Perhaps we could invent a term to distinguish between serious and frivolous historical fiction.

‘Did you read the two pre-cursors to the Aubrey/Maturin books? Called The Golden Ocean and The Unknown Shore? Both are wonderful..’

No, but I will now. Thanks for the recommendation.

Welcome and thanks.

I agree with all your sentiments. Yes, Pullings and Killick were good in the film but, as you say, playing rather minor roles.

Maturin is a one-off, it takes 20 books to develop his character. He is surely the most complex being in all literature (at least that I have encountered).

O’Brian himself was such a polymath that there seems no end to his knowledge: philosophy of all kinds (including what we now call the sciences); politics; manners; the arts (he also wrote a book on Picasso); political and military history (of course); and so on. Truly, a renaissance man!

I agree that they are much more than historical novels but I do not think that there is anything mere about the genre. An early O’Brian supporter was one of the great historical novelists, Mary Renault, who, almost single-handedly, gave me a life-long interest in the Classical and Hellenistic worlds in my teens, for which I will be forever grateful.

I thought the film had its moments, but the only actors who really pleased me were the ones who played Tom Pullings, although his part was, (to use a joke from the books), cur-tailed, and the one who played Killick. I though the portrait of life aboard a warship of the period was well done, though. But as you say, given the richness of the books, no film could really hope to do them justice. The character of Maturin alone- so complex and diverse and contradictory- would be damn near impossible to capture.

The books, though, can’t be praised highly enough. I’ve read the whole series a half-dozen times and will read it many more times before I depart this vale of error. I especially love the symetry. From the outset, Jack Aubrey’s burning ambition is to ‘raise his flag’, ie, attain admirals rank and in the last book, Blue At The Mizzen, published shortly before O’Brian died, he does.
I felt like cheering. And that is the magic of great literature-the characters and the world they inhabit becomes utterly real, completely involving.
And, of course, Aubrey and Maturin and Killick and Babbington et al will never die.

That is probably the right order to approach it. A couple of caveats:

The plot of the film is two dimensional, unsubtle and not true to the books. Some of the casting is a little odd, including Maturin, who looks nothing like his description in the books, although Bettany does a pretty good job despite this. The film focuses almost entirely on the realtionship between Aubrey (a very good Russell Crowe, although a bit of Aussie twang creeps in from time to time) and Maturin – most of the other characters being mere props, with the possible exception of the Master played by that consumate actor Robert Pugh.

Given the limitations of film as a medium it is not bad so far as creating an overall impression of life at sea during this period. Its special effects and location shots are all pretty good.

I must advise you, in all fairness to your family, that the books are highly addictive. You might become a little reclusive and perhaps even restive if you are denied your regular fix. Jobs might remain unjobbed and even birthdays or (heaven forbid) anniversaries may pass uncelebrated. You have been warned!