Name: H.M.S. Surprise
ISBN: 9780006499176

Patrick O'Brian

Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin tales are widely acknowledged to be the greatest series of historical novels ever written. H.M.S. Surprise follows the variable fortunes of Captain Jack Aubrey's career in Nelson's navy as he attempts to hold his ground against admirals, colleagues and the enemy, accepting a mission to convey a British ambassador to the East Indies. The voyage takes him and his friend Stephen Maturin to the strange sights and smells of the Indian sub-continent, and through the archipelago of spice islands where the French have a near-overwhelming superiority. Rarely has a novel managed to convey more vividly the fragility of a sailing ship in a wild sea. Rarely has a historical novelist combined action and lyricism of style in the way that O' Brian does. His superb sense of place, brilliant characterisation, and a vigour and joy of writing lift O'Brian above any but the most exalted of comparisons.

H.M.S. Surprise

After rescuing a friend from French torture chambers, Captain Aubrey attempts to save the British merchant fleet in the Indian Ocean

H. M. S. Surprise (Vol. Book 3) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)

Gavin

I shed a tear for Dil.


  Killick was a cross-grained bastard, who supposed that if he sprinkled his discourse with a good many sirs, the words in between did not signify: but still he had procured this coffee, these eggs, this butter, this soft tack, on shore and had put them on the table the morning after a hot engagement—ship still cleared for action and the galley knocked sideways by the fire from Cape Béar. Jack had known Killick ever since his first command, and as he had risen in rank so Killick's sullen independence had increased; he was angrier than usual now because Jack had wrecked his number three uniform and lost one of his gloves: 'Coat torn in five places—cutlass slash in the forearm which how can I ever darn that? Bullet 'ole all singed, never get the powder-marks out. Breeches all a-hoo, and all this nasty blood everywhere, like you'd been a-wallowing in a lay-stall, sir. What Miss would say, I don't know, sir. God strike me blind. Epaulette 'acked, fair 'acked to pieces. (Jesus, what a life.)

Quotations from Dryden throughout, nice dark tart verses.

  Once he had established that Jack and Hervey were connected with families he knew, he treated them as human beings; all the others as dogs—but as good, quite intelligent dogs in a dog-loving community. He was ceremonious, naturally kind, and he had a great and oppressive sense of duty. 

On the vulgarity of true aristos:

  General Aubrey belonged to another civilisation, a civilisation untouched by the age of enlightenment or the spread of the bourgeoisie, one that had passed away in the counties nearer London long before Sophie was born and one to which her essentially urban, respectable, middle-class family had never belonged at any time. She had been brought up in a quiet, staid, manless house and she did not know what to make of his gallantries, his praise of Jack's taste (Cecilia would have been more at home with him); nor of his observation that Jack was a sad dog—always had been—but she was not to mind it—Jack's mother never had. Sophia would not mind half a dozen love-children, he was sure. 

On innovation:

  “But any gait, all of 'em you see in this weather line, is what we call twelve-hundred-tonners; though to be sure some gauges thirteen and even fifteen hundred ton, Thames measurement. Wexford, there, with her brass fo'c'sle eight-pounder winking in the sun, she does: but we call her a twelve hundred ton ship.'
   'Sir, might it not be simpler to call her a fifteen hundred ton ship?'
   'Simpler, maybe: but it would never do. You don't want to be upsetting the old ways. Oh dear me, no. God's my life, if the Captain was to hear you “carrying on in that reckless Jacobin, democratical line, why, I dare say he would turn you adrift on a three-inch plank, with both your ears nailed down to it, to learn you bashfulness, the way he served three young gentlemen in the Med. No, no: you don't want to go arsing around with the old ways: the French did so, and look at the scrape it has gotten them into” 

One jarring bit: Stephen the caring pacifist is extremely quick to fight lethal duels over minor points of honour. This is partly down to his aiming to be nonlethal, but come on.

  ‘He was blaming his particular friend for romantic notions the other day—the friend who is to marry the daughter of that woman we saw just now—and if I had not been so shocked by his condition, I should have been tempted to laugh. He is himself a perfect Quixote: an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution until '93; a United Irishman until the rising, Lord Edward's adviser—his cousin, by the way—'
   'Is he a Fitzgerald?'
   'The wrong side of the blanket. And now Catalan independence. Or perhaps I should say, Catalan independence from the beginning, simultaneously with the others. But always heart and soul, blood and purse in some cause from which he can derive no conceivable personal benefit’ 

Surprisingly good afterword by Charlton Heston. The list of O’Brian megafans is funny: Iris Murdoch, Tom Stoppard, Joan Didion, David Mamet, Eudora Welty, Mark Knopfler, Walter Cronkite, George Will. Is there anything else they agree on?

H.M.S. Surprise

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