Thoughts on the Aubrey-Maturin Series
May. 31st, 2021 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firestorm717A few weeks ago, I decided on a whim to rewatch Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. I was a big fan of the Hornblower TV series back in the day, with its beautiful tall ships and handsome Royal Navy officers, but I don't recall strong feelings for Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World when I first watched it. Perhaps it's because I was expecting a typical swashbuckling adventure story rather than a meticulous study of shipboard life during the Age of Sail with a particular focus on the borderline romantic relationship between the main characters, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. Well, I'm happy to report that on a second viewing, I've fallen deeply in love with the film. I'm especially taken by the passionate, intellectual Stephen, who so loves his birds and beetles that he'll tag along as surgeon on a warship to study new species! The news article about Darwin's arch collapsing made me think of his expedition to the Galapagos islands - Stephen would have been both awed and heartbroken by the sight! Beyond that, I am of course very much a supporter of the Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin slash ship. At heart, the movie is about their friendship (or more, if you wanna interpret it that way, hehe). They are two very different people with very different motivations in life who nevertheless love, cherish, and respect each other deeply. They bond over their passion for music; one of the recurring motifs in the film is their duets on the violin/cello. As if that weren't enough, we get plenty of the usual slash tropes, such as snarky jokes (the weevil pun will never get old), meaningful glances, lover's quarrels, hurt-comfort scenes, Jack sacrificing his pursuit of the French warship he's been chasing relentlessly to save Stephen's life... and Stephen abandoning his precious collection of Galapagos flora & fauna to inform Jack of a sighting of that warship! *wipes tear* God, it's beautiful. And people wonder why so many Aubrey-Maturin fans are women.
Yes, that's right. The movie is actually based on a whole series of 20.5 books, which are officially dubbed the Aubrey-Maturin series! (I like to believe the fans just mistyped a dash for a backslash ^_~). Peter Weir, the director, pieced together the film's story from several different volumes, as he rightly believed it was a better representation of the time period and Jack/Stephen's relationship. Well, naturally I had to read the source material! I finished the first volume, Master and Commander, and am about halfway through the second, Post Captain, and I... have mixed feelings. This post is me working through those feelings.
So first off, the good stuff: the author of the series, Patrick O'Brian, is a very talented writer. His knowledge of the history and vocabulary of the time period is staggering - there's a whole separate lexicon for the series alone! - and his description of the naval actions are, according to experts, both highly detailed and accurate. My mind was whirling at the dense array of sailing terms in Master and Commander, Chapter 2, with all its talk of mizzenmasts and topgallants and whatnot. So the guy obviously did a ton of research. His writing voice is also quite eloquent (many compare him to Jane Austen, of whom he was a great fan), and his eccentric sense of humor sends me rolling with laughter. One of my favorite parts of the first book is when Jack/Stephen are faced with a much larger, stronger enemy ship, and Stephen tricks the officer of that ship into thinking their own ship is infected with the plague. He uses reverse psychology brilliantly! "Oh, please sir, please come aboard to look at our patients! Here, take hold of this rope!" XDDDD Of course, the enemy officer blanches and backs off like he's been hit with a full broadside! Another wonderfully hilarious (yet bizarre) scene is in Post Captain, when Jack/Stephen make their way across enemy territory disguised as a bear and a bear trainer. Yes, you read that right. Jack literally got into a full-body fur suit, and Stephen led him by a leash-and-collar over hundreds of miles. Early on, Jack even had to do a little dance for an audience to keep up appearances! I mean, wow. I didn't even have to go looking hard for the kink, LMAO. Apart from a few battles, O'Brian doesn't dwell much on the details of each scenario, preferring to hit the emotional highlights. I like this because it means we get a lot of good material in a just few pages - breezy reading. He also spends just as much if not more time on observations about people/society as he does on naval action, which sets the Aubrey-Maturin series apart from others in the genre. In fact, many fans have described it as "Jane Austen at sea"... it's really about the unique characters and their relationships with one another.
