Patrick O’Brian

Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin tales are widely acknowledged to be the greatest series of historical novels ever written.

The Fortune of War (Aubrey/Maturin Series, Book 6)

Patrick O'Brian

A historical sea saga, first published in 1979, in which Captain Jack Aubrey arrives in the Dutch East Indies to find himself appointed to the command of the fastest and best armed frigate in the British Navy. From the author of MASTER AND COMMANDER, POST CAPTAIN, HMS SURPRISE and THE MAURITIUS COMMAND.

The Fortune of War

Gavin

America as very foreign land. Jack making friends in the asylum is so fun!

  intelligence services were something else again, little worlds of their own, often inhabited by strange, extreme beings: he knew something of the French and Spanish; he had seen the English in the Dublin of 1798, and the riding-school in Stephen’s Green, where suspects were put to the question. Infamous creatures, most of the questioners; but even honourable, humane men were capable of almost anything for unselfish motives.


The depiction of slavery is very low-key - Diana is not fussed about it for instance - but this is because O’Brian shows the glossy civilised Southern surface and the sick pressure underneath: 

  [The slave], reaching behind Johnson for an empty cup, dropped it on the floor; Johnson whipped round, and Stephen saw her face turn grey as she stared in naked terror, her arms down by her sides; but Johnson turned back to Stephen with a laugh – ‘Where would the china-makers be, if no cups were ever broke?’ – and went on talking about the ivory-billed and the pileated woodpeckers.


Johnson is a good villain - charming, fluent, energetic, with his violence and vice always third-party, deniable - but a bit similar to Canning.

I finally catch Maturin in some bullshit:

  “...after all a monarchy is best.’
‘When you look about the world, and view the monarchs in it – I do not refer to your own, of course – can you really maintain that the hereditary king cuts a very shining figure?’
‘I cannot. Nor is that to the point: the person, unless he be extraordinarily good or extraordinarily bad, is of no importance. It is the living, moving, procreating, sometimes speaking symbol that counts.’
‘But surely mere birth without any necessary merit is illogical?’
‘Certainly, and that is its great merit. Man is a deeply illogical being, and must be ruled illogically. Whatever that frigid prig Bentham may say, there are innumerable motives that have nothing to do with utility. In good utilitarian logic a man does not sell all his goods to go crusading, nor does he build cathedrals; still less does he write verse. There are countless pieties without a name that find their focus in a crown. It is as well, I grant you, that the family should have worn it beyond the memory of man; for your recent creations do not answer – they are nothing in comparison of your priest-king, whose merit is irrelevant, whose place cannot be disputed, nor made the subject of a recurring vote.”

Poetry, being quicker than novels and requiring zero capital, comes out pretty well on a real utilitarian view. Cathedrals are good, it's just that they have to wait, after the homeless shelters. And never mind that he justifies illogical monarchy, illogical governance with a logical argument (tacitly anyway - it is Hobbes’ plea for stability, any stability, or maybe an appeal to the great deadweight of political manoeuvring). Never mind Maturin’s own independence fervour, hatred of tyranny, and half republicanism.

Not that this demeans the book, nor my affection for him, I’m just not used to agreeing with characters so much and it was a relief that Maturin is so real that he does eventually err, or say things just for the sound of them.

Jack Aubrey, commander of the best-armed frigate in the Royal Navy, leaves the Dutch East Indies to return to England in a dispatch vessel, but the outbreak of the War of 1812 delays his journey and draws him into bloody battle

The Fortune of War (Aubrey/Maturin Series, Book 6)

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