The twin heroes of the series are very different characters in almost every respect. Jack Aubrey is a bluff naval officer with a burning desire to rise up the ranks and emulate his hero, Nelson, as far as possible. Although he is a first class seaman and renowned fighting captain he is a child, a simpleton almost, ashore. His element is the sea. Not the least of his accomplishments is his expertise as a self-taught mathematician and on more than one occasion was invited to give a lecture to the Royal Society on nutation. It has been said that the Aubrey character was based loosely on that of Lord Cochrane, although that gentleman was an ardent Whig, whereas Aubrey is a died-in-the-wool Tory. His (Aubrey’s) father, who is a considerable embarrassment to him (and a hindrance in his naval ambitions) was MP for a rotten borough firstly as a Tory and then for the radical interest.

Aubrey’s particular friend and co-hero of the books is an Irish/Catalan polyglot called Stephen Maturin (full name, Esteban Maturin y Domanova). He is a physician, naturalist, and Roman Catholic – he is also illegitimate. He acts as an intelligence agent for the British government and so it suits his purpose to act as the ship’s surgeon under Aubrey’s command as a cover for his deeper purposes. He has other reasons to stay afloat, not least to satisfy his obsessive interest in the natural world, which often leads to tensions when Aubrey needs to ‘Crack on’ and Maturin (who is also a member of the Royal Society) would like to linger, spending time ‘Philosophising,’ as Aubrey puts it, in some remote part of the world.

What can two such disparate characters have in common that leads to a strong and enduring friendship based on mutual respect and admiration? Well, they both share a passion for music and spend many hours playing pieces together in Aubrey’s cabin. Aubrey plays the violin (and is the more proficient player) and Maturin the ‘Cello. They both also hate Napoleon, viewing him as a threat to their respective nations’ freedoms. Whilst Maturin has no love for the British government (and particularly its endemic anti-Catholic culture) he does acknowledge it as the least bad political system around, which is why he supports its fight against the Napoleonic tyranny. Finally, they both admire moral and physical courage in others, which each possesses in abundance.

There are many other characters to savour, some appearing for one book only and others enduring for large chunks of the series. Yet others flit in and out throughout the period, giving a real feeling of the complexity and multifarious nature of lived life. Some worthy of mention are: Barrett Bonden (Aubrey’s coxswain); Preserved Killick (his steward); ‘Awkward’ Davies (a foremast hand whom Aubrey once saved from drowning and has since followed him from command to command); Padeen (a monoglot Irishman who acts as Maturin’s sometime loblolly boy); Diana Villiers (a beautiful and dashing lady who features strongly in many of the books); Clarissa Oakes (the eponymous heroine of one volume); the egregious Mrs Williams and her beautiful daughter, Sophie; two Melanesian girls rescued from a smallpox infested island in the Pacific; Sir Joseph Blaine (Maturin’s intelligence boss in London, who is also a collector and classifier of beetles); Andrew Wray (a civil servant); Pullings, Babington, Reade, and Mowett (all officers under Aubrey’s command at various times), and so on.

The books are not simply adventure stories, although O’Brian is a superb storyteller, they also explore politics, Maturin was once a supporter of the United Irishmen until they began to develop links with Napoleon’s France; the natural world (O’Brian is also the biographer of Sir Joseph Banks); the role the Royal Navy played in suppressing the slave trade; the movements for independence in Chile and Peru (which the British government surreptitiously supported); relationships with the Ottoman Empire and Muslim/Christian sensitivities etc.

But the most compelling element of the series for me is his vivid depiction of life on board a British Man o’ War (the wooden world) during this time. He gives a real feeling for the long periods of boredom interspersed with short bursts of sometimes brutal activity. The overcrowding, the harsh environment and tough working conditions are all faithfully re-created from Admiralty records and captains’ logs. He is also a master at capturing the sometimes childish and occasionally witty humour that peppers any group of people thrown together for long periods. One trait of sailors that he really brings home is how they can endure almost any hardship afloat but one thing they cannot handle is sudden wealth ashore. They all (including Aubrey) love taking a prize (the resulting prize money was shared out in strictly laid down proportions) but few contrive to hang on to their new found riches for longer than a few days ashore. Maturin’s usual first job on leaving port is to treat those who have contracted the pox or have injured themselves in some drunken escapade or other.

