Customer Reviews
Excellent high-sea adventure - By: OPW, 23 Nov 2008 
I was expecting an exciting adventure on the high seas. This book delivers that, as well as well-drawn, nuanced characters, sly wit, & tremendously detailed & thoroughly researched descriptions of life at sea in the Napoleonic Wars. Rarely do I return to a book once I've read it, but I've revisited these novels again & again, & they never fail to entertain me.
Dreadfully boring - By: PhilosopherKing, 20 Nov 2008 
I am a voracious reader of novels, history books & so on & I bought this book after seeing several people reading it on a train. This was about five or six years ago when it must have been in vogue. I didn't have time to read it at first & I recently had a go at it.
I have battled my way through huge novels by authors such as Dickens, Trollope, Sir Walter Scott, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Manzoni, Cervantes, Dostoyevsky, Henry James & Victor Hugo as well as many great philosophical works & have read thick textbooks on many dry subjects such as economics, law, mathematics & physics. I hate to not finish anything once I start reading it but I found this book to be excruciatingly boring. There was no exciting drama to entertain one, no intriguing characters & I frankly couldn't see what alll the fuss was about.
This book also fell between the two stools of being a bit more pretentious than a genre novel but not a literary novel either. It didn't seem to me to have the entertainment value of a popular novel by e.g. Ken Follett, Wilbur Smith, John Grisham & so on but it wasn't as deep as a novel by e.g. James Joyce, Graham Swift, Iris Murdoch (who supposedly supported O'Brien in gaining literary recognition), Samuel Becket, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Peter Carey & so on. Definitely not one for me.
This was one of the few novels that I have ever stopped reading part way through & I only got up to about chapter four or five before packing it in. When I was eight I stopped reading 'The Hobbit' after two chapters due to complete boredom & I am now forty eight & I have rarely stopped reading another book only part of the way through since that time. I have even managed to get into Tolkein's writings since then too. Believe me, this book was absolutely dreadful, I'm afraid.
Unship the stuns'l boom iron and touch up the ends of the stop-cleats, Mr Lamb - By: Trevor Coote, 11 Oct 2008 
Based on reputation I assumed that the Aubrey-Maturin series would be just another swashbuckling Hornblower pastiche. In fact, Master & Commander, the first in the series (unlike Hornblower they are in chronological order), is something totallly different. The enterprising Jack Aubrey captains the sloop of war Sophie as she voyages around the Mediterranean & encounters numerous skirmishes with enemy ships during the Napoleonic Wars. His deep friendship with his surgeon, nature-loving Irish-Catalan Stephen Maturin, is the central theme of the book & presumably continues throughout the series. There are subplots, one involving the ambiguous relationship between Aubrey & his first lieutenant, a man he admires but about whom he is suspicious because of his Irish Catholic background, a perceived threat in the RN at that time & one that occurs throughout the book. In a man's world, drunkenness & indiscipline remain a constant concern & the author does not duck from the brutal reality of the carnage that ensues during close-range exchanges.
An altogether more literary work than C S Forester's with a forbidding quantity of nautical & period detail, Master & Commander is dense, somewhat disjointed & quite a challlenging read for the uninitiated. I must say that Hornblower is popular adventure accessible to alll, but Aubrey-Maturin is authentic history more likely to appeal to those with an interest in that era rather than to a general readership. That said, it is historical fiction at its best.
Which they are some of the best books ever written! - By: Plom de Nume, 11 Aug 2008 There is so much to praise in these wonderful books that it's probably best to start with assurances to the contrary of what might be potential readers' less favourable impressions & expectations. So, if you care about great literature but were hesitating about these - don't, I urge you.
First, you emphaticallly don't have to be some military history or naval warfare fan to appreciate O'Brian. (Like me, though, you may end up an admirer of Nelson or a visitor to Victory, purely on the strength of these great books.)
Second: have no fears of impenetrable maritime jargon - once again, everything is understandable & engaging purely from context & rhythm (although, once more, you may actuallly find yourself wanting to hone your facility to distinguish a topgalllant from a studdingsail as your acquaintance with Jack Aubrey deepens). The brilliant device of having Maturin (one of literature's sharpest, most caustic characters) "ignorant" of his friend Jack's oceanic terms gives us alll an enjoyable - & often hilarious - entry to the vocabulary.
