Patrick O’Brian: Master & Commander

If you have not read Master and Commander by now, and you’re even thinking about it, you’ve probably seen the Peter Weir film.  So the first thing to remember in approaching Patrick O’Brian’s novel for the first time is that, well, you’re not walking in on the same story at all.

Now I’m notorious for hating screen adaptations, so let’s be clear on this:  I’m not talking, “Dude, it’s nothing like the book at all!” here. It is, literally, a different story:  in specific, the meat of the film is based on nothing less than the tenth book in the Aubrey-Maturin series, the novel which provides the film with its subtitle:  The Far Side Of The World.

(I  actually did like the film, very much:  it simply isn’t Master and Commander.  Even beefed up for the role, Russell Crowe is at least fifty pounds underweight for the character of Jack Aubrey as written.  Aubrey is a fine fighter, but rather stout and not very fit – apparently pretty normal for British naval officers of 1800.)

Master and Commander is not essentially a novel of war. It is a novel of getting a ship ready for war: of what it would take to fit and refine a brig for both ocean service and combat duty in 1800. It’s the story of a hot-headed new commander’s first command; of his labours in making both vessel and crew come up to his standards; of his own weaknesses – to which he is mostly blind – and of their effects on his life and his command. On the emotional level, the novel is a story of friendship and rivalry, testosterone and cool reason: the full span of relationships that inevitably play out in an exclusively male society.

The novel opens with Jack and his future best friend, Stephen Maturin, rubbing each other the wrong way at first meeting.  They quarrel over music and good manners, and they come moderately close to a duel over it.  But their second meeting is far more amiable – so much so that it seems artificial until you come to know Jack’s impulsive nature better.  It is not long before Stephen finds himself sailing on the Sophie as her surgeon – hugely overqualified but completely underemployed.  This provides several key storytelling opportunities.

For one thing, Stephen is a complete landlubber, so that seeing life on the Sophie through his eyes, and having things explained to him, help to bring the sheer mass of technical information more readily to life than might otherwise be managed.  If that praise is a trifle faint, let me confess that the book already reads a bit too much like a textbook for many readers’ tastes.  All right, I admit it – the first time through, I skimmed a lot of the passages on just which sails were trimmed with which lines in order to catch a southwesterly breeze to best advantage.  And yet on going through the book again, I found some remarkably evocative storytelling in those very passages.

Although there is a certain amount of comic relief in his introduction to shipboard life, Stephen’s narrative perspective is more than merely one of ignorance:  he is an educated and experienced man with an embittered political past in Ireland; bilingual (at least); a naturalist and an informal philosopher.  Jack, by contrast, is a simple man from root to branch – outspoken, rash, bigoted, canny and acquisitive – whose education is exhaustively intimate in matters relating to ocean, sailing ships, the Royal Navy and its enemies… and utterly naïve in almost everything else.

O’Brian juxtaposes these characters’ perspectives with deceptive simplicity.  Points of world politics are viewed through the prejudices and comprehension of people of the time. Moral judgements on the part of various characters are constantly in evidence, although such judgements on the part of the author are effectively invisible.  One of the strongest dramatic threads in the novel is that of the homosexual officer with a desperate crush on the (fortunately) oblivious Jack, and the ways various of their shipmates cope with their own knowledge or ignorance of the whole matter.  On the far end of the spectrum, at one point a sailor is to be hanged for having taken his pleasure with the milk goat kept onboard; Stephen admits that he’s no more interested in that milk than anyone else, but thinks the punishment a bit extreme: he wonders if both man and goat mightn’t just be put ashore someplace – on separate islands, he suggests, if Jack has strong moral feelings on the matter.

And then there’s James Dillon, the Sophie’s newly appointed first lieutenant.  Dillon and Maturin share a secret past as survivors of the Irish rebellion of 1798, and there’s a wonderfully developed triangular conflict of testosterone competition/secret past/honesty between friends that grows among the various pairs in this trio.  Again, Maturin is the key.  And it is to O’Brian’s credit that he doesn’t draw out the suspense between any of the three figures a single paragraph past its credible need.

Two characters who are never named in the novel, but who figure very large indeed, are the ocean and the wind.  There’s nothing of the pathetic fallacy in it – you never have the sense of O’Brian giving the elements a personality:  you just sense, acutely and often urgently, the shifting signs of breeze and current that are available to experienced senses, and the vital need to read them accurately – even under fire.  O’Brian wastes no time with any of his characters.  He paints in strokes so spare that on my first pass there were times the book read to me as plot-driven, or worse – technology-driven, like early science fiction at its worst: and yet on second pass, these people are true to themselves without exception and without fail; and the technology of wood and canvas and good hempen rope is a kind of character unto itself, like the wind and the waves.

In all probability, aside from a few battles, a faithful adaptation of Master And Commander would have made a rather dull  film by most people’s standards (though I know a number of military history enthusiasts who would be happy to argue the point with great passion). I suspect that at some time in the future, CG will make it possible to film the novel as a miniseries.  That’s bound to play better, dramatically.  To fit both the detail of the Sophie’s refitting and retuning and the character development of her crew onto a screen is more than a couple of hours can reasonably be expected to compass.  You could almost take up that much time just with Aubrey’s ongoing gunnery drills… and his frustrating efforts to find enough powder for live practise without exceeding his assigned allotment of powder and shot.  It would certainly take more than a feature film’s length to do justice to the amount of detail involved in Aubrey’s ongoing quest to refine the rigging to get the best performance out of his small ship.  A boy and his sports car are nothing compared to this.  Jack’s most profound romantic relationship is with his ship, and he pays more attention to her needs and her signals than he is probably capable of paying to those of any woman.

I do not fancy myself an expert on early 19th-century sea warfare, but I can assure you of this: O’Brian loads his pages with such a lavish wit-span of naval practise, politics, custom, law and lore that you will not doubt for a minute that he knows whereof he speaks.  The book is something of a tour-de-force: you may never read another book in the series;  I never have:  but in a couple of hundred pages, O’Brian will give you an entertaining education in naval warfare at the turn of the 19th century, the men who waged it, and the timeless strategy and tactics of sail… and he will have given you the desperate suspense of a chase whose pace is measured not in miles per hour or split seconds, but in unpredictable turns of the wind and hours that strain the nerves.

(Lipincott, 1969)