H.M.S Surprise [Hardcover]

In the setting of the sea voyages, the dual romantic dramas of Captain Aubrey and Doctor Maturin continue to unfold. What reader can truly care that the bold and dashing Diana Villiers has been subjected to all sorts of low, nasty gossip, when Maturin has realised that his love for her has survived it? And will Aubrey's fiance, Sophie, break their engagement in the face of his long and silent absence at sea? Especially with a charming new minister in the neighborhood...

Always before, in spite of rivalries and breaks, the good captain and doctor's fortunes have risen and fallen pretty much together. But in this book, only one will win through to joy.

Aside from the poignant human drama, this book holds the most dramatic description of a storm at sea that I have ever read. O'Brian's prose drove my heart rate to amazing heights for the usually non-athletic pursuit of reading! His gift for succinct description is purely wonderful.

Another wonderful book in a series of wonderful books.

As H. M. S. Surpries opens, political machinations cost Jack his prize money (earned in the previous book0, and Stephen's cover in Spain is blown. As a result, and also because Stephen is scheming to see his lover Diana again (who has been taken by her keeper Richard Canning to India), Jack takes command of the aged frigate H.M.S. Surprise, and is sent to Cambodia (stopping in India) to deliver the new British envoy to the Sultan of Kampong.

Thus the setup for a long, wonderful, account of the voyage to the Orient and back. The pleasures of this book are remarkably varied: high comedy, such as the famous drunken sloth incident; high adventure, as the men of the Surprise battle not only the South Atlantic at its fiercest, but also the French; and bitter disappointment and even tragedy, in Stephen's seesaw relationship with Diana, as well as Stephen's involvement with a young Indian girl.

The pleasures of this book, however, are not restricted to a fine plot. The ongoing development of the characters of Jack and Stephen, and of their complex and fully described friendship, is a major achievement. In addition, the many minor characters are fascinating: the envoy Mr. Stanhope, Stephen's Indian friend, the various ship's officers and men, other ship captains, and so on. And O'Brian's depiction of the building of an effective crew, the relationship of captain to officers to men, is another fascinating detail, and something he revisits from book to book, as Jack encounters different crews in different circumstances. Finally, O'Brian is a fine writer of prose, with a faintly old-fashioned style, well poised to evoke the atmosphere of the time of which he writes to readers of our time, and consistently quotable, in his dry fashion.

Jack and Stephen are heroic in certain aspects of their characters, but they are both multi-faceted characters, with terrible flaws and endearing crotchets in addition to their accomplishments. And they truly come across to this reader as characters of their time, and not 20th Century people cast back into the past. Even Stephen's very contemporary racial and religious attitudes are well-motivated by his background, and expressed in language which reeks wonderfully of his time: "Stuff. I have the greatest esteem for Jews, if anyone can speak of a heterogeneous great body of men in such a meaningless, illiberal way."

I recommend all these books highly. It was with great difficulty the first time through the series that I restrained myself, upon finishing each book, from immediately starting in on the next one.

How can you possibly dislike a book that contains a line such as this: "Jack, you have debauched my sloth." Yes, O'Brian has a certain amount of levity, although it is often hidden underneath the layers of the manners of the time. His style is somewhat like that of Jane Austen, where the most cutting of phrases are being said in the nicest of ways. You either like this sort of thing or don't. I like it, when I catch it, but I yearn for annotations, just knowing that there are some subtleties that are escaping me.