Blue at the Mizzen

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
C. S. Forester had his swashbuckling Horatio Hornblower, Bernard Cornwell his dashing Richard Sharpe, but Patrick O'Brian, with his 20 volumes of adventures featuring Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his friend, Dr. Stephen Maturin, has transcended the genre and thrust Napoleonic storytelling into the literary limelight.

Blue at the Mizzen begins with a festive display of bonhomie and largesse that belies Aubrey's deep unease. The men of the Surprise have profited handsomely from their recent capture of a Moorish galley at the close of The Hundred Days. But the one prize Jack most desires -- his commission -- remains elusive. And with Napoleon safely bottled up once again, his frigate, lately attached to the Royal Navy, now officially reverts to its former status as a hydrographical vessel. Worse, this sudden outbreak of peace means that Jack runs the very real risk of losing his seasoned crew: "Your seaman," he muses, "can put up with uncommon dirty weather, endure great hardship and very short commons -- a good, steady, courageous, uncomplaining creature under officers he can respect.... What he cannot bear is sudden wealth. It goes straight to their heads, and if there is the least possibility they get drunk and disorderly, and desert in droves."

To forestall such an event, Jack orders Surprise to slip away from Gibraltar at dusk. But this stealthy gambit takes the ship into the first of several near-disasters that will bedevil her peacetime mission. In the dead of night, Surprise is struck a glancing blow across the bows by a dark Scandinavian timber carrier and nearly sunk. The ship is forced to put into port for repairs -- only to find that the recent cessation of hostilities has taken its toll on the Mediterranean's choice shipyards. While delayed in Madeira, however, Stephen Maturin contacts his intelligence network to sound out the Admiralty's position on the recent political situation in South America, where Chile and Peru are making their bid for independence from Spain.

Carrying a set of indecipherable dispatches, Maturin proceeds to Whitehall aboard Surprise's tender, Ringle, with Jack sailing hard in his wake to Sepping's Yard for proper repairs and crew. Among those who enlist is 15-year-old midshipman Horatio Hansen, the bastard son of the Duke of Clarence (a former naval man himself and the future King William IV). Refitted, remanned, and given the not-quite-official commission to "help the independent and republican Chileans to form a navy, " Surprise at last sets out on its "South American caper." But Dr. Maturin has one last surprise for his old friend Aubrey; he begs the favor of a brief leave in Sierra Leone, in order to discuss Linnaean classification of avifauna with a beautiful widow, Christine Wood -- and, incidentally, to ask her hand in marriage.

Gently rebuffed, Maturin leaves Sierra Leone with a renewed dedication to his relationship with his "dear Mrs. Wood." One of the book's most memorable sections is his record of the ship's southern passage around the Horn, exquisitely depicted in a serial letter to his beloved Christine. In recounting this portion of the journey from Maturin's perspective, O'Brian captures both the sublime and the quotidian aspects of the endeavor with brilliant philosophical detachment. Constant damp, cold meals, frostbite, tedium, and physical exhaustion are contrasted with the more intellectual impressions of the voyage: the spiritual ache of depression, loneliness, and isolation; the awesome power and harsh beauty of nature's extremes.

Perhaps shocking to some modern moralists, Dr. Maturin does not deny himself the psychic balms available to a 19th-century man of science -- coca, tobacco, laudanum, alcohol -- though he does keep to a strict personal code of moderation in all things (except, perhaps, an immoderate fondness for coffee). But there is little he can do to alleviate his old friend's deepening depression. For Aubrey, this uncertain escapade represents the last hope of attaining his personal "blue at the mizzen" -- the pennant that signifies an admiral at the head of his squadron. The only prescription for such a malady is action, and where swift and decisive action is concerned, Blue at the Mizzen does not disappoint. Allied with the factious Chilean juntas under Director-general Bernardo O'Higgins and the renegade officer Sir David Lindsay (formerly of His Majesty's Royal Navy), Jack makes an audacious preemptive strike on the pride of the Spanish fleet -- a whirlwind engagement that will determine both Chile's fate and his own. (Greg Marrs)

Boston Globe

I haven’t read novels [in the past ten years] except for all of the Patrick O’Brian series. It was, unfortunately, like tripping on heroin. I started on those books and couldn’t stop.— E. O. Wilson

New Republic

Patrick O’Brian is unquestionably the Homer of the Napoleonic wars.

Slate

I devoured Patrick O’Brian’s 20-volume masterpiece as if it had been so many tots of Jamaica grog.— Christopher Hitchens

New York Times

[O’Brian’s] Aubrey-Maturin series, 20 novels of the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars, is a masterpiece. It will outlive most of today’s putative literary gems as Sherlock Holmes has outlived Bulwer-Lytton, as Mark Twain has outlived Charles Reade.— David Mamet

Washington Post

The Aubrey-Maturin series...far beyond any episodic chronicle, ebbs and flows with the timeless tide of character and the human heart.— Ken Ringle

Chicago Sun-Times

There is not a writer alive whose work I value over his.— Stephen Becker

San Francisco Chronicle

Filled with exuberance and humor, and a writer's palpable delight at exercising his finest muscles. . . . At sea with a master.

New York Times Book Review

The best historical novels ever written... On every page Mr. O’Brian reminds us with subtle artistry of the most important of all historical lessons: that times change but people don’t, that the griefs and follies and victories of the men and women who were here before us are in fact the maps of our own lives.— Richard Snow

The New York Times Book Review

O'Brian has presented his readers with a shining jewel...an intricate, multifaceted work.

New Yorker

The book contains the usual splendid blend of nautical detail and political intrigue, savage battles and naturalists' musing, all ratified by O'Brian's seemingly effortless ability to deploy the vocabulary and idioms of the time.

J. W. Foster

This is a work of genius, and in the face of its inevitable end, I can only think with pleasure at the now 20 volumes on my shelf.
— BookPage

Amanda Foreman

...a welcome return to form. After a spell in the doldrums O'Brian has presented his readers with a shining jewel, an intricate, multifaceted work -- one of those rare novels that actually bear up under close scrutiny...
— New York Times Book Review

John Ferguson

O'Brian is not that hard a taste to acquire, but he is very tough to shake.... [The Aubrey/Maturin series] is a great work.
—Boston Globe

John Skow

Not one of those overweening lists and counterlists of 100 greatest novels that provoked such harrumphing...mentioned the remarkable British novelist Patrick O'Brian. This, his beguiled readers could argue, demeans not O'Brian but the lists.
—Time

Paul C. Paulson

[O'Brian is] better than anybody at historical fiction...[He] is as able and graceful with the English language as a writer can be.
—Denver Post

Library Journal

Here is the 20th in the series presenting the escapades of Cap. Jack Aubrey of the British Royal Navy ship Surprise and his longtime companion, naval surgeon Stephen Maturin. O'Brian belongs to that select group of historical novelists who seem to write for their own audiences; his fans will greet the present volume eagerly. But for readers unacquainted with the series, Blue at the Mizzen would not be the best way to be introduced to O'Brian and his seaworthy heroes; one needs the background of the previous volumes to connect with all the characters. When we last climbed aboard the Surprise, Aubrey, Maturin, and crew had helped frustrate Napoleon in his plan to conquer Europe. In this seafaring adventure, we are off to Chile to help Bernardo O'Higgins and Jos de San Martin in their struggle to rid the country of Spanish domination. O'Brian never races through his stories; he drags them crabwise toward their predictable denouements. The current book is loaded to the gunwales with turgid dialog, ornate prose, and episodes that seem pasted on rather than built into the narrative. But that is part of O'Brian's appeal to his fans. Buy for them. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/99.]--A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.