Anyway, that's the good stuff. Now, the less good. I said O'Brian was a stickler for historical accuracy and terminology - well, that can be a real drag if you're not a professional naval historian! I'm a pretty well-read person, and I regularly have to consult the lexicon, Wikipedia, Google, Google Translate, and fan forums to understand many of the words he uses. O'Brian never defines any of his terminology, nor does he offer footnotes/translations for his lines of foreign text (ranging from French to Spanish to Latin), so it's a wonder anyone understood his books back when they were published in the 70's! It makes a read-through quite slow, as much of the archaic vocabulary can only be found on niche websites, and that's not even touching on the sailing terms... I've played naval strategy games and sailed a little myself IRL, and I'm still pretty clueless at what's happening in > 50% of the naval battles. The hardcore fans assure me that I should just ignore unknown terms on my first read-through and enjoy the overall story, that I will understand things better on subsequent read-throughs, but 1) I'm a perfectionist reader who hates skipping over words/phrases I don't understand, and 2) I'm not even sure I want to do another full read-through of a 20.5 book series!
Which brings me to my second complaint: the books are... rather uneven in pacing. Master and Commander was alright. It started out slow, I barely managed to stay awake through Jack's fitting-out of his ship, but once he and Stephen got onto the high seas, the adventure took off. There were enough exciting events and humorous dialogue to carry me through the confusing parts... like the whole Irish/Catholic subplot with Dillon that I didn't understand cause hell if I learned anything about European history in high school! However, Post Captain is just a pain in the ass. It starts off well enough with a lead-up to an exciting ship battle, only for the Peace of Amiens to hit, and then the next 5-6 chapters are just Jack/Stephen courting some ladies and dodging debt collectors. It's... not what I was expecting. To be quite frank, one of the reasons I enjoyed Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is that it had no romantic storyline (unless you count the crackling sexual tension between Jack/Stephen, hehehe). There weren't any named women characters, barely a mention of a sweetheart back home, it was just hot dudes in hot uniforms getting some hot and sweaty ship-on-ship action. Sometimes, that's all I want - to be a voyeur in the world of men and male bonding. (I'll write a whole post about this phenomenon later). Unfortunately, Post Captain is quite the opposite of that. The whole story revolves around Jack/Stephen's romantic shenanigans, as they court and moon over and nearly come to blows over two women, Sophia and Diana. Now, these women are well-written characters - a pleasant surprise, given that O'Brian was an old dude from the 50's, not exactly known for their liberated view of women - but I came in expecting Jack/Stephen sailing on tall ships, not skulking about some lady's house, wondering when she will finally notice him, *uwu*. This is wholly my bias: I just don't like romance. I don't care about courtship. I have zero interest in traditional heterosexual rituals of sex and dating and marriage. So it was extremely hard for me to get through the first half of Post Captain. I'm at about the 60% mark now, and it looks like we'll FINALLY get a big ship battle in which Jack can do something other than make out with multiple women (and then being a big ol' pouting hypocrite when those women entertain other suitors, LMAO).
