Master and Commander (book) Rambly Review-ish
I have just finished the novel Master and Commander, the first of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin novels, and I can assert O'Brian has a new fan. I had attempted this series before, 15-20 years ago when my dad was obsessed with it, and it didn't grab me. I guess sometimes the time has to be right. I wanted to write a big essay on it, but finding myself generally exhausted (by life, not the book), I'll content myself with some quick takes instead.
Summary
In the year 1800, English naval captain Jack Aubrey meets Irish physician and naturalist Stephen Maturin and persuades him to join his ship as its surgeon. They proceed to develop a friendship in the course of naval adventures in the Napoleonic Wars.
Light spoilers may follow...
Stuff I Liked
There's next-to-no setup and payoff. Okay, there's a little, but largely the book feels like it's just people going about their lives in the Napoleonic Wars, and what setup and payoff there is feels largely like natural life consequences. Now, I do believe the strongest narratives have good setup and payoff, but it's considered a "must" for almost everything today, and there's something refreshingly natural about just seeing people about their lives with a minimum of narrative contrivance. The ending is terribly anti-climactic and, you know, I'm okay with that.
The narration does not coddle the audience. O'Brian's descriptions can be very detailed when he's scene setting, but he rarely adds a spare word about feeling, motivation, or unnecessary scene transition. In fact, scenes can change between one line of dialogue and the next with no break in the text and no immediate indication that it is now four hours later and everyone has gone to dinner. You just have to catch up--and I'm fine with that. In fact, I really admire how he drops in character-building moments, like So-and-So received a letter, with no fanfare and little explanation and just allows the reader to connect the dots as to what this means. It creates good suspense (sometimes) and good opportunity for reader participation (always). Oh, and the sea jargon is incomprehensible to me. O'Brian makes little effort to explain it--and I'm okay with that too.
It's a nice mix of historical verisimilitude and modern literary license. O'Brian is famous for having done his homework on everything from naval maneuvers to Austenian-era language, and it shows. I feel convincingly transported to the British Empire in 1800. At the same time, this doesn't read like an Austenian-era book. As a novel from the 1970s, it's allowed to be more vulgar, more straightforward, and more political, and that, too, lends a kind of realism. This textual honesty is probably best on display in the quiet but persistent context of Irish oppression. Several scenes feature two Irishmen remarking on their English friend/captain, and the gulfs in privilege come across well without preaching: the way the Irish have to understand the English but the reverse is not the case feels very authentic and pointed.
Jack and Stephen have a convincing and interesting friendship. They contrast each other in some fun ways while having enough in common that it's clear why they hit it off. This is the start of their friendship, so there are limits to how deep it runs, but I look forward to following them in later books across the years.
Jack, Stephen, and James Dillon (principal character 3) are all very well drawn and relatable. Usually, this would item 1 on my "like it" list, and I'm not sure why it's so low here, except that maybe the more unusual (by today's standards) aspects of the storytelling stood out more.
I liked the story's engagement with homosexuality. It was not a main theme, not didactic, but handled sensitively and with no homophobia. (I give some bonus points for this for a book from 1970.) It highlighted the inhumanity of the era's absurdly rigid anti-sodomy laws with no preaching, and for me, it all landed quite well.
Stuff I Didn't Like
As with the 2003 Master and Commander movie (mostly based on a different book in the series), I do think race could have been better represented without any anachronism or heavy political preaching. People of color served extensively at sea; the book mentions several in Jack's crew, but none are important characters, none gets more than a smattering of lines, and the major black character has had his tongue cut out (prior to joining the crew), so he is quite literally silenced. That was a missed opportunity to push harder at the culture of the time and just push back against the marginalization of people of color.
This is a minor niggle, but I feel that over the course of the book, some of Stephen's flaws disappeared and some of Jack's intensified (not in an intentional literary way, but in a way that feels like unintentional drift). That unbalanced their friendship a little bit for me. But, as I say, this was a minor detail.
Overall
I think I like this book for the same reason I've historically been a fan of science fiction: it feels convincingly like a different society from mine. That's something I've been getting less and less lately from sci fi, much of which seems to be in an era of attempting to closely replicate the cultural conversations and values we have in the developed world right now, and it gets tiring. This was refreshing.
