A Square-Rigged Saga

By John Skow

Not one of those overweening lists and counterlists of 100 greatest novels that provoked such harrumphing a few months ago mentioned the remarkable British novelist Patrick O'Brian. This, his beguiled readers could argue, demeans not O'Brian but the lists. To O'Brian loyalists--readers and re-readers, hangers-about on the O'Brian website, buyers of O'Brian calendars, dictionaries, three-cornered hats (a lie) and period foul-weather gear (another)--what might be open to dispute is whether to reserve, say, one slot high on a new "greatest" roster, or 18 or 20 places very close to the top.

This is because the author's masterwork is an astonishing naval saga set in Napoleonic times during England's long sea war with France, and it extends now to 19 closely linked novels. The latest, The Hundred Days (W.W. Norton; 282 pages; $24) is just out. And O'Brian, now close to 85, is busily at work on a 20th.

This is not genre writing, agreeable trash to be pigeonholed. If salt-soaked comparison is required, O'Brian's adventures suggest Joseph Conrad's sea tales more than those of C.S. Forester and his Horatio Hornblower. Conrad's prevailing mood is darker; though O'Brian can summon darkness and defeat, he is more arch and owlish. But as Forester did, O'Brian novelizes serially. The precarious lives of two memorable characters, friends and shipmates, thread through his books.

Jack Aubrey is a fighting captain, brave and beefy, unsubtle except in naval matters and mathematics. Stephen Maturin, Irish and Catalan, sallow and scrawny, is a gifted surgeon who can whip off a shattered arm or leg and Bob's your uncle; he is also a naturalist, a rare linguist, and a shrewd intelligence agent for the British Admiralty.

A civilizing nicety in this most civilized of narrations is that the two are passable amateur musicians. Maturin plays the cello, and as Aubrey admits, "I scrape a little, sir. I torment a fiddle from time to time." As chapters end--chapters of blood, crashing seas and weevily sea biscuit--the two are likely to take solace together, tormenting Locatelli or Boccherini. Friendship, lifelong and ramified, between these two and with recurring minor characters, is the bedrock theme of the novels.

Author O'Brian, who has sailed on square-rigged ships, is a meticulous naval scholar and medical historian. The battles in which Aubrey distinguishes himself and Maturin repairs the wounded are real, borrowed from history (the two are passengers on H.M.S. Java when the U.S.S. Constitution, now a tourist attraction in Boston Harbor, defeats the British ship off Brazil in his sixth novel, The Fortune of War) and retold in language nearly understandable to a landsman ("A burton-tackle to the chesstree. Lead aft to a snatch block fast to the aftermost ringbolts and forward free. Look alive there!"). In the new novel Napoleon has just escaped from Elba, and the two heroes must block a huge shipment of Algerian gold intended to pay the Emperor's Muslim mercenaries.

O'Brian is also a shameless wag, who early in the series has the hulking Aubrey escape overland from the French disguised as a dancing bear, led by Maturin as bear trainer, and who is not above calling a ferocious Spanish xebec-frigate defeated by Aubrey the Cacafuego, which means exactly what first-year Spanish students think it means (s___-fire).

As with any good marine fiction, the sea itself is background, scene shifter and, from time to storm-lashed time, main character. But the series swims also on an ocean of wondrous language, in which inept seamen, for instance, are not only "sad brutish grobians," but "froward dirty disreputable rough good-for-nothing disorderly ragabashes and raparees." If there is a serious flaw, it is that since the novels are mostly about men, they are probably mostly for men. O'Brian writes good female characters, but mostly they remain ashore (and one of the best, Maturin's flamboyant wife Diana, dies offstage, in a coaching accident, before The Hundred Days begins).

The onlie begetter of this oceanic marvel lives a life of ritualized civility in the South of France. Tea at four (or "I'm afraid I grow fractious"), whiskey at six. An interview remains politely impersonal. He has sailed; he studied medicine; he sees great value in the rigorous, hierarchical politeness of the Royal Navy in Aubrey's time. But he admits that he has forgotten some details of his novels 10 or 15 books ago and shares some uncertainties about those to come. Not long ago he was at work on Chapter 3 of the untitled 20th novel, and he remarked, rather direly, "I have to last." Then he reflected that although the new novel in progress was supposed to bring Aubrey full circle, "I'm not sure whether I shan't take him a bit beyond full circle, with one or two incidents at the very height of the Royal Navy's glory. I should like simply for my own amusement--and because I don't really see how I can bear easily to live without writing--and at least for my own pleasure--to write one more, or perhaps two."

--Reported by Bruce Crumley/Paris

With reporting by Bruce Crumley/Paris