HarperCollins, Copyright 1970, 412 pagesISBN: 0 00 616626 1
Read: April 2010 (at age 32)
First time read
If you haven’t read it:
This is the first book of a long series. It’s very technical. Don’t read it unless you really like sailing jargon. Do read it if you want an accurate description of life at sea in the 1800’s.
From the back of the book:
Master and Commander is the first of Patrick O’Brian’s now famous Aubrey/Maturin novels, regarded by many as the greatest series of historical novels ever written. It establishes the friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey RN and Stephen Maturin, who becomes his secretive ship’s surgeon and an intelligence agent. It contains all the action and excitement which could possibly be hoped for in a historical novel, but it also displays the qualities which have put O’Brian far ahead of any of his competitors: his depiction of the detail of life aboard a Nelsonic man-of-war, of weapons, food, conversation and ambience, of the landscape and of the sea. O’Brian’s portrayal of each of these is faultless and the sense of period throughout is acute. His power of characterization is above all masterly.
My Reactions (spoilers ahoy!)
Overall:
The characters were interesting, and the setting was great, but they all got lost in the mess of lack of plot and overly descriptive passages describing the technical details of sailing a ship in the early 1800’s and lack of definable story arc. It just didn’t work for me.
Rating: 2
Characters:
Fair - Several years ago, I watched the movie, “Master and Commander” starring Russell Crowe as Capt. Jack Aubrey, and Paul Bettany as Dr. Stephen Maturin. That movie wasn’t based on this book, but it used characters and themes from this series. In my mind’s eye, I kept seeing the good doctor as Mr. Bettany, and that alone made me keep turning the pages.
I kept seeing all kinds of potential in the characters; however, there was a huge amount of “tell, don’t show” to describe thoughts, feelings, and relationships in this book, and the actions as told didn’t all make sense. The very start of the book is one example of this – at an evening musical performance, the two main characters irritate each other almost to the point of dueling. In the morning, they meet in the street, go for coffee, and become the best of friends. How? Why? I don’t get it. And I’m sure that if I really worked at it, I could find some way to justify it in the context of the story, but it just didn’t seem to fit.
Even the “show” sections of character development were surrounded by so much telling that they lost a lot of punch.
As an aside, Russell Crowe didn’t work in my minds eye for the Captain at all – the descriptions of a large or even obese man nicknamed “Goldilocks” didn’t fit him at all.
Premise:
Fine. Describing the voyages of His Majesty’s sloop, the Sophie. We have a newly chartered Captain of a small warship, and the story follows along his travels for the first while of his command.
Setting:
Good. The high seas c. 1800 is a wonderful place to spend a few hours reading about. There were many well-described sea battles which take the place of setting
Plot:
Weak. As far as I can tell, there was no story arc. There was no real conflict, or villain. There was no achievement, no terrible actions causing the captain to search his soul and overcome, or fail at. There was was a series of naval battles and prize seizures to show that our good captain was a good seaman, and then the book ended.
Readability:
Poor. This was a hard book to read because of the technical emphasis on the technical side of sailing. I now know that there are sails called maintopgallants, and mainstaysails and royals, and stunningsails, and I’m not sure that I really care about all these things. And there are pages and pages of very technical description. If you care about these things, then this book might be a good one for you. I like technical descriptions, in general – I enjoyed the early Tom Clancy’s because of that, but this was just too much for me.
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