History and Mystery Reads

RaRating: 9/10

• Accuracy: Exceptional; O’Brian built many episodes on real naval actions, including Lord Cochrane’s capture of a Spanish frigate with a tiny brig in 1801.
• Readability: Rich and witty but initially bewildering, with dense naval terminology left unexplained.
• Plot: A young lieutenant gets his first command, meets a ship’s surgeon at a concert, and takes a small brig on a cruise in the Mediterranean.
• Science bonus: Stephen Maturin is a physician and naturalist, and his surgery, including a trepanning on deck, sits alongside Aubrey’s mathematical seamanship and navigation.

The story begins in 1800, at a concert in Port Mahon, Minorca. A lieutenant named Jack Aubrey, beating time too enthusiastically, annoys the man beside him, a small, shabby physician called Stephen Maturin. They nearly fight a duel. Instead, when Aubrey receives command of the brig Sophie, he invites Maturin to sail as surgeon.

So begins one of the great literary friendships. Aubrey is large, cheerful, brave at sea and hopeless on land. Maturin is Irish-Catalan, a naturalist, a laudanum user, and, as later books reveal, an intelligence agent. Their conversations, full of music, science and teasing, are the heart of the series.

The naval action is superb. O’Brian based many incidents on historical events, and the Sophie’s climactic fight with a much larger Spanish ship echoes Cochrane’s real exploit. The detail of rigging, gunnery and shipboard life is enormous and often unexplained, which can bewilder newcomers but creates a total immersion.

O’Brian’s prose is elegant, allusive and very funny, closer to Jane Austen than to C.S. Forester. The dialogue has period flavour without pastiche.

The first chapters are slow for readers unfamiliar with naval life, and the book lacks the emotional depth of later volumes.

The 9 reflects a brilliant opening to a twenty-volume series that many readers consider the finest historical fiction ever written. Peter Weir’s 2003 film borrowed its title.