At the Heart Of the Ocean

By Richard Lacayo

Fame and wealth came late for Patrick O'Brian. He was already 55 in 1970 when he published Master and Commander, the first of what would be 20 volumes in his irresistible naval saga set in the time of the Napoleonic wars. But by the time the last volume appeared in 1999, O'Brian's tales of Captain Jack Aubrey and his shipmate Dr. Stephen Maturin had become Harry Potter for grownups. Each new book was a heavily anticipated publishing event among not only weekend sailors but also people whose only prior encounter with seafaring had been Sloop John B. By now 8 million copies have been sold. And at O'Brian's death in 2000, William F. Buckley called him "the most evocative writer on the sea since Homer."

Russell Crowe's film will expand the O'Brian cult. But new readers drawn by the cannon fire may be surprised to discover how complex the books truly are. Their spiritual through line is the friendship of Aubrey and Maturin, a classic concord of opposed natures. Aubrey is gruff, blocky, pragmatic; Maturin is lean, reserved and cerebral, though stalwart enough to amputate limbs without the niceties of general anesthetic or clean instruments. Both men are moved by music. Maturin plays cello, while Aubrey scrapes along on violin, and their shared attempts at Locatelli or Boccherini are their ultimate expression of comradeship.

The books have a music of their own, though occasionally compressed into passages that are a trial by vocabulary for shore-hugging readers ("and then these futtock-plates at the rim here hold the dead-eyes for the topmast shrouds"). The books are action-adventures, true, but also peerless novels of 19th century manners, detailing the mores of Regency England while instructing in the finer points of how to cannonade a French corsair or master seas that can body slam mere frigates into splinters.

O'Brian was fascinated with feints and deceptions, with warships that disguise themselves or fly false colors. Was that because he flew false colors himself? He wasn't Irish; his name wasn't even O'Brian. He was born Richard Russ, the last of nine children of a bankrupt English physician who dispersed the family after his wife died. As a young man, Russ/O'Brian abandoned a wife, son and dying infant daughter to pursue a writer's life. When fame arrived and the world tracked him to the south of France, where he had lived since 1950 with his second wife, he invented a new past. But a biography by Dean King published just after O'Brian's death revealed that despite O'Brian's claims, he was never a pilot in the Royal Air Force or a student at Oxford. What we know for sure is that he was a minor master of 20th century literature. His books will sail on.

--By Richard Lacayo