The most daunting aspect of the books for me on first reading (I have just finished the whole series for the second time) was the naval jargon. O’Brian solves this gradually and brilliantly. Maturin is a confirmed and lifelong land-lubber who never gets the hang of naval terms – the hands are not even convinced he knows his Larboard from his Starboard. This allows Aubrey patiently to explain the terminology (oft repeated), so eventually even the most lubberly reader (of which I include myself) begins slowly to understand how a ship functions and gets efficiently from A to B. He also uses this method to explain fighting terms and tactics. It works in reverse too, when Maturin tries to describe to Aubrey some natural wonder (a tortoise, insect or bird) that has not yet been catalogued or investigated by science. He also explains the medical science and surgical techniques of the period in this way.

I learned much from the series – naval and historical facts, of course (O’Brian is a scrupulous researcher) but much more than that. There is a great deal of social commentary with a sympathetic perspective on the manners and mores of the time, and there are also some real insights into human relationships. He exposes that most destructive tendency of all relationships – the striving for moral superiority. On one occasion Maturin listens to Jack, who thinks he is alone, playing the violin and realises that he is far, far more talented a musician than he shows when they play together. In other words, he deliberately plays down to Stephen’s level and he wonders to himself how he will ever overcome this moral deficit. O’Brian knows that successful friendships depend on moral equilibrium. Without this the relationship quickly descends into jealousy, rivalry, contempt and indifference.

Women are necessarily few in such a male-oriented world but those who appear are real and fully developed characters. This lack of a large female cast is often cited as a weakness with the accusation that they are really adventure books for boys but I know women who have become just as addicted to this world as I have. Even the children (not numerous, of course) are three dimensional and interesting. It should also be remembered that the youngsters on board ship are little more than children themselves – Aubrey, for example, was 12 when he first sailed. What sets these books apart from, say, the Hornblower series more than anything for me is the humour. It runs through the books like a golden thread, giving them a lightness and a realism that some historical novels lack.

I have deliberately steered away from describing individual passages or actions here because I would not like to spoil the plots for you, although they are all a matter of historical record.

As an afterthought, I saw the film, ‘Master and Commander; the Far Side of the World,’ for the second time the other night. The first time I saw it I was incensed at the solecisms and liberties with the plot but having now read the whole series for a second time and then watched the film again I am not so sure. Of course there was some serious miscasting, particularly (and ludicrously) Bonden who, incidentally, was called more than once by Aubrey, ‘Barrett,’ which would never have occurred. The plot seemed to be a mish-mash of several of the books (none of which was Master and Commander) along with various inventions, such as the chase, which was a French ship in the film but an American in the book (and in reality). I suppose this was done to appease American audiences. Having said all this, however, on second viewing it did capture something of the atmosphere of Nelson’s navy and the sometimes tense, sometimes loving and always respectful nature of Aubrey and Maturin’s relationship. One could see how two such seeming opposites might have forged an enduring friendship. The musical sequences were particularly moving in this respect. I also liked the hands’ banter and their fervently held superstitions.

I should mention a quick caveat. The precise cause of this disaster is not clear. Neither character mentions it much. Indeed, we soon find out that the young boy was only born a few days after the catastrophe set in (and the father still remembers the precise time the clocks stopped: 1.17am). One of the bits of rather effusive blurb on the back casts McCarthy’s novel as ‘the first great masterpiece of the globally warmed generation’. But I think this is wide of the mark. The novel is not resonant in the slightest with a hortatory message about climate change. (One needn’t be a climate change sceptic to have misgivings about righteous climate change novels). Rather, the focus is on the symbiotic relation between the (anonymous) father and son, as they trudge along the road with no ostensibly clear end in sight, and the existential stasis of this endlessness.

