Surgeons Mate #7 [Paperback]

The Surgeon's Mate picks up where The Fortune of War left off. In the previous installment our boys had escaped from Boston just in time to participate in the epic battle between the Chesapeake and the Shannon. Victorious they arrive in Halifax and more trouble begins. Aubrey's lack of land sense and Maturin's unrequited love for Diana continue to cause them problems. In fact they are the underlying tensions that follow them through each episode in the novel. Along the way we are treated to O'Brian's philosophical discussions between his two quirky heroes and among their assorted friends and associates. Like the others in the series The Surgeon's Mate is a gem.

Unlike earlier novels the action in The Surgeon's Mate is non-stop. O'Brian, always excellent in his characterization and use of language, has considerably improved the pacing from the earliest series entries. The reader is treated to the heroes travelling from Halifax to England to the Baltic to Paris and back to England in a rousing tour-de-force. Does O'Brian lose anything with the faster pace of The Surgeon's Mate? Absolutely not, he still has the strengths of the earlier books.

One aspect of the series that has made it great is the ability of O'Brian to set some of the thorny discussions of our times in the context of the early 19th century. In The Surgeon's Mate, the abortion issue creates a marvelous balanced tension. O'Brian's presentation is even handed, airing both sides of the debate but ultimately not choosing sides. O'Brian has moderated some of the great debates of the last 30 years in his Aubrey Maturin series while providing great naval action along the way.

Perhaps it's time to put O'Brian's novels in a special category- six stars.

This fifteenth novel in the series is not one of the author's better efforts, I'm afraid. The SURPRISE has just left Sidney Cove when a female stowaway is discovered in the cable tier. She turns out to be Clarissa, a transported convict under the protection of Midshipman Oakes (for which almost no explanation is given), to whom she is quickly married. ("Clarissa Oakes," in fact, was the English title of this volume, and I hve no idea why they changed it.) Most of the remainder of the book is taken up with the ship's progress across the South Seas and, although there is a land battle at the very end (and even that experienced at one remove), the bulk of the story is an exploration of Clarissa's character and how it was formed, as well as the extremely divisive effect of her somewhat warped personality on the ship's officers and company. As usual, O'Brian shows great skill in narrating a plethora of overlapping subplots, both supporting and complementary, most of them depending on the shifting relationships among the inhabitants of a closed universe -- a ship at sea for weeks and months at a time out of sight of land -- and for that reason the book is certainly worth reading. But if you're in search of a more usual naval adventure, this isn't quite it.

Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin moves through the series from primarily books about Captain Jack Aubrey to one primarily one about Dr. Stephen Maturin. And while it would be a simplification to say that it was also a shift from swash buckling and sea-fights to espionage and character studies (sea battles also being about espionage and deception and character studies), that too takes place. The Truelove (The Clarissa Oakes outside the U.S.) is well along the scale towards espionage and character studies. In many ways the whole series progresses as O'Brien matured as a writer and less mature readers would want to start with the first book in the series and progress through them slowly, reading perhaps one a year with this book coming in one's early thirties. As a reviewer wrote earlier, this is probably not a book for most high school readers. Having said that, it is one of the best books in the series, with the introduction of a one of the series most interesting characters, Clarissa Oakes, and the tying up of a couple of earlier, unfinished stories. Now that I have finished the series, it also reminds me that O'Brian never finished the series, with certain isolated eventss in the book (for those having read the book, for example, involving Puolani) that surely would have been connected with future books.

The question of naval terminology is a hard one. O'Brien could have, like Sir Walter Scott, put in footnotes explaining it (and perhaps some historical background as well, older readers may not be aware that many young people, for example, have no idea what the Napoleonic Wars were, much less the enclosure movement in England, important in a later volume), but that certainly would have broken up the flow of the books. I would very much like to see a volume put out giving a chapter by chapter book by book glossary of naval terminology and historical background published.

So, while this is probably not the best book to introduce the young, male high school reader to the series; it might very well be the best introduction for the, perhaps stereotypically, older and perhaps female reader.