Other work by O’Brian, of great quality in its own right, such as the biography of Picasso and the translations, feeds additional useful tributary streams into what posterity will judge to be the main river. The exploration of Picasso’s cultural background had obviously been of use in deepening the texture of Maturin and of his family. O’Brian himself is dismissive of the skills needed for translation; wrongly, I think: though sneered at now, the Victorians were not stupid to believe that a training in translation from and into Latin and Greek was the best way of achieving a full understanding not only of how those languages worked, but of how one’s own language works too. O’Brian’s prose is better in the later work than the earlier; more flexible, clearer when he wants it to be, more economical. I would not be surprised if the discipline of the translator had not helped with this. Equally, O’Brian has a very subtle and light touch with dialect. Not for him the full-blown attempted phonetic mimicry of Kipling, which makes some of that great man’s best stories so irritating to read; nonetheless Killick’s word order (with the exact use of ‘which’ at the beginning of a sentence, as in ‘Which he was mortal tired last night, like a foundered horse’); the subtle Irish cadence which breaks out in Maturin’s speech, particularly when he is excited; and the Devonian of the Shelmerston men on Surprise, all show sensitivity of a very high order to the different way English can be spoken. I have no doubt his natural skills as a linguist, honed by his work as a translator of de Beauvoir and much else, are reflected in this acuteness of the ear.
In sketching the way in which I believe the various elements in O’Brian’s background, skills and sensibilities may contribute to the success of the books, I do not mean to make the reductionist mistake of saying that any of these things explain him as a writer. We can see in Testimonies—a fine book, recently re-issued—that the underlying power of imagination, the craftsmanship in structure, and the intense human sympathy are all there from the start; the external influences, and the bit of luck, that led him to the sea and the navy provided just the structure he needed to deploy his powers effectively. He is not the first to find the community of a wooden ship, nor the rhythm of voyage and return, a powerful motor for storytelling and a natural stage against which to deploy human emotion; Odysseus is the father of all the Aubreys in literature, after all.
But all this is, in a real sense, beside the main point. It is an enjoyable game to trace origins and influences; it is satisfying and reassuring to learn that O’Brian is formidable as an historian and antiquary in addition to his powers as a novelist, but it is as novelist that we honour him, and as novelist that he will be remembered. The pure gold of the very greatest storytelling is to be found in the best passages of the Aubrey/Maturin series, passages which can live with Scott and Kipling and equal or better Charles Reade or Buchan. All these writers, to greater or lesser extent, embarrass much of our current literary establishment because of the clarity of their vision and the sharpness of their contempt for those who denigrate the values which they themselves do not doubt. That is perhaps why O’Brian’s first acclaim came in the USA not here, and why his fame in Britain, where self-doubt has reached epidemic status amongst our elites, spreads like wildfire by word of mouth helped only by a few brave souls like John Bayley and Iris Murdoch, who have always had the independence to welcome excellence, in what ever shape.
This essay is taken from
Patrick O‘Brian, Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography,
edited by A E Cunningham, and is reprinted here
by kind permission of The British Library
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Patrick O’Brian
Post Captain Page 50