But just look at “21”! There is no sense of harassment or desolation here, no loss of focus, nor of energy. And if it ends too soon, it is nonetheless a rich distillation – a summary of sorts – of all that has, over thousands of pages and tens of thousands of miles, won O’Brian such passionate admirers. First of all, there is the language – and here I mean not O’Brian’s prose but what he gives his characters to say. He insisted that their speech was an accurate reflection of how early nineteenth-century people talked; but I believe it is a brilliant poetic invention, complex yet so wholly consistent that we in time learn to speak it almost through the same process we would follow acquiring a foreign language. It never ceases to show us that this is a world at once remote and familiar, and the conveying of that familiarity is, I think, a feat of the imagina tion that far surpasses, say, J.R.R. Tolkien’s kingdoms of dwarfs and sorcerers. We get to be introduced to Jack and Stephen one last time, and how keen the pleasure remains: Stephen abashed in the composition of his heavily-coded love letter; Jack with elephantine, ignorant delicacy discussing the Church of Rome with his closest friend. And here is Killick, his insolence for once extinguished by the calamity that has befallen Jack’s best uniform during freezing weeks off the Horn. Now come the curiously stirring details: the men begging slush from the galley to give the shot in the garlands a pleasing sheen; Steph en clipping the tip of his pen “with a minute pair of m etal jaws made for the purpose.” To be sure, there’s no battle in these pages, but the great-gun exercise on the Sussex gives a highly satisfactory sense of the violence and power that men like Jack Aubrey controlled. And any disappointment at the lack of a frigate duel must be eradicated by the presence of the humour that quietly leavens every paragraph. Jack, explaining how he acquired the extra gunpowder necessary for hi s spectacular exercise, says he’d bribed “the last powder-hoy, for a trifle of whiskey – you know the I rish drink, Stephen, I am sure?” “I have never heard of it,” says Stephen. This tiny exchange is marvellously appealing: both men are being funny; both men understand one another perfectly.
Their amity suggests what I find so moving about this last work from Patrick O’Brian’s hand. Some of the novels end with their principals settled and content, some with them in poverty and peril. It is, of course , impossible to say where “21” would have left them. I’m sure the egregious Captain Miller would have reappeared to work some malice after Stephen’s humiliation of him. And Jack’s money-making initiatives would likely have put him on the metaphorical lee-shore. Right now, however, we are able to visit these friends we have followed so very far in a rare state of almost perfect felicity. Jack has seen his black son ably discharging important duties. Sophie and his daughters are with him; Brigid is with her father, she’s thriving, and Stephen is with a woman who is very dear to him. Jack is flying a rear-admiral’s flag aboard a ship of the line. So we can leave them sailing through fair, sweet days – Stephen with his dissections, Jack with his “sacred blue flag,” Killick muttering darkly over the toasted cheese – embarked on a voyage like the one that opens the book: “Quietly indeed they sailed along, with gentle breezes that wafted them generally northwards at something in the nature of five miles in the hour, north-wards to even warmer seas. Little activity was called for, apart from the nice adjustment of the sails, and although the exact routine of the ship was never relaxed nor her very strict rules of cleanliness, these long sunny days with a soldier’s wind seemed to many the ideal of a seaman’s life – regular, steady, traditional meals with the exact allowance of grog; hornpipes in the last dog-watch , the deep melody of the Doctor’s ‘cello from the cabin and the cheerful sound of the gunrooms dinner; the future lost in a haze somewhere “north of the equator.”
Remember that this was written at a time when the author was lonely and tormented. Yet Patrick O'Brian has given a farewell to his follower ’s that is as gracious as it is gallant. And we, in turn, may find some solace in the thought that of all people, this man would not have hated to be taken out of action much as Nelson was: deep in triumph, shedding glory on the service he loved, and still at the peak of his powers.
Patrick O'Brian, 21: The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey
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