Curiously, for a book full of action, the two most notable
aspects of these, the third and first Aubrey and Maturin novels, are the
author’s confidence in the reader’s appetite for period naval jargon, and the
long, patient accumulation of personality in the two main characters. Why,
then, do readers stick with this lengthy enterprise? How does Patrick O’Brian
make it work?
Taken together, the Aubrey and Maturin books I have read and
listened to are a scattershot of the first half-dozen in the 30- book series. I
have read elsewhere, and come to agree, that readers (and listeners) can view
this as less a sequence than a great tapestry of character. There is some term
for this that escapes me, romans
something-or-other, that means generally this.
One test of this idea is that I entered the
Aubrey-and-Maturin universe through the now-decade-old movie said to be based
on two of the novels together, Master and
Commander: the Far Side of the World. Years after viewing the movie, when I
first read one of O’Brian’s books, I heard the movie’s actors in my head, and
saw them in my mind, especially Captain (or Master and Commander, or Lieutenant,
or Post-Captain, as appropriate) Jack Aubrey, Doctor Steven Maturin, and (in
the movie and after the second book) Lieutenant Thomas Pullings, a very
sympathetic supporting character. However, with continued listening to two
different voice actors’ renderings, and with my own readings – and these
critically with the aid of O’Brian’s own vivid and idiosyncratic descriptions –
I developed my own standards for the principal characters’ speech. Maybe it was
just the divergence of readers, actors, and descriptions that freed my
imagination to create or choose voices of my own for the characters.
The movie Master and
Commander bears little resemblance to the book by the same name, with the
exception of those three characters, the setting, and the jargon. It seems that
translating the novels into a movie required rearrangement of the events, and
some characters, to suit the audience and format. It’s similar to Captain
Aubrey’s practice of re-stowing the holds of the various ships he captains, or
“raking the masts” of the sloop Sophie,
or installing bentinck-shrouds (extra stays on the masts that support again
extra sails), against naval tradition and at some cost to his military
advancement, in order to eke another half-knot out of whatever assemblage of
timber and canvas he currently commands.
And when the ship confronts its target, he maneuvers it and
presses his advantages to leave it in sad shape. When the masts are
compromised, the yardarms and ropes snapped or cut, the sails shredded, the
ship’s rigging is “all-ahoo,” one of my favorite naval terms from the series. I
have a recollection of the term being applied to wigs and the like, but I won’t
wait to confirm that before applying it as needed in my own circumstances.
For example, I have struggled to set aside enough time to
write this, but my scheduling has been crowded and chaotic – in other words,
all-ahoo. That’s why it took two weeks, allowing me to finish lsitening to Lisa
See’s Shanghai Girls in the meantime.
While I was listening, I found two of the 11 cds included repetitions of
earlier segments of the book after the completion of the sequential segments.
It was as if a printer inserted a second copy of pages 121-160 after page 244.
This was, it turns out, my first application of the term “all-ahoo.” My second
occurred with the realization that I was going to listen to a second book
before reviewing the first (actually, first two).
One reason for my difficulty in getting organized enough to
write this was coaching. I have struggled to educate myself about the many
parts of soccer I never got good at. Sometimes, practices go well, and people
have fun. At other times, my players and I wrestle each other for control of a
small game at practice. The chaos is, well, evocative of the idea. It’s also
pretty inescapable when layering five hours a week of planning and working with
“U-9s” atop a lopsided routine of work, home life, and the commute between. Has
anybody seen my son’s left cleat?
And a “cleat” is the key. The chaos and rush of life, or of
naval warfare, or of constructing or inhabiting a fictional world, relies on a
few stable points. Without them, and without them being strong enough to bear
the load, the whole project flies apart. We rely on teachers, family, and
neithbors to fill the gaps in our own ability as parents, both to satisfy immediate wants and to
provide more generally for the children we cross bridges to support, and again
to see. A “cleat” in British seamen’s speech two centuries ago is a piece of
metal, wedged into wood, on which a line can be fastened. This is only what
I’ve gleaned, but this gleaning helps in reading the stories.
Fastening a few points to hang the rest of the rigging on is
a bare essential for readers. Disbelief requires a capacious and sturdy
framework (three masts, with stays and shrouds?) for the reader to suspend it. O’Brian’s
characters do things we don’t recognize today, not entirely, and think things
that are surprisingly alien. (The masts, stays and shrouds of rank in British
society at the time are not very distinct to American readers of this time,
generally.) Yet when one hauls on a rope (a character, say, Aubrey, encounters
a barrier to his advancement based on class rather than accomplishment), the
shape of the rigging is indicated by the movement of the sails. This is true
for social aspects of the story, for technical aspects, and every other.
Long, slow, careful study—lightened by the fact of its
pleasure—is required to generate an understanding of all of the terms in use,
and all of their meanings and variations, and of the society and physical world
the describe. Locally, O’Brian would have written these books for an audience a
half century closer to the language, politics, society, and technology in the
books than current readers. He and the initial readers and the current ones all
make a substantial leap through time to inhabit that world, however briefly.
The cleats, holding ropes fast to keep the masts and sails in place, bear a
heavy load.
With so much difference between readers’ experiences inside
and outside the novels, the author must have found more durable reference
points, commonalities, than the apparent specifics. There’s a diagram of a
frigate’s rigging at the front of many of the books, to help bridge the gap,
but until I read the story, several of them, I found the diagram unhelpful. What
allows readers to bridge that gap, to construct characters over meandering
plots in thirty books, to cope with unfamiliar social customs, language, and
technologies? How do we hold on and where do we step so as not to fall
overboard?
“All-ahoo” is a wonderful term. I am adopting it because it
makes sense, it stands out in my memory from reading, and I look forward to my
next encounter with it. I have “all-ahoo” in my life because it’s universal,
and I can connect with it. The real answer to the question about continuing to
suspend disbelief is that there are many points of connection, many fasteners
and useful concepts, flashes of recognition closing the gap between reader and
characters. I care about Aubrey’s unwelcome innovations with rigging not
because I am a sailor (I am not), but because I am hesitant to shake things up
in my own career. Maturin’s extremes of social awkwardness are confusing at
first, but each layer of details makes his behavior more intelligible. The avid
loyalties of lower-ranked men seem strange until readers get a close look at
Aubrey’s coxswain, Bonden, or see both sides of the relationship with Thomas
Pullings. The ropes come into view a length at a time.
