird and grisly chapter, like something out of Moby-Dick, when a Dutch seventy-four pursues Jack's smaller vessel implacably through the icebergs and mountainous waves of the great southern ocean. And no other writer, not even Melville, has described the whale or the wandering albatross with O'Brian's studious and yet lyrical accuracy.
The vicissitudes in Jack's naval career—the many fiascos and disasters as well as the occasional triumphs—come from naval careers of the period, like that of Lord Cochrane and his brother, who was dismissed from the service for alleged financial irregularities. Such resourceful heroes often made a second career for themselves—Cochrane became a Chilean admiral in the South American war of liberation—and there seems every hope that Jack and Stephen may turn up in those parts when their author can no longer put off the conclusion of hostilities in Europe. Most historical novels suffer from the fatal twin defects of emphasising the pastness of the past too much while at the same time seeking to be over-familiar with it ('Have some more of this Chian,' drawled Alcibiades). O'Brian does neither. Indeed 'history' as such does not seem greatly to interest him: his originality consists in the unpretentious use he makes of it to invent a new style of fiction.
That unpretentiousness has become a rare asset among novelists. The reader today has become conditioned, partly by academic critics, to look in Melville and Conrad for the larger issues and deeper significances, rather than enjoying the play of life, the humour and detail of the performance. Yet surface is what matters in good fiction, and Melville on the whale, and on the Pequod's crew, is more absorbing to his readers in the long run that is the parabolic significance of Captain Ahab. Patrick O'Brian has contrived to invent a new world that is almost entirely, in this sense, a world of enchanting fictional surfaces, and all the better for it. As narrator he never obtrudes his own personality, is himself never present in the role of author at all; but we know well what most pleases, intrigues, and fascinates him; and there is a kind of sweetness in his books, an enthusiasm and love for the setting of the fiction, which will remind older readers of Sir Walter Scott. It is worth remembering that Melville too worshipped Scott, and that the young Conrad pored over the Waverley novels in Poland long before he went
to Sea.
This retrospective review first appeared in November 1991 in The New York Review of Books. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of Professor Bayley.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
In Which We Serve
Patrick O'Brian, The Wine-Dark Sea
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