The desolation is suitably embodied in the structure and style. McCarthy gives a single paragraph to each incident or event, whether a mundane early morning sunrise or occasional, dreamlike remembrances. He writes tersely, with only occasional flourishes enlivening the barren vocabulary. It’s as if words themselves have become as half-forgotten as the old world: ‘the sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality’. McCarthy only occasionally breaks out and widens the verbal breadth. The first meeting with another character introduces a menace which retains a frightening, shadowy presence throughout: gangs of cannibalistic wanderers with troupes of raped women and enslaved catamites in tow. As one of these gray devils stumbles across the pair, the father pulls out a pistol and explains to their would be assailant, in a rare elaboration upon his customary single sentence replies to his son’s questions, that the bullet from his gun, ‘will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them anymore. They’ll just be soup.’

But, in the main, the dialogue between father and son is almost brusque. (Are we going to die? | No. Do you want to ride in the cart? | It’s okay). The son has a redolent innocence in his queries. He regularly seeks reassurance from his father that they are, indeed, ‘the good guys’, that they’ve ‘got the fire’, and his father – never wholly convincingly – insists that they are. The boy’s vulnerability is underlined by his father’s constant vigilance, looking out for food and firewood, rubbing his son warm in the bitter chill under a makeshift tarpaulin tent. This contrasts strongly with the occasionally sickening vignettes which emphasise, if the unceasing battle against hunger and cold didn’t already, their pathetic, fragile predicament. Only occasionally do we catch glimpses of the horror from which the father aches to protect his son by constantly fingering the pistol in his pocket. At one point, walking into yet another deserted house, they break open a padlocked trapdoor and encounter a basement of naked, limbless people being harvested for food. The details McCarthy provides in this and a handful of other sequences are brief but painfully precise. And this shadowy terror animates the atmosphere of the novel in an arresting way.

But, at root, the novel is symbolized by the dilemma of the pistol. After the afore-mentioned encounter, they are left with just one bullet. We also learn that at one point, there were three bullets. The mother and wife figure, we learn, had turned the gun on herself, soon after giving birth, seeking the release into nothingness instead of numbering among the ‘walking dead’. Ostensibly, the father’s predicament revolves around keeping his son alive by scavenging for provisions. His son appears to be helpless and dependent. But, in another sense, it is the son who is keeping his father alive through a naïve goodness. Upon encountering the poor souls in the basement or a stinking old man, the son is repulsed by their inability and his father’s unwillingness to help others, at risk to themselves, the father keeps emphasising. And the father’s dilemma revolves around whether he may have to turn this pistol, which he clings onto to protect his son (his ‘god’), onto his boy. (There is a chilling scene when it emerges that the father has already explained to the son how to turn a gun on himself if ever he was ‘caught’). In part, then, the novel reads like a meditation on Camus’ famous question. I couldn’t possibly reveal how this tension ultimately plays out, but it is gripping.

I hadn’t read anything by Cormac McCarthy before. Some people have raved about him to me. In truth, I’m not sure how representative ‘The Road’ is of his work in general. But, I found it thoroughly captivating. It’s a terrible cliché, but I rarely devour novels: I read this one in the obligatory day (though, admittedly, it is rather short). Not so long ago, I read Viktor Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, in the main a reflection upon his time in Dachau. And this novel reminded me of some of the existential questions Frankl considers to be an essential – perhaps the essential – aspect of being human. It also illuminates in spite of or perhaps even through its bleakness how our existence can only begin to make sense relationally. I was left profoundly moved and yet this is not simply some mawkish response. To my mind, the novel offers – and I’m not sure how this relates to McCarthy’s thought in general – an aching hint at what we might mean when we speak of love, not as a sloppy sentiment but as a true passion, embodied in the smallest of acts and quietest of gestures, in enduring silence and seeming futility: this question of futility may be something worth pursuing if anyone has read it and knows how the narrative pans out. Anyhow, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

(I borrowed the book from the shop, but will be on the lookout for a suitable second hand copy: will gladly pass it onto anyone interested when – not if – I pick a copy up).

