Not to stretch a naval metaphor, but I’ve been in a reading doldrums. Nothing satisfies. At these times I fall back on one of two tried-and-true authors: Terry Pratchett or Patrick O’Brian. Pratchett pops up pretty regularly on Blogging for a Good Book, but I am amazed to see that we have never written about O’Brian, whose 20-volume Aubrey-Maturin series fills an entire library shelf.
Set in the world of the royal navy during the Napoleonic wars, O’Brian’s novels are first and foremost the portrait of a lifelong friendship between Jack Aubrey, affable and resolute ship’s captain, and Stephen Maturin, surgeon, naturalist, and intelligence agent. The series pretty easily finds its audience of men (and women) who are interested in age-of-sail adventures on the high seas; I’m not sure it always finds its audience of women (and men) who enjoy Jane Austen’s prose style, well-crafted sentences and characters, or the complications of Regency-era manners.
The New York Times may have called them “the best historical novels ever written,” but I avoided this series for years based solely on the infernal diagram of sails that opens every volume. No one wants to have to memorize sailing terminology just to get into a good story. Even as I began to be won over by O’Brian’s carefully-chosen words and dry humor, I simply refused to care which sail was a spritsail.
Fortunately, there is so much more than sails to care about as you turn the pages: there are also debauched sloths. Battles, mutinies, French prisons, typhoons, desert islands, music, birds, rich vocabulary, and a whole Dickensian roster of colorful secondary characters. There is indeed a lot of naval jargon, but the reader is not beat about the head with it, or if he is, he has a sympathetic ally in his ignorance in the person of Stephen Maturin. Stephen is also a landlubber, an outsider looking in to the regimented world of the royal navy, and he does not care any more about how many masts a ship has than I did.
Jack is famously lucky at sea, a skilled, courageous ship’s captain who will take, burn, and destroy the enemy at every opportunity, while on land, he is easy prey for speculators or a pretty face. Stephen is an Irish-Catalan physician with a passion for natural philosophy, and is forever cluttering Jack’s ship with beetles, wombats, and diving bells. If you cross him, he will fleece you at cards. If you double-cross him, he will find you, he will shoot you, and then he will dissect you. Their world of naval battles and subversive intelligence work occasionally collides with the domestic sphere and the polite drawing rooms of Jane Austen, usually with disastrous results, and then they are back to sea to escape debt, lawsuits, wives, sweethearts, and mothers-in-law.
And if you do begin to care about spritsails, there are many fine books to help you explore Aubrey and Maturin’s world, whether you’re interested in the vocabulary, the geography, the ships, or even, heaven help you, the food (probably the only cookbook in the library with a recipe for rats in onion sauce).
Check the WRL catalog for Master and Commander.
Or try the audiobooks. Patrick Tull and Simon Vance are both fantastic readers.
Blogging for a Good Book 
These are definitely on my reading list. I have 18 of the 20 in the edition where the spine of the books make up a picture. As soon as I find the last two at a used book sale I will begin the reading quest.
Vanbramen is there a special ISBN for the volumes that have the illustrated spine? I am also collecting. :-)
I love this series, I have read the 20 books, some of them several times and they are all awesome. And I like Austen too, I assure you they are not incompatible.
Thank you for introducing me to Patrick O’Brian. From what I discern from your writing I am sure they’ll be enjoyable reads.
And, I am a fan of Terry Pratchett too :)
A very nice blog you’ve got here :)
A very good series, one that has influenced my writing. My own historical series features a woman in disguise as a surgeon’s mate aboard a warship, during the Seven Years War. The only thing I take Patrick O’Brian to task on is that in his time period there were women aboard naval warships. Not just in port when the prostitutes were allowed on board, but the warrant officers were allowed to sail with their wives, and many of them did. Because the ship was their home.
And it crops up many times in the novels, whether the gunner’s wife, other captain’s partners, officer’s wives, and Steven Maturin has a female assistant for the last two novels
Do you have any further naval fiction recommendations? I just finished the O’Brian series and I’ve been trawling blogs to figure out what might be worth checking out next!
I have to confess, I haven’t yet found a great readalike for Patrick O’Brian, not one that matches him in style. But if you’re looking for a good naval adventure, here are some that we’ve enjoyed on Blogging for a Good Book: Doctor Dogbody’s Leg, by James Norman Hall, plus series by Dewey Lambdin, Richard Woodman, and of course, C.S. Forester.
In addition to Charlotte’s excellent suggestions, you might also try Alexander Kent’s Bolitho series.
Thanks so much!
Patrick O’Brian loved Captain Marryat’s naval histories and no surprise their heroes share the same name – and Jack Easy, of Mr MidshipmanEasy, is our hero, along with Mesty, I think the first African-American hero – I just recorded this as an audiobook and think anyone who loves O’Brian will love meeting Captain Marryat in this “Candide” joins the Royal Navy: http://www.audible.com/pd/Fiction/Mr-Midshipman-Easy-Audiobook/B00F9GKWRQ/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1379854903&sr=1-1
I’m getting ready to begin the Aubrey/Maturin series on my own blog. I’ve done a chapter by chapter precis and commentary on 3 earlier novels by the same author: http://vappleman.wordpress.com/2014/05/04/the-golden-ocean-chapter-1-and-2/
I agree. This author is worth several blogs, and the series even more so.
[…] could be better than a novel of nautical adventure? While I enjoy Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series about which Charlotte has written so well, I think that my favorite 19th century sailing novels are […]