In the last volume of the wonderful Maturin/Aubrey series, Jack had been court-martialed for what appeared to be his complicity in a stock market fraud. Being a naïve landlubber, he had no idea of what he was being fraudulently involved in, thought he was just helping someone out and making a killing in the meantime. He was kicked out of the navy and removed from the post-captain’s list, eliminating all his accumulated seniority. Stephen, having come into a considerable fortune, purchased The Surprise, Jack’s old ship, and bought a letter of marque so Jack could operate as a legal privateer. Having been sent on a special mission (remember that he is still an English secret agent), Stephen obtained a special exemption for the men of The Surprise to prevent them from being pressed into service should they be stopped by an English naval vessel. O'Brian really has a delightful way of writing. Here's another example of that wry humor that pervades his books. Russell is declaiming how all Frenchmen are worthless and uses as examples some French proverbial expressions, ". . .when the French wish to describe anything mighty foul they say, 'sal come un peigne', which gives you a pretty idea of their personal cleanliness. When they have other things to occupy their mind they say they have other cats to whip: a most inhuman thing to do [at least we beat dead horses] And when they are going to put a ship about, the order is 'a- Diue-va', or 'we must chance it and trust to God', which gives you some notion of their seamanship." One can only guess about O'Brian's early relationship with publishers, but from numerous comments made by a variety of characters, I suspect it was not a happy one: "You were telling me about publishers," asks Stephen of Mowett. “ ‘Yes , sir: I was about to say they were the most hellish procrastinators--' " 'Oh, how dreadful,' cried Fanny. 'Do they go to special houses, or do they . . .' " 'He means they delay,' said Babbington." O'Brian was a big fan of opium apparently, for Maturin is constantly singing its praises as a cure for all sorts of ills, and when queried about its ostensible addictive qualities, he replied in this book: "The objections come only from a few unhappy beings, Jansenists for the most part, who also condemn wine, agreeable food, music and the company of women: they even call out against coffee, for all love! Their objections are valid solely in the case of a few poor souls with feeble willpower, who would just as easily become the victims of intoxicating liquors, and who are practically moral imbeciles, often addicted to other forms of depravity; otherwise it is no more injurious than smoking tobacco." One learns all sorts of interesting things. Jack returns to his ship only to discover the word Seth written on the side. The Sethians were a Gnostic Christian group who believed that Cain and Abel were brought into the world by angels, and that Seth, who was born after Abel’s murder, was the Almighty’s direct and pure creation. Anyway, there were pockets of Sethians scattered throughout England and, naturally, there were two schools of Sethians, the old that wrote the S backwards, and the new that wrote it in the conventional manner. Unlike Quakers, “they have no dislike for warfare,” so Jack has several Sethian sailors who celebrated recent good fortune by honoring Seth by painting his name on the side of the ship. When ordered to remove the name, they refused, not wishing to dishonor Seth. What makes this interesting is Jack’s novel way of making everyone happy. Rather clever, I thought. (Check out the Sethians on the web. They have a rather different perspective on the universe.)
I started reading this series a little over two years ago and have been slowly working my way through it since. Time to check in on Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin once again.We left these two in a rather sad state of affairs in the last book, The Reverse of the Medal. Aubrey's long and glorious naval career was in tatters, after his enemies duped him and were able to have him charged with manipulating the stock market. Anyone who knows Aubrey knows he is too much of a simpleton about finances to be able to manipulate the market, but that didn't prevent him from being convicted, having his name struck off the list of naval captains, and, humiliatingly, sentenced to the stocks. We saw him locked into the stocks with his enemies set to take advantage of his helpless position by throwing garbage at him. But his shipmates, both present and past, came to his rescue, surrounded the stock and prevented anyone from harming him.Meanwhile, Maturin, made newly wealthy by a bequest, bought the Surprise, Aubrey's beloved frigate, fitted it out as a privateer and gave Aubrey command of it. In this book, we see their first adventures on the sea in their new circumstances aboard their private man-of-war.Many of their shipmates from the past have followed them into private service, so the characters here are mostly familiar to longtime readers of the series. And it turns out that the "luck" of Jack Aubrey, which is really a matter of clever strategy and always angling to have the weather gage, continues to hold, even when he isn't wearing a naval uniform. Soon, the privateers of the Surprise are raking in prizes hand over fist. Happily, Aubrey's financial worries seem finally to have been eased.He would give it all up, though, to have his naval career restored and much of the action of this book is aimed at that goal.At the same time, Stephen's worry is a more personal one. His wife, Diana, the only woman he has truly loved, has absconded to Sweden because she believes that Stephen has betrayed her with a redhead while sailing around the Mediterranean. His enemies have made sure to report those tales to her. It isn't true, of course. He was merely pursuing his second career as a British intelligence office when he was squiring the redhead around. But how will he ever convince Diana of that? Perhaps it will not be giving too much away to say that this book ends happily. In fact, I think it is probably the sunniest book in the series so far. At the end, we find both of our heroes as content as we have ever seen them, proof that good things come to those who persevere and wait. At least in fiction.Patrick O'Brian was an amazingly talented writer of historical naval fiction. While I am obviously not the best judge of the accuracy of all the minutiae of the British navy in the Nelsonic period, it certainly rings true, and much more knowledgable critics than I have attested to the truthful depiction of the life of sailors in the navy at that time. O'Brian had a way of bringing to the reader the details of life on board ship in all of its repetition, boredom, beauty, savagery, humor, boldness, and dignity. He makes these characters live for us and makes us care about them. There is scarcely higher praise one can offer a writer.
