Reviews
My first experience with Master and Commander was around age eleven. My family would listen to audio books on long car trips, and this was one of the books we had picked out. However, the narrator was a very old man with a cracking, monotone voice. I think it only lasted about three minutes before there was a unanimous decision to turn it off. Several years later, the movie came out, and I loved it. So I decided to try the book. I made it to page 108 (I know because my bookmark was still there) before the dry facets of British Naval ways uninspired me. So the book sat on my shelf for a couple more years. Since one of my reading challenge categories was to finish a book I'd previously abandoned, I decided to give it another go. The story does improve once you get past the dense details about the British Navy. Now I am in the awkward place of seeming to contradict myself. I often complain about historical fiction not having enough facts and details, but it is certainly possible to go too far in the other direction and scare off readers by inundating them with page after page of minute details. I'm no stranger to sailing terms, but when forced to read a few pages of nothing but the exact dimensions of each component of the ship, I tend to lose interest. As I mentioned, the story does pick towards the middle. Once you get passed the very slow character introductions, draw out scene setting, and aforementioned excessive details, the exciting sea battles really liven things up. However, the ending dropped the ball. (view spoiler)[After raising my level of interest with sea battle tactics, I found the ending extremely disappointing. Jack is left as a mere spectator on shore for the last big battle. You only get to find out about it as a secondhand account from another character. Then his trial is presented only through the court transcript. So instead of experiencing it "firsthand" so to speak and feeling the emotions of the scene, you are presented with a flat, diminished recording. It was like standing in a very long line for a rollercoaster and arriving at the front of the line only to have some hand you a dull paper about rollercoaster. in lieu of actually riding one. Not only was I robbed of the emotion and suspense that the scene should have featured, but it was a deflating ending. It did little more than set the stage for the next book. (hide spoiler)] The other thing about this series is that they were clearly written in imitation of the Horatio Hornblower 1 - 11. series. I find I prefer that series to this one. They both follow a British Naval officer throughout the Napoleonic Wars. But Horatio Hornblower is less dense and more fun to read. So overall, Master and Commander was an ok read. Parts of it were good (the middle), but other parts (the beginning and end) definitely bring it down to a solid 3 stars. This review fulfills the "Book You Started But Never Finished" category of the Popsugar 2015 reading challenge. http://www.popsugar.com/love/Reading-...
What is it to be Jane Austen for dudes?* There’s the boring meaning: “set in 1700s”, or “full of circumlocution”. Or the interesting: “depicting old fun, old morals, matters of grave importance (marriage, war) with irony and humour, status regulation, the sheer work of getting along with others”. explosions, to boot. The seamen, sprawling abroad on the fo’c’sle and combing out their long hair or plaiting it up again for one another, kindly explained to the landmen that this long swell from the south and east, this strange sticky heat that came both from the sky and the glassy surface of the heaving sea, and this horribly threatening appearance of the sun, meant that there was to be a coming dissolution of all natural bonds, an apocalyptic upheaval, a right dirty night. Brutal, too. The jolly crew, so kind and deferential to Stephen, are invariably wasted and criminal on shore (“the Sophies were much given to rapine”) And the heroic, witty, sensitive officers are pretty bloodthirsty (“burning for the uproar and the more than human liberation of a battle”). That’s what you get when you hire or abduct a hundred killers and pen them in with 2 pints of rum a day. Prose is curious: both smooth and obscure. But he’s a master all right. Stephen could remember an evening when he had sat there in the warm, deepening twilight, watching the sea; it had barely a ruffle on its surface, and yet the Sophie picked up enough moving air with her topgallants to draw a long straight whispering furrow across the water, a line brilliant with unearthly phosphorescence, visible for quarter of a mile behind her. Days and nights of unbelievable purity. Nights when the steady Ionian breeze rounded the square mainsail – not a brace to be touched, watch relieving watch – and he and Jack on deck, sawing away, sawing away, lost in their music, until the falling dew untuned their strings. And days when the perfection of dawn was so great, the emptiness so entire, that men were almost afraid to speak. “It seems to me that the greater mass of