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The Surgeon's Mate, by Patrick O'Brian
Feb. 3rd, 2020 09:57 pmThe trouble is, I don't really want to write anything specific about this book, because it's book seven. I am so enjoying the Aubrey and Maturin series. At this point I am happy simply when the main characters act like themselves, which they very reliably do: Stephen, enthusiastic natural philosopher, subtle-minded surgeon who will never learn not to fall off the sides of ships or out of their rigging; Jack, no man more astutely daring when adjusting a ship's sails to wring the most safe speed out of the wind conditions, no man worse-suited to a life on land, getting into debt and sleeping with the wives of superior officers with a cheerful misguided certainty that everything will be fine which can be quite painful to read. Each helping the other through, each looking at the other with the deeply loving superiority of someone more than half blind to his own faults, each the other's closest friend. Whenever I hope their mistakes will pass without consequences, I'm secretly also pleased in my certainty that they absolutely won't. But their virtues never entirely escape reward, either.
There are books I can read when half asleep, and books I take with me on holiday for sheer easy pleasure; these books are the second but not the first, because O'Brian writes with indirection (often puts his best jokes in it) and generally requires one to be conscious enough to visualise the physical layout of a situation in some detail. He has set pieces involving ships where I read along going, 'I have no idea exactly what's happening, but I know exactly what's generally happening!' and on the other hand there are set pieces where I feel I'm seeing it unfold, the ships changing sail, trying to intersect each other's courses. (I'm not sure whether the difference is complexity or writing clarity so much as my state of mind). His descriptions of life at sea have such reality that I've been reading his voyages and battles for seven books and they aren't growing any more repetitive than social interactions do. He gives exposition to people who have interesting motives for saying it or interesting ways of hearing it. (In book one a lot of the necessary 'here is how ships work' material is softened considerably by being told to Stephen, who barely grasps a word of it. In this book, the plot of the previous two books is summarised by Jack to a woman he wants to impress, which... goes well enough that it goes badly). When I turned to the first Temeraire book after this, even the addition of dragons didn't stop the world feeling thinner and less lived-in, but on the other hand these books give me a baseline such that I felt a vivid sense of the whole of Patrick O'Brian's version of the Navy occurring offstage at all times. (And oh my lord, there are officers in the O'Brian version who would cope badly with the social implications of hatching a dragon egg). O'Brian can set up and deliver a set piece over chapters or book-quarters; he's also delightfully willing to set up a plot point exactly as though it was going to unfold conventionally and then render it irrelevant. In this book, Stephen and Jack spent a while working simultaneously on different solutions to the same problem, and there's no telling which if either of them will succeed or if they're going to cancel each other out disastrously and be rescued by someone else.
Of this book in particular: well, I wondered if that would happen, and I am most interested to see what follows. There was something I thought ought to have gone horribly wrong which didn't, which both saddens and gladdens me. There, a most useful report.
I must also regretfully say that this is not a book in which Stephen transports a problematic and unusual animal by ship. Neither beehive nor sloth. I will be expecting one in the next book.
There are books I can read when half asleep, and books I take with me on holiday for sheer easy pleasure; these books are the second but not the first, because O'Brian writes with indirection (often puts his best jokes in it) and generally requires one to be conscious enough to visualise the physical layout of a situation in some detail. He has set pieces involving ships where I read along going, 'I have no idea exactly what's happening, but I know exactly what's generally happening!' and on the other hand there are set pieces where I feel I'm seeing it unfold, the ships changing sail, trying to intersect each other's courses. (I'm not sure whether the difference is complexity or writing clarity so much as my state of mind). His descriptions of life at sea have such reality that I've been reading his voyages and battles for seven books and they aren't growing any more repetitive than social interactions do. He gives exposition to people who have interesting motives for saying it or interesting ways of hearing it. (In book one a lot of the necessary 'here is how ships work' material is softened considerably by being told to Stephen, who barely grasps a word of it. In this book, the plot of the previous two books is summarised by Jack to a woman he wants to impress, which... goes well enough that it goes badly). When I turned to the first Temeraire book after this, even the addition of dragons didn't stop the world feeling thinner and less lived-in, but on the other hand these books give me a baseline such that I felt a vivid sense of the whole of Patrick O'Brian's version of the Navy occurring offstage at all times. (And oh my lord, there are officers in the O'Brian version who would cope badly with the social implications of hatching a dragon egg). O'Brian can set up and deliver a set piece over chapters or book-quarters; he's also delightfully willing to set up a plot point exactly as though it was going to unfold conventionally and then render it irrelevant. In this book, Stephen and Jack spent a while working simultaneously on different solutions to the same problem, and there's no telling which if either of them will succeed or if they're going to cancel each other out disastrously and be rescued by someone else.
Of this book in particular: well, I wondered if that would happen, and I am most interested to see what follows. There was something I thought ought to have gone horribly wrong which didn't, which both saddens and gladdens me. There, a most useful report.
I must also regretfully say that this is not a book in which Stephen transports a problematic and unusual animal by ship. Neither beehive nor sloth. I will be expecting one in the next book.
