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(More customer reviews)I have a hunch that it would take some doing to get these same contributors -- towering literary figures all -- together between any two other book covers. Their essays provide thoughtful insight into O'Brian's writing. They allow me to better understand why I instinctively liked it from the start.
In his opening paragraph of the introduction to this book William Waldegrave says, and so aptly, "Few events in the continuing history of literature are as satisfying as those moments when a writer, leaving behind the dissonance of experiment and imitation, finds his own authentic voice and settles into a lifetime of creativity in a style which he makes his own."
Patrick O'Brian's superb style is his alone, a voice like no other, and when we go back to his earlier works -- having exhausted the Aubrey/Maturin series over and over -- we find that he had settled into his style long ago.
The final contribution sheds some light on why O'Brian was so slow to take off in the U.S., which was not until after he was translated into Japanese. Stuart Bennett's essay is titled Four Decades of Reviews. "Though rarely out of print in Great Britain," he says, "the first five of the Aubrey novels received a somewhat muted reception in the U.S. After 'Desolation Island' in 1979, no attempt was made to present Aubrey to an American readership until Norton's 1990 reissues. Reasons for this long American dry spell can be found in some of the reviews of the early Aubrey novels." Some examples:
"Publisher's Weekly" said of "Post Captain" in 1972: "Overwritten for so little plot, which consists mainly of adventures at sea and the friends's feuding over their rather tedious women."
"New York Times Book Review" on "H.M.S. Surprise" in 1973: "Mr. O'Brian is constantly becalmed in his own diction, which can take a disturbingly giddy turn. Men-of-war with names like 'Belle Poulle' and 'Caca Fuego' just don't inspire confidence." Mr. Bennett responds, "The French quite certainly possessed a ship called the 'Belle Poulle' ... Furthermore the Spaniards often named their men-of-war 'Cacafuego'; one formed part of the Invincible Armada."
I discovered "Master and Commander" and "Post Captain" wholly by chance in 1990, before I or anyone I knew had ever heard of Patrick O'Brian. The reviewers this second time around had not awakened. I was hooked from the start and like a literary Johnny Appleseed began introducing others to this fine "new" writer. And so it has been a wonderfully satisfying experience for me to see the appreciation of O'Brian's craftsmanship blossom, then swell to such heights as it has during the years following. Happily, the reviewers liked Aubrey and Maturin this time around.
I believe this collection of essays was the first of the string of books that now accompany O'Brian's books. In it we learn some things about Patrick O'Brian from himself. Among them: he wrote his first tale of the sea, "The Golden Ocean", "in little more than a month, laughing most of the time." He describes that the story, published in 1956, made no great impression, but led an American publisher to ask for an "adult" sea story. "Master and Commander" was the result. It was published in the late sixties, but would not be successful in the U.S. for another twenty-five years, this time at the hands of another publisher: W.W. Norton. Many American readers are very happy that Norton breathed new life into Aubrey and Maturin, and consequently into Patrick O'Brian's whole works.
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