The Books: “Master & Commander” (Patrick O’Brian)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Master and Commander, by Patrick O’Brian.

I came to these books late. As in, RIGHT NOW. Master & Commander was the last book I read in 2007 – and I am now nearly finished with Desolation Island, the fifth in the series. I will certainly read all of them. I find them addictive – which was a surprise to me. I’m not sure what I was expecting but acute psychological observations filling page after page was not on the list. I expected the gripping war scenes (which are SO well written – you can actually see what is going on – and that is no small thing, especially for a landlubber reader like myself) – and I expected the evocations of the sea in all its different moods – but what I really really LOVE about these books is how psychological they are. The dissection of a man’s character (or a woman’s, too, actually) – what he is hiding, what he uses to cover up his soul/flaws/whatever, how he navigates social situations, his secret griefs and how they come to the surface – just all of that … O’Brian is so so good at putting our fellow man on display, in all his different guises – and seeing how he operates. I just love that. He has SUCH a good eye for personality and motivation. Not to mention, of course, how well he immerses us in that world and that time. Never once do I feel an anachronism – because, of course, not only is the technology different in the early years of the 19th century – but man is different too. I mean, not totally, of course – things like love, anger, fear, competition – we all have all of that in us, and we always have and I believe we always will. But Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin (and all the other characters) feel like 19th century people to me. Not that I know any 19th century people, but you know what I mean.

I just LOVE hanging out with these characters and I am so thrilled that I have so many more books to go, so I can just linger on in them … it’s an embarrassment of riches.

Master & Commander starts with Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin meeting for the first time in a small concert at a private house. I love that O’Brian chooses to introduce us to both of them in the context of music – which is so important to both of the main characters, and one of their main bonds of friendship. Some of my favorite bits of writing in these books is when Aubrey and Maturin meet up at evening in the captain’s quarters, and Aubrey plays his violin and Maturin plays his cello – It is a silent communion of friendship – and it is how they can be truly intimate with one another. They’re outside the realm of language and social niceties – they are communicating, freely and without barriers – delving themselves into Mozart, Bach, whoever. God, it’s just marvelous how O’Brian brings us to that particular scene again and again – and you know, each time it’s different. Because different things are being communicated. Sometimes it’s loneliness, sometimes it’s hope … sometimes it’s a long breath of fresh air after a weary day … It’s like they allow themselves to sink into their own personal experiences – after so much pure ACTION during the day. They can step back, and let the music do the talking for them. Wonderful stuff.

I also love Stephen Maturin’s diary entries. Terrific writing, first of all, on O’Brian’s part … I can hear Stephen’s voice. And his psychological and intellectual observations are like blood to a vampire for me. I can’t get enough.

So that’s the excerpt I chose from this book – one of his diary entries.

And one last thing. The main gift of these books (for me) is that I have truly come to love these people. I love Jack Aubrey, and I love Stephen Maturin. Maturin’s my favorite – and his journey, over the course of the books, has been so pleasing to me to read … his laudanum addiction, his intellectual and scientific curiosity, his observations, his love affair (Ouch!), his intelligence work, his hatred of tyranny and authority of any kind, his medical work and his devotion to it, his friendship with Aubrey … He has quickly become one of my favorite literary characters ever. I adore Jack Aubrey, too, but Stephen Maturin is my main man.

I LOVE THESE BOOKS.

EXCERPT FROM Master and Commander, by Patrick O’Brian.

It was an enchanting house for meditation, backing on to the very top of Mahon’s cliff and overhanging the merchants’ quay at a dizzy height – so high that the noise and business of the harbour was impersonal, no more than an accompaniment to thought. Stephen’s room was at the back, on this cool northern side looking over the water; and he sat there just inside the open window with his feet in a basin of water, writing his diary while the swifts (common, pallid and Alpine) raced shrieking through the torrid, quivering air between him and the Sophie, a toy-like object far down on the other side of the harbour, tied up to the victualling-wharf.

‘So James Dillon is a Catholic,’ he wrote in his minute and secret shorthand. ‘He used not to be. That is to say, he was not a Catholic in the sense that it would have made any marked difference to his behaviour, or have rendered the taking of an oath intolerably painful. He was not in any way a religious man. Has there been some conversion, some Loyolan change? I hope not. How many crypto-Catholics are there in the service? I should like to ask him; but that would be indiscreet. I remember Colonel Despard’s telling me that in England Bishop Challoner gave a dozen dispensations a year for the occasional taking of the sacrament according to the Anglican rite. Colonel T-, of the Gordon riots, was a Catholic. Did Despard’s remark refer only to the army? I never thought to ask him at the time. Quaere: is this the cause for James Dillon’s agitated state of mind? Yes, I think so. Some strong pressure is certainly at work. What is more, it appears to me that this is a critical time for him, a lesser climacteric – a time that will settle him in that particular course he will never leave again, but will persevere in for the rest of his life. It has often seemed to me that towards this period (in which we all three lie, more or less) men strike out their permanent characters; or have those characters struck into them. Merriment, roaring high spirits before this: then some chance concatenation, or some hidden predilection (or rather inherent bias) working through, and the man is in the road he cannot leave but must go on, making it deeper and deeper (a groove, or channel), until he is lost in his mere character – persona – no longer human, but an accretion of qualities belonging to this character. James Dillon was a delightful being. Now he is closing in. It is odd – will I say heart-breaking? – how cheerfulness goes: gaiety of mind, natural free-springing joy. Authority is its great enemy – the assumption of authority. I know few men over fifty that seem to me entirely human: virtually none who has long exercised authority. The senior post-captains here; Admiral Warne. Shrivelled men (shrivelled in essence: not, alas, in belly). Pomp, an unwholesome diet, a cause of choler, a pleasure paid too late and at too high a price, like lying with a peppered paramour. Yet Ld Nelson, by Jack Aubrey’s account, is as direct and unaffected and amiable a man as could be wished. So, indeed, in most ways is JA himself; though a certain careless arrogancy of power appears at times. His cheerfulness, at all events, is with him still. How long will it last? What woman, political cause, disappointment, wound, disease, untoward child, defeat, what strange surprising accident will take it all away? But I am concerned for James Dillon: he is as mercurial as he ever was – more so – only now it is all ten octaves lower down and in a darker key; and sometimes I am afraid in a black humour he will do himself a mischief. I would give so much to bring him cordially friends with Jack Aubrey. They are so alike in so many ways, and James is made for friendship: when he sees that he is mistaken about JA’s conduct, surely he will come round? But will he ever find this out, or is JA to be the focus of his discontent? If so there is little hope; for the discontent, the inner contest, must at times be very severe in a man so humorless (on occasion) and so very exigent upon the point of honour. He is obliged to reconcile the irreconcilable more often than most men; and he is less qualified to do so. And whatever he may say he knows as well as I do that he is in danger of a horrible confrontation: suppose it had been he who took Wolfe Tone in Lough Swilly? What if Emmet persuades the French to invade again? And what if Bonaparte makes friends with the Pope? It is not impossible. But on the other hand, JD is a mercurial creature, and if once, on the upward rise, he comes to love JA as he should, he will not change – never was a more loyal affection. I would give a great deal to bring them friends.’