Patrick O'Brian

Stephen Maturin tries to turn Napoleon's secret link to the Islamic world against the emperor

The Hundred Days (Vol. Book 19) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)

Gavin

The cracks finally show here. It’s O’Brian’s own mourning book apparently. Still good, still fantastically subtle alongside its cannonfire (witness Lady Clifford’s reaction to children).

At one point it looks like it’ll be another genre entirely, what with the land crossings, the fearsome order of literal Assassins who must be deprived of their blood money and the triple-crossing of wily pashas.

Great fun with sailor superstitions:

   “There is the rope, of course. He can get half a crown an inch for a rope that hanged a right willain. And there are the clothes, bought by them that think a pair of pissed and shitten breeches …’
‘Now then, Killick,’ cried Poll, ‘this ain’t one of your Wapping ale-houses or knocking-kens, so clap a stopper over that kind of talk. “Soiled linen” is what you mean.’
‘… are worth a guinea, for the sake of the luck they bring. But most of all it is the Hand of Glory that makes the hangman so eager for the work. Because why? Because it too is worth its weight in gold … well, in silver.’
‘What’s a Hand of Glory?’ asked the nervous voice.
‘Which it is the hand that did the deed – ripped the young girl up or slit the old gentleman’s throat – and that the hangman cuts off and holds up. And our Doctor has one in a jar which he keeps secret in the cabin and looks at by night with his mate, talking very low.”




  
“Do not take me for a bloody-minded man, Stephen, a death-or-glory swashbuckling cove. Believe me, I had rather see a first-rate burnt to the waterline than a ship’s boy killed or mutilated.”



(view spoiler)[The utterly abrupt death of Bonden, and the almost complete lack of public reaction to it, is too moving and outraging. 19 books of him - more depth to this tertiary character than most protagonists - and off he goes. O’Brian’s nihilistic treatment of him is the most artful moment in the book, since it gets a rise out of us while making its point. I won’t forget. All Jack allows himself is that he was “an admirable sailor”, as opposed to a devoted and comic and comically virtuous complete man. (hide spoiler)]


   “The doctors are going ashore,’ said Joe Plaice to his old friend Barret Bonden.
‘I don’t blame them,’ said Bonden. ‘I should like to see the sights of Spalato myself. I dare say they are going to burn a candle to some saint.’
‘That’s a genteel way of putting it,’ said Plaice.

At six bells in the middle watch, when all the larboard and most of the starboard guns had been drawn and reloaded with powder that Jack kept for saluting, the doctors came back. They were kindly helped up the side by powerful seamen and they crept, weary and bowed, towards their beds.
‘Wholly shagged out,’ said the gunner’s mate. ‘Dear me, they can’t hardly walk.’
‘Well, we are all of us human,’ said the yeoman of the sheets.”

The Hundred Days (Vol. Book 19) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)

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