Anyway, that brings us to my last complaint, which I readily admit again is wholly personal. I don't like Stephen Maturin in the books. Sorry, I just don't. Oh, he's an interesting character for sure - O'Brian gave him many dimensions as a physician, naturalist, and intelligence agent - but he strikes me as a very cold man, emotionally detached, so different from the Stephen in the movie. And I don't like him at all because I have this image of Paul Bettany's interpretation in my head. There's one particular storyline that turned me off of book!Stephen completely. So Jack, being a bit of a rake, is courting both Sophia and Diana. Stephen has his eyes set only on Diana - is obsessed with her in fact, even though she has turned him down repeatedly. You see where this is going? After a long build-up, the conflict comes to a head in a vicious argument between Jack/Stephen that ends in a challenge to a duel. Jack is the one who throws down the gauntlet, but Stephen certainly shares equal part in the blame, as he initiated a conversation that he knew would end in a fight over Diana. So anyway, now we get to the part that puts me off of Stephen. It's revealed in an earlier scene that Stephen is a crack shot and excellent duelist. He claims it's from dueling at university in Dublin, but I believe he was trained for it as a top-level intelligence agent for the Admiralty. There's a very unnerving scene in which Stephen does some target practice before the duel. O'Brian describes him as cold, reptilian, his shots hitting his mark with machine-like precision. He shoots the pips off a playing card with ease. That whole scene disturbed me because it's so different from movie!Stephen and my headcanon!Stephen (more of a pacifist, adequate in fighting as he must be on a warship, but no more), and I don't like having my headcanon contradicted :P. But more than that, I didn't like how Stephen seemed to have... no regret or remorse about the duel at all, a duel in which he is almost certain to kill Jack, as everyone including Jack admits that Stephen is the better duelist (though Jack himself is an "old hand" according to a mutual friend). So, yeah. That really bothered me. On top of that, I felt really bad for Jack because while Stephen was practicing, Jack was drinking himself into a stupor over the sorry state of his love life and his professional life - and soon finds out Diana is seeing another suitor anyway! That kind of killed any interest he had in her, but he's bound by honor to go through with the duel and kicks himself for feeling upset just because he learned too late that Stephen's the deadlier duelist.
So... yeah. That particular storyline ruined my Jack/Stephen OTP and made Stephen out to be a remorseless murderer. Which, you know, is fine if that's how O'Brian wants to play it. It makes sense for Stephen to have this dark side as a spy and all. But just because it makes sense doesn't mean I have to like it. I understand that later in the book, Jack/Stephen tacitly call off the duel and Jack apologizes to Stephen for calling Stephen a liar, while Stephen puts a good word in for Jack at the Admiralty... but that whole remorseless murderer thing stays with me. It really bothers me that Stephen COULD kill his friend without a twinge of conscience, when just moments earlier, he and Jack were calling each other "my dear" and Jack had gifted Stephen a narwhal tooth that Jack bought with his own money. Like Jack, do you really want someone like that as a friend? Up to this point, Jack does more for and gives more to the friendship than Stephen, and I have to wonder if this pattern will continue... if it's just Stephen's cold and unrelenting nature.
Basically, I don't like book!Stephen for totally personal reasons.
If I were to psychoanalyze myself, I'd say half of this is because movie!Stephen is my current imaginary BF, and I'm only attracted to men who are gentle, sensitive, and nonviolent... a bit of a damsel in distress, if you will ^_~... so I'm not pleased with the opposite characterization. (In my head, I'm the dashing naval captain who teaches *him* how to fight, hehehe). And the other half is because I just realized that I myself am a little like Stephen in my friendships. Not the killer part LOL, but the cold and distant part, the part that takes more than he gives. I haven't been a good friend to the few people in my life who have cared for me, and I guess book!Stephen holds up an uncomfortable mirror to my failings.
Yes, that's right. The movie is actually based on a whole series of 20.5 books, which are officially dubbed the Aubrey-Maturin series! (I like to believe the fans just mistyped a dash for a backslash ^_~). Peter Weir, the director, pieced together the film's story from several different volumes, as he rightly believed it was a better representation of the time period and Jack/Stephen's relationship. Well, naturally I had to read the source material! I finished the first volume, Master and Commander, and am about halfway through the second, Post Captain, and I... have mixed feelings. This post is me working through those feelings.