What do You think about The Letter Of Marque (1992)?
The Letter of Marque has been one of the quickest reads in the Aubrey/Maturin series. In large part this is because of the immense relief at having Jack's luck return. As I've said in a previous review, I don't by any means need every book in the series to have a "happily ever after" ending; but build-up of bad luck and bad breaks over the past few volumes had become overwhelming. In this volume, Jack is lucky once more, and so many of the loose ends of sadness are resolved happily. This is the book that even offers the return of Diana, and the much-anticipated resolution of the break between her and Stephen. The whole book was thoroughly satsifying, and it propels me into the next volume just as soon as I finish this review. As the song says, "Ah tutti contenti saremo cosí." My reviews of the Aubrey/Maturin series: Master and Commander Post Captain H.M.S. Surprise The Mauritius Command Desolation Island The Fortune of War The Surgeon's Mate The Ionian Mission Treason's Harbour The Far Side of the World The Reverse of the Medal The Letter of Marque The Thirteen-Gun Salute The Nutmeg of Consolation Clarissa Oakes The Wine-Dark Sea The Commodore The Yellow Admiral The Hundred Days Blue at the Mizzen 21
—Neil Coulter
This was a wonderful conclusion to The Reverse of the Medal. As Stephen notes at one stage in the book, Aristotle's definition of tragedy encompassed not only a great man being brought down but also the redemption and deliverance of a man who had been laid low. If that's true, then this book, in company with the last, forms a truly great example of the same. From the nadir of fortune that both Jack and Stephen experience in TRotM, LoM sees a complete reversal. Jack is more successful than he's ever been, Stephen has Diana restored to him, and the book ends on one of the happiest and most contained notes that I think I've ever seen in an O' Brian novel.The period sense was, as ever, perfect. If ever there was a literary universe in which I think I would like to live, then the Aubrey-Maturin universe is one of them. The dialogue was a joy as ever. O' Brian is so good at using dialogue to show just how close a friendship Stephen and Jack have, just how much they mean to one another. It's such a joyous thing that even Jack's little bit of banter at Stephen about the fact that the sea going out is, in fact, called the tide, succeeded in bringing a huge smile to my face. I particularly enjoyed Stephen's conversation about how difficult it is to survive as an undergraduate at TCD. Things, clearly, have not changed that much. *g*
—Siria
EDITORIAL REVIEW: Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin tales are widely acknowledged to be the greatest series of historical novels ever written. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of their beginning, with Master and Commander, these evocative stories are being re-issued in paperback with smart new livery. This is the twelfth book in the series. Jack Aubrey is a naval officer, a post-captain of experience and capacity. When The Letter of Marque opens he has been struck off the Navy List for a crime he has not committed. With Aubrey is his friend and ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin, who is also an unofficial British intelligence agent. Maturin has bought for Aubrey his old ship the Surprise, so that the misery of ejection from the service can be palliated by the command of what Aubrey calls a 'private man-of-war' -- a letter of marque, a privateer. Together they sail on a voyage which, if successful, might restore Aubrey to the rank, and the raison d'etre, whose loss he so much regrets. Around these simple, ostensibly familar elements Patrick O'Brian has written a novel of great narrative power, exploring his extraordinary world once more, in a tale full of human feeling and rarely matched in its drama.
—Duncan Mandel
