Please see my comments on Vol. 1, Master and Commander. ( )

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Not the most riveting Aubrey/Maturin installment, but....: "The Truelove", the immediate precursor to Patrick O'Brian's "The Wine Dark Sea", is quite frankly not the most riveting installment in the Aubrey/Maturin saga. And yet it is an interesting psychological glimpse into the personalities of the officers and crew of Her Majesty's Hired Vessel Surprise, when a female stowaway, Clarissa Harvill, is discovered. She becomes quite literally the main attraction to Surprise's junior officers, and even a trusted veteran like Captain Thomas Pullings, falls prey to her charms. For once neither Captain Jack Aubrey nor Dr. Stephen Maturin are the main focus of this tale, devoted instead to the enigmatic Clarissa Oakes (She is married off to one of the junior officers later during the tale.), who provides Maturin with a tantalizing clue regarding a French spy working in Whitehall. Instead we see an idyllic sojourn in the South Seas marred by personality disputes, a brief battle on a Polynesian island between French privateers and Surprise's crew, and the eventual appearance of the French privateer Franklin, which will play a prominent role in the next novel in the series. This book still deserves highest praise for O'Brian's eloquent prose and vivid descriptions of Polynesian natural history.

This has perhaps slightly more unity of plot than the other stories in the series. I'm not sure whether or not that works for or against it. It does make for a less open-ended book; on the other hand, there was maybe less of a sense of a flow between it and the previous book, and on into the next. I did quite like the title character, though. This wonderful sense of emotional flatness which had been created by her past life, a character that was never knowingly manipulative or melodramatic, but who disrupted and caused change simply by being there, by being who she was.

I'm slightly worried about a certain aspect of Stephen's life on finishing this. I really, really hope that PO'B won't end up doing what I think he's going to do - though I suppose I'll just have to suffer through the rest of the book to find out. *g* ( )