So first off, the good stuff: the author of the series, Patrick O'Brian, is a very talented writer. His knowledge of the history and vocabulary of the time period is staggering - there's a whole separate lexicon for the series alone! - and his description of the naval actions are, according to experts, both highly detailed and accurate. My mind was whirling at the dense array of sailing terms in Master and Commander, Chapter 2, with all its talk of mizzenmasts and topgallants and whatnot. So the guy obviously did a ton of research. His writing voice is also quite eloquent (many compare him to Jane Austen, of whom he was a great fan), and his eccentric sense of humor sends me rolling with laughter. One of my favorite parts of the first book is when Jack/Stephen are faced with a much larger, stronger enemy ship, and Stephen tricks the officer of that ship into thinking their own ship is infected with the plague. He uses reverse psychology brilliantly! "Oh, please sir, please come aboard to look at our patients! Here, take hold of this rope!" XDDDD Of course, the enemy officer blanches and backs off like he's been hit with a full broadside! Another wonderfully hilarious (yet bizarre) scene is in Post Captain, when Jack/Stephen make their way across enemy territory disguised as a bear and a bear trainer. Yes, you read that right. Jack literally got into a full-body fur suit, and Stephen led him by a leash-and-collar over hundreds of miles. Early on, Jack even had to do a little dance for an audience to keep up appearances! I mean, wow. I didn't even have to go looking hard for the kink, LMAO. Apart from a few battles, O'Brian doesn't dwell much on the details of each scenario, preferring to hit the emotional highlights. I like this because it means we get a lot of good material in a just few pages - breezy reading. He also spends just as much if not more time on observations about people/society as he does on naval action, which sets the Aubrey-Maturin series apart from others in the genre. In fact, many fans have described it as "Jane Austen at sea"... it's really about the unique characters and their relationships with one another.
Anyway, that's the good stuff. Now, the less good. I said O'Brian was a stickler for historical accuracy and terminology - well, that can be a real drag if you're not a professional naval historian! I'm a pretty well-read person, and I regularly have to consult the lexicon, Wikipedia, Google, Google Translate, and fan forums to understand many of the words he uses. O'Brian never defines any of his terminology, nor does he offer footnotes/translations for his lines of foreign text (ranging from French to Spanish to Latin), so it's a wonder anyone understood his books back when they were published in the 70's! It makes a read-through quite slow, as much of the archaic vocabulary can only be found on niche websites, and that's not even touching on the sailing terms... I've played naval strategy games and sailed a little myself IRL, and I'm still pretty clueless at what's happening in > 50% of the naval battles. The hardcore fans assure me that I should just ignore unknown terms on my first read-through and enjoy the overall story, that I will understand things better on subsequent read-throughs, but 1) I'm a perfectionist reader who hates skipping over words/phrases I don't understand, and 2) I'm not even sure I want to do another full read-through of a 20.5 book series!
Which brings me to my second complaint: the books are... rather uneven in pacing. Master and Commander was alright. It started out slow, I barely managed to stay awake through Jack's fitting-out of his ship, but once he and Stephen got onto the high seas, the adventure took off. There were enough exciting events and humorous dialogue to carry me through the confusing parts... like the whole Irish/Catholic subplot with Dillon that I didn't understand cause hell if I learned anything about European history in high school! However, Post Captain is just a pain in the ass. It starts off well enough with a lead-up to an exciting ship battle, only for the Peace of Amiens to hit, and then the next 5-6 chapters are just Jack/Stephen courting some ladies and dodging debt collectors. It's... not what I was expecting. To be quite frank, one of the reasons I enjoyed Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is that it had no romantic storyline (unless you count the crackling sexual tension between Jack/Stephen, hehehe). There weren't any named women characters, barely a mention of a sweetheart back home, it was just hot dudes in hot uniforms getting some hot and sweaty ship-on-ship action. Sometimes, that's all I want - to be a voyeur in the world of men and male bonding. (I'll write a whole post about this phenomenon later). Unfortunately, Post Captain is quite the opposite of that. The whole story revolves around Jack/Stephen's romantic shenanigans, as they court and moon over and nearly come to blows over two women, Sophia and Diana. Now, these women are well-written characters - a pleasant surprise, given that O'Brian was an old dude from the 50's, not exactly known for their liberated view of women - but I came in expecting Jack/Stephen sailing on tall ships, not skulking about some lady's house, wondering when she will finally notice him, *uwu*. This is wholly my bias: I just don't like romance. I don't care about courtship. I have zero interest in traditional heterosexual rituals of sex and dating and marriage. So it was extremely hard for me to get through the first half of Post Captain. I'm at about the 60% mark now, and it looks like we'll FINALLY get a big ship battle in which Jack can do something other than make out with multiple women (and then being a big ol' pouting hypocrite when those women entertain other suitors, LMAO).