Reading these adventures drives home to me how much Star Trek is based on 19th-century naval warfare. At times, I felt like I was in a Star Trek episode. I mean, they were "warping in" and "warping out." :-)
Summary
In the year 1800, English naval captain Jack Aubrey meets Irish physician and naturalist Stephen Maturin and persuades him to join his ship as its surgeon. They proceed to develop a friendship in the course of naval adventures in the Napoleonic Wars.
Light spoilers may follow...
Stuff I Liked
There's next-to-no setup and payoff. Okay, there's a little, but largely the book feels like it's just people going about their lives in the Napoleonic Wars, and what setup and payoff there is feels largely like natural life consequences. Now, I do believe the strongest narratives have good setup and payoff, but it's considered a "must" for almost everything today, and there's something refreshingly natural about just seeing people about their lives with a minimum of narrative contrivance. The ending is terribly anti-climactic and, you know, I'm okay with that.
The narration does not coddle the audience. O'Brian's descriptions can be very detailed when he's scene setting, but he rarely adds a spare word about feeling, motivation, or unnecessary scene transition. In fact, scenes can change between one line of dialogue and the next with no break in the text and no immediate indication that it is now four hours later and everyone has gone to dinner. You just have to catch up--and I'm fine with that. In fact, I really admire how he drops in character-building moments, like So-and-So received a letter, with no fanfare and little explanation and just allows the reader to connect the dots as to what this means. It creates good suspense (sometimes) and good opportunity for reader participation (always). Oh, and the sea jargon is incomprehensible to me. O'Brian makes little effort to explain it--and I'm okay with that too.
It's a nice mix of historical verisimilitude and modern literary license. O'Brian is famous for having done his homework on everything from naval maneuvers to Austenian-era language, and it shows. I feel convincingly transported to the British Empire in 1800. At the same time, this doesn't read like an Austenian-era book. As a novel from the 1970s, it's allowed to be more vulgar, more straightforward, and more political, and that, too, lends a kind of realism. This textual honesty is probably best on display in the quiet but persistent context of Irish oppression. Several scenes feature two Irishmen remarking on their English friend/captain, and the gulfs in privilege come across well without preaching: the way the Irish have to understand the English but the reverse is not the case feels very authentic and pointed.
Jack and Stephen have a convincing and interesting friendship. They contrast each other in some fun ways while having enough in common that it's clear why they hit it off. This is the start of their friendship, so there are limits to how deep it runs, but I look forward to following them in later books across the years.
Jack, Stephen, and James Dillon (principal character 3) are all very well drawn and relatable. Usually, this would item 1 on my "like it" list, and I'm not sure why it's so low here, except that maybe the more unusual (by today's standards) aspects of the storytelling stood out more.
I liked the story's engagement with homosexuality. It was not a main theme, not didactic, but handled sensitively and with no homophobia. (I give some bonus points for this for a book from 1970.) It highlighted the inhumanity of the era's absurdly rigid anti-sodomy laws with no preaching, and for me, it all landed quite well.
Stuff I Didn't Like
As with the 2003 Master and Commander movie (mostly based on a different book in the series), I do think race could have been better represented without any anachronism or heavy political preaching. People of color served extensively at sea; the book mentions several in Jack's crew, but none are important characters, none gets more than a smattering of lines, and the major black character has had his tongue cut out (prior to joining the crew), so he is quite literally silenced. That was a missed opportunity to push harder at the culture of the time and just push back against the marginalization of people of color.
This is a minor niggle, but I feel that over the course of the book, some of Stephen's flaws disappeared and some of Jack's intensified (not in an intentional literary way, but in a way that feels like unintentional drift). That unbalanced their friendship a little bit for me. But, as I say, this was a minor detail.
Overall
I think I like this book for the same reason I've historically been a fan of science fiction: it feels convincingly like a different society from mine. That's something I've been getting less and less lately from sci fi, much of which seems to be in an era of attempting to closely replicate the cultural conversations and values we have in the developed world right now, and it gets tiring. This was refreshing.
Reading these adventures drives home to me how much Star Trek is based on 19th-century naval warfare. At times, I felt like I was in a Star Trek episode. I mean, they were "warping in" and "warping out." :-)