Thoughts on a series
Last year I fell in love with Stephen Maturin. Despite my best intentions he is beginning to look rather like Paul Bettany in my mind's eye, rather than being short and not terribly attractive at all. I blame O'Brian for not being more descriptive in the first few novels, before I saw the movie. Heh.
I have now, after much self control, started out on The Far Side of the World. My instinct was to buy all twenty and sit and read them until I had finished them, like I did with the Sharpe books, but I have been rationing myself to one every couple of months or so. I am so impressed with my iron self control. I snapped last night though - having finished Treason's Harbour on Thursday, I immediately started on the next one - these three for the price of two book deals are a killer!
I now find I have some thoughts about the way the series has been written. Clearly, O'Brian never expected it to be such a success, otherwise he would have planned the chronology a bit better. I always knew the entire series covered the years 1800-1815, but as the first books advanced with gaps of years between them, I began to wonder how on earth all the other books were going to be squeezed in. Here we have it in an author's introduction ot FSofW - O'Brian admits he screwed up, but wants to write more. He talks about adding in 'extra years' an 1812a for example, to give him enough time to carry on. I'm not sure how I feel about this. Are the later books going to turn out to be mere pot boilers? While on the one hand it seems honest with the readers to say he's going to do this, it also seems somehow dishonest to the characters. Bernard Cornwell got round this problem by writing 'earlier' books, and then later ones squeezed between others, so that the order of writing bears little relation to the actual chronology. Is that more honest? You know, I think it is. Throwing Aubrey and Maturin into some sort of Groundhog Day (if this is in fact what he ended up doing) reduces their believability. What a shame.
I have now, after much self control, started out on The Far Side of the World. My instinct was to buy all twenty and sit and read them until I had finished them, like I did with the Sharpe books, but I have been rationing myself to one every couple of months or so. I am so impressed with my iron self control. I snapped last night though - having finished Treason's Harbour on Thursday, I immediately started on the next one - these three for the price of two book deals are a killer!
I now find I have some thoughts about the way the series has been written. Clearly, O'Brian never expected it to be such a success, otherwise he would have planned the chronology a bit better. I always knew the entire series covered the years 1800-1815, but as the first books advanced with gaps of years between them, I began to wonder how on earth all the other books were going to be squeezed in. Here we have it in an author's introduction ot FSofW - O'Brian admits he screwed up, but wants to write more. He talks about adding in 'extra years' an 1812a for example, to give him enough time to carry on. I'm not sure how I feel about this. Are the later books going to turn out to be mere pot boilers? While on the one hand it seems honest with the readers to say he's going to do this, it also seems somehow dishonest to the characters. Bernard Cornwell got round this problem by writing 'earlier' books, and then later ones squeezed between others, so that the order of writing bears little relation to the actual chronology. Is that more honest? You know, I think it is. Throwing Aubrey and Maturin into some sort of Groundhog Day (if this is in fact what he ended up doing) reduces their believability. What a shame.