Anyway, that brings us to my last complaint, which I readily admit again is wholly personal. I don't like Stephen Maturin in the books. Sorry, I just don't. Oh, he's an interesting character for sure - O'Brian gave him many dimensions as a physician, naturalist, and intelligence agent - but he strikes me as a very cold man, emotionally detached, so different from the Stephen in the movie. And I don't like him at all because I have this image of Paul Bettany's interpretation in my head. There's one particular storyline that turned me off of book!Stephen completely. So Jack, being a bit of a rake, is courting both Sophia and Diana. Stephen has his eyes set only on Diana - is obsessed with her in fact, even though she has turned him down repeatedly. You see where this is going? After a long build-up, the conflict comes to a head in a vicious argument between Jack/Stephen that ends in a challenge to a duel. Jack is the one who throws down the gauntlet, but Stephen certainly shares equal part in the blame, as he initiated a conversation that he knew would end in a fight over Diana. So anyway, now we get to the part that puts me off of Stephen. It's revealed in an earlier scene that Stephen is a crack shot and excellent duelist. He claims it's from dueling at university in Dublin, but I believe he was trained for it as a top-level intelligence agent for the Admiralty. There's a very unnerving scene in which Stephen does some target practice before the duel. O'Brian describes him as cold, reptilian, his shots hitting his mark with machine-like precision. He shoots the pips off a playing card with ease. That whole scene disturbed me because it's so different from movie!Stephen and my headcanon!Stephen (more of a pacifist, adequate in fighting as he must be on a warship, but no more), and I don't like having my headcanon contradicted :P. But more than that, I didn't like how Stephen seemed to have... no regret or remorse about the duel at all, a duel in which he is almost certain to kill Jack, as everyone including Jack admits that Stephen is the better duelist (though Jack himself is an "old hand" according to a mutual friend). So, yeah. That really bothered me. On top of that, I felt really bad for Jack because while Stephen was practicing, Jack was drinking himself into a stupor over the sorry state of his love life and his professional life - and soon finds out Diana is seeing another suitor anyway! That kind of killed any interest he had in her, but he's bound by honor to go through with the duel and kicks himself for feeling upset just because he learned too late that Stephen's the deadlier duelist.
So... yeah. That particular storyline ruined my Jack/Stephen OTP and made Stephen out to be a remorseless murderer. Which, you know, is fine if that's how O'Brian wants to play it. It makes sense for Stephen to have this dark side as a spy and all. But just because it makes sense doesn't mean I have to like it. I understand that later in the book, Jack/Stephen tacitly call off the duel and Jack apologizes to Stephen for calling Stephen a liar, while Stephen puts a good word in for Jack at the Admiralty... but that whole remorseless murderer thing stays with me. It really bothers me that Stephen COULD kill his friend without a twinge of conscience, when just moments earlier, he and Jack were calling each other "my dear" and Jack had gifted Stephen a narwhal tooth that Jack bought with his own money. Like Jack, do you really want someone like that as a friend? Up to this point, Jack does more for and gives more to the friendship than Stephen, and I have to wonder if this pattern will continue... if it's just Stephen's cold and unrelenting nature.
Basically, I don't like book!Stephen for totally personal reasons.
If I were to psychoanalyze myself, I'd say half of this is because movie!Stephen is my current imaginary BF, and I'm only attracted to men who are gentle, sensitive, and nonviolent... a bit of a damsel in distress, if you will ^_~... so I'm not pleased with the opposite characterization. (In my head, I'm the dashing naval captain who teaches *him* how to fight, hehehe). And the other half is because I just realized that I myself am a little like Stephen in my friendships. Not the killer part LOL, but the cold and distant part, the part that takes more than he gives. I haven't been a good friend to the few people in my life who have cared for me, and I guess book!Stephen holds up an uncomfortable mirror to my failings.