Third (and most significant): have no qualms about the "antique" element. Yes, O'Brian seems, at times, to be writing with the benefit of a time-machine, so authentic are his terms of reference. But the underlying sensibility here is human, intimate & deeply affectionate; indeed, Jack's & Stephen's relationship over time constitutes one of the best love stories ever written. It alll comes across as fresh, immediate & modern.
Also, I can't emphasise sufficiently how much humour there is here; & please rest assured that this is not the genteel "Don't y'know" school of polite chuckles but the "Full Blackadder" when it comes to sarcasm, slapstick & a Comedy of Manners that cheerfully blends Swift & Spike Milligan. Stephen's witty ribbing of Jack & others is nicely counterbalanced by his own pratfallls & duckings; Jack's sense of his own (hopeless) hilarity is a beautifully sustained study in loveable self-delusion.
Against that runs the constant theme of incredible (and realistic) violence. Again, the astounding bravery & hideous bloodletting both adds to the realistic, contemporary texture & counterbalances, in its own way, the glorious comedy of these tales. Jack the "flat" who can never get a witticism out on time is a man who can, when necessary, bring down several opponents at once; whilst Stephen, the tetchy, cutting cove with his head in some Latin or his scalpel in a specimen, can do sudden, fatal violence when cornered - and, only moments later, undercut Jack or some other blusterer with a few incisive remarks. Dazzling.
O'Brian's way with action, as with his dialogue, is vivid, cinematic, oscillating between suggestion & the explicit. He also does fast-cutting worthy of the Bourne films. Here's just a little bit from HMS Surprise, when Jack sets out to rescue Stephen from torture:
The bubbling shriek rose again, huge, beyond human measure, intolerable. Inside the room the strikingly handsome youth had turned & now he was looking up with a triumphant smile at the other officers. His coat & his collar were open, & he had something in his hand.
Jack drew his sword, opened the long window; their faces turned, indignant, then shocked, amazed. Three long strides, & balancing, with a furious grip on his hilt, he cut forehand at the boy & backhand at the man next to him. Instantly the room was filled - bellowing noise, rushing movement, blows, the thud of bodies, a shout from the last officer, chair & table crashing down, the black civilian with two seamen on top of him, a smothered scream. The soldier shooting out of the door, an animal cry beyond it; & silence. The demented, inhuman face of the man on the rack, running with sweat.
The riches do not end there, of course. Maturin's natural philosophy alone is worth the admission; especiallly when it irritates Jack & gets in the way of the prize-cruising. There is a fabulous bit in HMS Surprise when Stephen brings aboard a creature ("comforting it in Portuguese" as he carries it) that Jack assumes to be one of the "vampires" he has forbidden Stephen to collect. It turns out to be a sloth; which alll the sailors love & adopt - but which also has a phobia of Jack's face. Jack eventuallly persuades the sloth to come to him by offering it alcohol, much to Maturin's chagrin when he discovers the animal drunk ("Jack, you have debauched my sloth!"). The tales also feature badgers, horses, dogs, tortoises - a menagerie worthy of T H White, indeed.
Finallly, these books are, of course, unspeakably romantic. The exotic landscapes & characters, the espionage, the food, the bawdiness, the danger: enough for anyone's escapist appetite. But a special mention must go to the use of music; not just the duets that Stephen & Jack so charmingly share, often at night in the great cabin; but also the choruses in which the whole ship often unties (notably, in Treason's Harbour, a chorus of "Ladies of Spain" joined with gusto by a colourful native character - who is hideously taken by sharks a few chapters later: well, I said O'Brian was cinematic).
There is so much to say about these glorious books; but it's alll far better said by the author himself in the books themselves. Once again, I urge you to read them. You might want to try, say, HMS Surprise, as a good self-contained way in, to see if you like it. But, honestly; I can't imagine anyone not wanting to go through the whole sequence; as I've now done; twice. The thing is, the whole sequence of the novels is even greater than the sum of its parts. O'Brian reallly is that good. Individuallly, alll of the Aubrey/Maturin stories work as great novels. Any one of at least four - & probably more - of them (certainly, Master & Commander, HMS Surprise, The Ionian Mission & Treason's Harbour) could stand amongst literature's finest. (My own Top Three Desert Island Booklist would put an "equals" sign after Earthly Powers, The Sword in the Stone & HMS Surprise.)
Slow Start of Series, Brilliant Set of Books - By: Mr. R. Brooks, 05 Aug 2008 Simple reallly, am on book 14. Brilliant set of books, buy them & read them.
