The Genius of Patrick O'Brian
The author Patrick O'Brian passed away in 2000 at the age of 85, leaving a wide-ranging legacy — most notably his unfinished twenty volume series of historical fiction chronicling the adventures at sea (and on land) during the early nineteenth century of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. According to the BBC, O'Brian sold over two million books. Brought to an even wider public with Peter Weir's 2003 film Master and Commander, starring Russell Crowe (grossing over $200 million worldwide), nevertheless O'Brian remains outside the canon of great works in English literature.
Many, including his son, thought O'Brian a bastard. He abandoned his first wife and two children (one dying at the time), leaving them nothing, to set up with Mary Tolstoy (née Wicksteed). Immediately upon remarriage to Mary he changed his name from Richard Patrick Russ to Patrick O'Brian, deliberately obscuring the lineage from his German-Jewish father and English mother. Several moves later, in 1949, the O'Brians relocated to Collioure, a small French Mediterranean town a couple kilometers north of the Spanish border. There they stayed until Mary's death in 1998, whereupon Patrick moved to Dublin, residing at Trinity College and continuing to write until the end. He was an intensely private man who, once he had achieved fame, strongly discouraged reporters from looking into his life.
An obituary by his son paints an extremely unflattering picture, as does a biography by Nikolai Tolstoy, his stepson, who knew him perhaps as well as anyone other than his wife. A "psychological basket case" sums up the more sympathetic view. No doubt his posthumous reputation has suffered from such revelations.
Many critics put Patrick O'Brian on par with writers such as Jane Austen, for his ability to lyrically recreate the inner world of a particular society. In his case it's an even more astonishing accomplishment, based as it is not on personal experience but on reading and research. Beyond that, O'Brian serves up epic themes of duty, honor, courage, kindness and humanity — the many traits he himself possessed seemingly as partial expressions. And one especially cherishes his story telling because it is droll.
I've read through the entire twenty volume Aubrey-Maturin series at least three or four times, and am starting it again, as I am inclined to do when I run out of less interesting fare. (I don't consider the unfinished twenty first volume one of the corpus.) Perhaps this is extreme on my part, I don't know. But I rate O'Brian far, far above most other authors and am grateful for his books. If you haven't read any you might well enjoy them.
Posted by George Kenney on June 11, 2008 2:05 PM 
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Comments
Amen! PO'B ruined me for trade fiction. No more could I read mystery or sci-fi; the "prose" barely deserves the name.
"The Canon" shows the psychological changes in a man's career. At mid-life, a career professional, these stories address aspects of my life that otherwise drift by.
He did two 'young adult' books around 1960 in the same vein. They were about the true-life adventures of young men on a British exploration vessel in the early 1700's that did not end well. They are not the cracking good story of Long John Silver or Tom Brown's Schooldays. One does not wish to be a young man having an adventure on a boat that ends its journey around Tierra Del Fuego amid scurvy-ridden dying men.
He also wrote some children's book when he was 9 that became a mild short-lived best-seller in England. Quite a career, and, yes, heroes are sometimes not pretty up close.
Posted by: Tonsure Wimple | June 15, 2008 3:05 AM
Wonderful books. I've always described them as "Jane Austen with cannons".
I can't begin to imagine the effort required to immerse oneself in a previous age so convincingly. The knowledge of naval terminology alone is astonishing.
Some thoughts:
The books on tape narrated by Patrick Tull are very enjoyable. I was never fond of the dispassionate narration that O' Brien himself favoured — Tull really gets into the characters. Not everyone likes audiobooks, but I do.
The ship, er, frigate, er VESSEL used in the movie is in San Diego harbour permanently. Well worth a visit if you're in the area.
Have you seen the TV interview with O'Brien, made shortly before his death? What a cantankerous bastard! I really did pity the interviewer. I have to forgive him though, as the books are so wonderful. I'm just glad I wasn't a member of his family.
The remarkable thing is that the man was able to create characters of such subtlety and manners — yet was as cruel as described by his next of kin.
Posted by: dermot | June 16, 2008 11:31 PM