Master and Commander [Paperback]

To be honest, at first I found the book confusing and boring. The reader is faced with a number of unfamiliarities: the time period, the culture of the Royal navy, the dialect, the nautical terms, the political situations, the standards of behavior, the geography, the Royal Society with its Baconian approach to science, and state-legitimized piracy, to name but a few. I spent about 6 months reading this book ( I usually read a book in a week or two), and would put it down for awhile and read something else. After three or four chapters, I realized that there was little value in looking up all the references to various sails and parts of ships. From this point on I really started to enjoy the book, and by the time Aubrey has his first piratical adventure, I was hooked. After I finished "Master and Commander", I read the other 19 books in 11 months.

Some advice:

1. Read the books in order. Characters appear, disappear, and re-appear throughout the books. Sometimes they die, but usually not.
2. Read the second book "Post Captain" very carefully. IMHO, it is the best book of all 20. This book focuses on developing the Maturin character as a spy; a sophisticated man of wealth, background, and education; a drug user; and a nerdy womanizer - sort of an 19th century cross between James Bond and Bill Gates.
3. Unless you are compelled by an obsessive-compulsive disorder to do otherwise, ignore the thousands of detailed nautical terms. Sometimes they have some value, but generally only in the case of a nautical joke. I bought one of the suggested help books ("Dictionary of Nautical Terms") and found it to be generally useless in defining terms used in 19th century sailing.
4. Keep a general US and World history text handy. This will be useful for some quick background when Aubrey is involved in some minor war, especially the ones I slept thru in world history classes in college.
5. I looked up a lot of terms in the OED.
6. Have fun. These are easy reads. It was fun to discover a unread series of 20 great books to read at my age. It was like "discovering" the works of Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, McPhee, and Updike in high school.

For twenty books we follow the adventures of this pair, around the world, in love and war, sun and storm, battle and peace, at sea and on land. The reader who stays with them - and it is not uncommon to read all twenty books, one after the other - is in for a feast, a remarkable journey through this world of sea-captains and their ladies, spies and spymasters, politicians, convicts, bureaucrats and soldiers. Grand ladies and scoundrels, thiefs, bailiffs and bums.

But I stray. This is the first volume, and like all the others it stands alone as a story. It is the story of Lucky Jack Aubrey and his cruises in the sloop HMS Sophie up and down the Mediterranean, but chiefly off the coasts of France and Spain. There is victory and promotion, death and failure, glory and satisfaction before we get to the end.

The atmosphere is unerringly authentic. Every word is researched, every setting, every ship, every part of a ship. We are taken aloft in a square-rigger, we man the guns in a sea-battle, and we line the rails as she comes home to port. All in exquisite detail.

But this is more than Hornblower or his later imitators. This is a step up. These battles and characters, settings and seamen are far, far more than the "fighting sail" equivalent of today's technothriller. No cardboard characters here! Every one is finely drawn, acting according to their own desires and ambitions, with their own habits and mannerisms. Here is Mowett, declaiming snatches of poetry, remarkably turgid poetry that was published by the yard in those days. (Thankfully we never hear more than a verse or two). Here is Killick, bringing in the Captain's salt horse, Midshipman Babbington interested in the ladies but amazingly coy about it. Barret Bonden, Tom Pullings - a host of characters!

The humour, the gentle good humour, sets this book aside from all the others with a sailing ship on the cover. There are wonderful jokes, there is restrained word play, there are hidden treasures of subtlety, for Patrick O'Brian was a deep old file, and every now and then he sets the reader up for a prank, all the more pleasurable for being found out and appreciated at its proper moment.

One remarkable aspect is the popularity of this series amongst the fairer sex. This is not a catalogue of sea-battles and nineteenth century naval technology, but a tale of manners and relationships that would do Jane Austen proud.

We feel for the characters, suffering and smiling with them as the narrative unfolds. And we can feel the relationships folding in turn - Jack and Stephen might begin the story as mere acquaintances, but they end as firm friends, one of the best and most pleasant friendships in literature.

For, rest assured, this is literature. A most amazingly pleasant novel-series that is both fun to read and yet contains enough deep insights and discussions of fundamental themes for any university course.

I must confess I am biased. I read Hornblower as a schoolboy and began reading his imitators - Bolitho, Ramage and the rest. I'd buy each book as they were published but as time went by I perservered with only one author, and the annual wait for the next Patrick O'Brian seemed to stretch out to double or triple the time. I have now read them all, for Patrick O'Brian died as the Twentieth Century ended, but I still read and re-read them for the sheer pleasure of the reading. And I am a busy man, with piles of wonderful books stacked high on my bedside table, but there is nothing in fiction quite so pleasant as to return to the dear old barky, hear the strains of Locatelli from the great stern-cabin, spy Killick waiting by the door with coffee and toasted cheese, and a cheery voice from the Gunroom cry "Rouse out another bottle there - can't you see we've got a guest?"

O happy meeting, and happy voyage in this first of a great novel series. Dear reader, do yourself a favour and plunge into this wonderful world. ...