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O’Brian, Patrick

the Aubrey/Maturin novels, [40] 45, [42] 67, [44] 48

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O’Brian’s World

Grant McIntyre on Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels

O’Brian’s mastery of language is most wonderful of all. He manages to capture that mixture of toughness and grace which, for me at least, makes formal eighteenth-century English so attractive. Also the verbal violence that makes demotic eighteenth-century English so vivid. He catches Stephen’s subtle Irishness, or the slightly unidiomatic English of highly educated South Americans, or the competitiveness of children, or the way one wife can make her opinion of another very clear without expressing it, or Jack can make his authority absolute without disrespect – and he does it all in the language of the time.
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The House that Jack Built

Grant McIntyre on Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels

Most people would agree that Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels, set when Britain’s Navy had first Napoleon and then the USA to confront, are among the best historical fiction the twentieth century produced. In fact plenty would drop that word ‘among’, since the books contain so much variety, perceptiveness and subtle comedy, so many wonderful themes and inventions of genius which add to the fun of reading them.
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A Friendship of Opposites

Grant McIntyre on Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels

Never one for naval yarns I didn’t at first spot Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels, which are set in the wars at sea against Napoleon and then the United States. But once I’d tried one I bought them by the handful. It was like that for most of his readers. O’Brian was not successful at first; critics took him for a kind of retread C. S. Forester, and in fact his books did look a bit dated, published next to Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers for instance, or One Hundred Years of Solitude. A surprising few – Iris Murdoch, Charlton Heston, William Waldegrave and David Mamet, for example – were passionate about them from the start, but ten years passed before most of us realized something new and extraordinary had appeared.

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