I am wary of writing too much in this review lest I spoil  a wonderful read for those yet to become acquainted with it. And also because English Literature was the only O level that I failed, so I have a long held sense of inadequacy when it comes to writing about literature. Though I have of course read this book, which is more than can be said for the set texts of my O level syllabus.

The “Idiot” of the story is not so much an idiot as a rare case of a true innocent. Sent away at an early age to a sanatorium in Switzerland, Prince Myshkin has little to no knowledge of the social etiquette of his native Russian society. He is a man seemingly incapable of a dark thought or an evil deed. When he returns to Russia he knows no one and has nothing. Whilst he is immediately accepted into society he is nonetheless perceived as an idiot and a misfit, but the reader gets a sense that all the other characters in the book have far greater personal failings than that of Myshkin, whilst also being blind to their own idiocies. 

Myshkin, like Doestoevsky himself, suffers from epilepsy, which further singles him out as an oddball, but interestingly is also a life-saver at one point in the story (I see an exciting parallel with my own bipolar disorder (now thankfully under control with minimal input from medication), which I feel almost certainly saved my life in a very similar manner, which leads to interesting thoughts on illness as curse/blessing).

Myshkin becomes embroiled in a love triangle when he falls in love with Nastasya Filippovna after seeing her portrait. Nastsya is a complex character, a woman wronged and consequently damaged who seems incapable of restraining herself from a path of self destruction. She knows that she is capable of cruelty (though this is an acting out of her sense of  injustice over what has happened to her) and fears that she will be a corrupting influence on Myshkin. She is torn between allowing him to love her and her fear of dragging him under her dark influence. She sees Myshkin for what he is, a kind and good man, but cannot bring herself to trust that if she were to give herself to him then she could feel whole again (there are parallels here with people who feel unworthy of the love of Christ and see themselves as irredeemable).

Myskin’s rival, Parfyon Rogozhin, is deeply, madly, troublingly in love with Nastasya. He desires to have her so much that he discounts the fact that she openly does not love him. It is a blind love, the loving of the other being all-consuming.  

There is a secondary romance between two other characters which overlaps with the main triangle. Gavril Ardalionovitch was going to marry Nastasya despite not being in love with her, and Aglaia Ivanova stuggles with her feelings for Myshkin whilst knowing that Gavril is in love with her. 

There is an array of expertly described minor characters, all with interesting flaws. A vodka soaked pathological liar of a general provides some humour. A young nihilist dying of consumption who wishes to make his mark on the world before he departs provides some drama. A fawning verbose widower balances his dubious morality with his generous sociable nature.  They are a group of characters that, like them or not,  you would not feel bored by at a dinner party.

There are some big themes in this book, the nature of “goodness”, love in its different forms, religion, and death. The most disturbing aspect is that Myshkin’s character, as a good person, is shown to be incompatible with the society in which he has to live. He is routinely abused and mocked but is unfailingly compassionate and forgiving.

Dostoevsky introduces the concerns and topics of discussion of the day into the story. Written in 1868, one of these at least is decidedly modern. There is much talk of atheism. The “woman question” is alluded to on several occasions without being fully explained. Of course, if written and set a hundred years later, Nastasya’s situation would have been radically different. I am grateful that women today are not judged so harshly. Today it is easy to start again and leave your history behind, but then your reputation once tarnished was only salvaged (to an extent) by a good marriage. It is this sense of powerlessness that feeds Nastasya’s destructive tendencies.

The only thing I struggled with when reading this book was the Russian names. Everyone has at least three names (Myshkin’s full name being Prince Lyov Nikolayevitch Myshkin) which are used at different times in different situations. If I were to read the book for the first time knowing this I would make a note of these when they are introduced to save having to look back to check you know who is being talked about. The copy I have is the Wordsworth Classic that I got from Amazon for only £1.99. Other versions may have character lists in.

I thoroughly recommend that you read this book for yourself. I am sure it will be one of the very few books that I shall re-read. Right now though I have “The Brothers Karamazov” waiting for me.