confusion and distress must arise from these less evident divergencies – the moral law, the civil, military, common laws, the code of honour, custom, the rules of practical life, of civility, of amorous conversation, gallantry, to say nothing of Christianity for those that practise it. All sometimes, indeed generally, at variance; none ever in an entirely harmonious relation to the rest; and a man is perpetually required to choose one rather than another, perhaps (in his particular case) its contrary. It is as though our strings were each tuned according to a completely separate system – it is as though the poor ass were surrounded by four and twenty mangers” People are in it for Jack and Stephen. JA is a big kind lunk, thinks he’s wittier than he is. On deciding to test out his new cannon: “I think we can have a couple of rounds: God knows how long these charges have been lying in the guns. Besides,’ he added in a voice within his inner voice – a voice from a far deeper level, ‘think of the lovely smell.” “I have been thinking about Dillon all day. All day long I have been thinking about him, off and on. You would scarcely credit how much I miss him... Dillon was Irish. Though you would never have thought so – never to be seen drunk, almost never called anyone out, spoke like a Christian, the most gentleman-like creature in the world, nothing of the hector at all – oh Christ. My dear fellow, my dear Maturin, I do beg your pardon. I say these damned things … I regret it extremely.” SM is a cool moody Irish intellectual, quick with a bonesaw, and actually witty. “The thing is officially called the trial of the captain, officers and ship’s company...; but obviously in this it is only my conduct that is in question. You have nothing to worry about, I do assure you, upon my word and honour. Nothing at all.’ ‘Oh, I shall plead guilty at once,’ said Stephen. ‘And I shall add that I was sitting in the powder-magazine with a naked light at the time, imagining the death of the King, wasting my medical stores, smoking tobacco and making a fraudulent return of the portable soup. What solemn nonsense it is’ – laughing heartily... After a longish pause Jack said, ‘You do not rate post-captains and admirals very high among intelligent beings, I believe? I have heard you say some tolerably severe things about admirals, and great men.’ “Why, to be sure, something sad seems to happen to your great men and your admirals, with age, pretty often: even to your post-captains. A kind of atrophy, a withering-away of the head and the heart. I conceive it may arise from…” Almost every page at sea has some new jargon, most of it lovely. You will need this, even though some things are explained to landmen. O’Brian is intentionally making it difficult for us, so skip him if you don’t consent to an old snob messing with you. “And then these futtock-plates at the rim here hold the dead-eyes for the topmast shrouds – the top gives a wide base so that the shrouds have a purchase: the top is a little over ten foot wide. It is the same thing up above. There are the cross-trees, and they spread the topgallant shrouds. You see them, sir? Up there, where the look-out is perched, beyond the topsail yard.’ ‘You could not explain this maze of ropes and wood and canvas without using sea-terms, I suppose. No, it would not be possible.’ ‘Using no sea-terms? I should be puzzled to do that, sir” O’Brian goes onto my very short list of novelists who can write a philosopher character without accidentally making them a guru or a pseud. (Joyce, St Aubyn, Borges, Bolaño, Stoppard, Egan) * Austen is for everyone, but not everyone knows that.
After all the goddamn horror books & stories I've been reading lately, I needed a unicorn chaser. So I went back to O'Brian. It is a good decision. ====================== Taking another pass through O'Brian's wondrous saga. I've seen a couple of reproduction sailing vessels since the first time I read the series, so I'm looking forward to having them in mind while I read them again. So very good to be in Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin's world again. I am with child to read more. :)
I officially quit this book at page 82 and will not be returning. A classic it may be, but the plot moves so slowly and the writing is pedantic and difficult to get into unless you already know the terminology of sailing ships - which I do not. I don't fault the book for my lack of knowledge, but the characters are also a little one-note in terms of how they've come across. At nearly 20% of the way through the book, I just couldn't get into it. I'll leave this book to someone who enjoys naval history more than I do.
An atmospheric and immersive historical fiction. Great blend of fact and fiction. Very persuasive setting, filled with heavy naval jargon that was contemporary to that time. Because of that it was rather hard to listen in audio format. Pick up a companion book (Patrick O'Brian's Navy for example), and read it as a book. Many references and most of context will make much more sense.
