The Sheila Variations

Naval mastery

I know I have a ton of Patrick O'Brian fans out there. This link is for you. A terrific review of W. W. Norton’s release of Patrick O’Brian’s Complete Aubrey/Maturin Novels including the unfinished twenty-first.

In every genre, there are one or two writers whose excellence of craft raises the form to art. Patrick O’Brian, who died in January 2000 at 86, so honed his craft that the Aubrey/Maturin novels are peer to the great sagas of the nineteenth century.

The review is not just a book review. It's a fan's raving about books he loves and cherishes. It's amazing, you get completely swept away by his enthusiasm.

A wonderful excerpt from the review about historical fiction:

O’Brian’s clarity in writing character makes him a peer of the great nineteenth-century novelists: Tolstoy, Dickens, Flaubert, George Eliot, all of whom wrote historical novels. Vanity Fair, Middlemarch, and War and Peace are to my mind the three greatest novels of the nineteenth century, and they are all set in the historical past. The stature of the historical novel—like history painting—is quite diminished today. I suppose the genre is seen as less than fully creative in an age when the advice given in writing programs and workshops is to “write what you know.” It is quite silly since some of our best writing is in the historical genre. The now-forgotten J. G. Farrell was in this tradition. He died too young—at forty-four—to reach his prime, but his last finished novel, The Singapore Grip (1978), is certainly one of the finest literary works of the 1970s. This satiric retelling of the fall of Singapore in 1941 is poignant, but also laugh-aloud funny. (The “Naming of Parts” sequence is the most amusing bit of fiction I know post-Lucky Jim.) A contemporary historical novelist worthy of mention in the same breath as O’Brian and Farrell is Derek Robinson. I cannot recommend his trilogy about the Royal Flying Corps in World War I—Goshawk Squadron (1971), War Story (1987), and Hornet’s Sting (1991)—too highly. They are caustic, utterly modern, and offer penetrating insight into the minds of First World War pilots.

“Insight” is very much the right word for what the finest historical fiction can give us. History books can be very dry and need space to establish mastery. Fiction can at its best take this mastery and package it better for the reader. It can draw the reluctant in and teach factual knowledge almost by accident.

Totally. Go and read the review - very much worth your while.

Posted by sheila