Master and Commander

Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian. I actually started reading this before the movie came out, but was only a hundred pages in when we went to see the movie. That kind of puts an odd spin on both book and movie.

O'Brian is an author who probably qualifies for "honorary SF author" status, given the number of SF readers who like the books. It probably has something to do with the painstaking reconstruction of the operation of a British Navy ship in the Napoleonic era-- an amazing amount of technical detail is provided, and some aspects of the culture are pretty alien.

Ultimately, this kind of fell flat for me for a couple of reasons. For one, I just didn't care enough about the naval details to try to puzzle out what everything did, so there were large sections of text that I read with mental subtitles ("Ship stuff happens," "The crew do naval things in order to make the ship go faster," or "Bits of ship are repaired."). Another problem is that the plot steadfastly refuses to resolve into a continuous arc-- it's very episodic, and every time I started to think we were developing an overall plot to the book, it would come to an abrupt stop. This eventually became very annoying, especially when a conflict that had been building between two characters, that seemed to be heading somewhere interesting, was cut off by the sudden death of one of the two.

The biggest problem, though, has to do with the writing. It's not imitative enough of nineteenth-century novels to really be called a pastiche, but it's written in a style that consciously evokes older modes of writing. Unfortunately, these mostly drive me nuts, such as the technique of describing action through long rambling monologues in single paragraphs:

"Nothing pleasanter than good shipmates. May I offer you a whet? Our seamsn's drink, that we call grog-- are you acquainted with it? It goes down gratefully enough at sea. Simpkin, bring us some grog. Damn that fellow-- he is slow as Beelzebub... Simpkin! Light along that grog. God rot the flaming son of a bitch. Ah, there you are. I needed that," he said, putting down his glass. "Such a tedious damned morning. Each watch has to have just the same proportions of skilled hands in the various stations, and so on. Endless discussion. And," said he, hitching himself a little closer to Stephen's ear, "I blundered into one of those unhappy gaffes... I picked up the list and read off Flaherty, Lynch, Sullivan, Michael Kelly, Joseph Kelly, Sheridan and Aloysius Burke-- those chaps that took the bounty at Liverpool-- and I said 'More of these damned Irish Papists; at this rate half the starboard watch will be made up of them, and we shall not be able to get by for beads'-- meaning it pleasantly, you know. But then I noticed a damned frigid kind of a chill and I said to myself, 'Why, Jack, you damned fool, Dillon is from Ireland, and he takes it as a national reflexion.' Whereas I had not meant anything so illiberal as a national reflexion, of course; only that I hated Papists. So I tried to put it right by a few well-turned flings against the Pope; but perhaps they were not so clever as I though, for they did not seem to answer."

Article Author: Chad Orzel

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