Post Captain

Post Captain see Aubrey and Maturin ashore, enjoying the interlude of the Peace of Amiens and chasing after local eligible women Sophie Williams and Diane Villiers, when tragedy strikes. Jack's perfidious prize agent disappears with all his money, and Jack finds himself in debt to the tune of 11,000 pounds, and liable to be arrested at any time.

The two escape to France, and are there when the Peace of Amiens ends and it's back to war, lovely profitable war! Fortunately, Aubrey is hanging out with the French captains who captured the Sophie in the first book, and since they're such bros they give him warning. Maturin leads Jack across France disguised as a dancing bear (wait what?), and he gets a new ship, the experimental and show more unseaworthy Polychrest, and his career is back on track.

There's one naval action of note, but most of this book is concerned with courting, debt, political games, and the tightening and near breaking of the friendship of our leads while pursuing women. Putting Hos Before Bros, as the saying goes, only leads to tragedy. Still having fun, still dadly as hell. show less

A steady-going follow-up to Master and Commander, Post Captain does not yet provoke the devotion that the Aubrey-Maturin series is said to induce in its readers. The nautical terminology is less bewildering – or perhaps I'm just used to it – but the book does not advance much from the promise of the first instalment.

I wrote in my review of Master and Commander that it was an investment that had not yet – but surely would – pay dividends, but Post Captain, ironically, begins with Captain Jack Aubrey fleeing a debt. His finances are in disarray, a promotion has been denied him, and he must away to sea on whatever can float. A great start, surely?

Unfortunately not, for the first half of the novel becomes mired on land, in a sort of show more Jane Austen-esque soap opera that sees Aubrey and his ship's doctor, Stephen Maturin, in some long-winded social courtship with two eligible young ladies. It's tolerable stuff, in its way – Post Captain is well-written from first to last – but it's not why we're here.

Naval adventure is why we're here – that, and the complementary friendship between Aubrey and Maturin – and, fortunately, the book begins to provide this in doses. Author Patrick O'Brian has an unparalleled ability to evoke the ins-and-outs of naval warfare (tacking in to the right wind, and all that other stuff) without sacrificing pace or tension, and every moment Post Captain is at sea is refreshing. In these parts, the novel is thrilling in its action, engaging in its conversation and astute in its characterisation. That this further shows the land-based scenes for their lubberliness (a bitter duel between Aubrey and Maturin is abandoned without further mention, while there is also an embarrassing sequence about one hundred pages in where Aubrey evades capture in France by disguising himself as a bear) is by the by. When O'Brian engages the enemy more closely, we can hardly wait to follow him in. show less

Post Captain, the second volume in O’Brians Aubrey-Maturin series, presents a marked improvement over the first volume: While there still is a lot of naval battles and detailed descriptions of maritime life and customs, he is giving a lot more space and (in consequence) depth to his characters, giving them a life away from shipboard (it actually takes a hundred pages for our protagonists to first reach the sea in this novel), giving them a history and outlook and even – big gasp here, for this is at its heart still a very male book – romantic relationships. There are still passages where the massed naval jargon forms an impenetrable thicket, but fortunately they are confined to the occasional paragraphs and do not extend over show more whole pages, seriously hindering the reader’s progress through the novel.

All of this makes Post Captain a thoroughly enjoyable read, and while I do not think that O’Brian has quite found his groove yet, there is a general broadening of scope here, the narrative extending to events on land as on sea, the narrator’s gaze not quite so focused on ships and how they are run but giving room for more general human concerns. The narrative voice still appears a bit tense and cramped compared to the relaxed, almost serene attitude O’Brian will work towards in the next two volumes (which is as far as I got on my first reading of the series), but there already is a certain… camaraderie forming between narrator and reader, which I think might be the hallmark of his writing style.

While O’Brian’s love for the sea and all things naval seeps through every page of this novel, he never unduly romanticises it, he does not gloss over the fact that life on board of a ship of the Royal Navy was extremely harsh and, for all their undeniable excitement, his battle scenes can be quite brutal and never flinch away from the gruesome details. Although one might ask oneself whether O’Brian’s congenial narration is not somewhat counter-productive here – I don’t think there is any doubt that does want to paint the whole picture, but including the sad and ugly parts, but just maybe the narrator is much too comfortable to give much conviction when his tales touch upon human suffering and the occasional tragedy. At this stage, I am still undecided about this myself and will likely come back to that point when discussing later volumes.

In Post Captain it also becomes even more pronounced than in Master & Commander that what makes and drives this series is the unlikely friendship between its two main protagonists. They are very different characters – different from each other, but also full of contradictions in themselves, which is part of what makes them so fascinating – and yet, in some mysterious way they seem to complement each other; and while right now I’m not sure whether I have enough of an interest in the Royal Navy to keep my interest up over twenty volumes of novels, I can actually imagine spending that much time exploring the friendship between Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. show less

The perils of life ashore are many and varied if you are Jack Aubrey, Master & Commander in His Majesty's Navy ca. 1802. Post Captain, the second Aubrey/Maturin novel (and one of the funniest) seems to exist to detail them all.Or at least a whole lot of them.

Chief among these perils is that you might be trapped in a bit of Jane Austen-flavored courtship porn* for a good third of your novel. You might take a house to share with your shipmates and start thinking of starting a hunting pack when all of a sudden you run right into a pretty face. A pretty face with a wickedly grasping, calculating mother who is the chief reason that pretty face is still unmarried. But because you're only a dashing, commanding, formidable figure on the deck of show more a ship, you might be helpless and kind of thick when confronted with this pair. And if the pretty face has a pretty widowed cousin who is well on her way to being something of a courtesan for you to pursue as well, even though your best friend kind of likes her, too, well!

All that's going to be enough to drive your typical naval action, Napoleonic War-fixated O'Brian fan just a little batty, although it is nice to see that O'Brian conjured up some female characters that could more than hold their own against our sea captain and his physician friend. And I do mean more than hold their own! The boys are dished, simply dished, in their company, kind of hilariously helpless, mostly because they've not been prepared to deal with the likes of Sophie Williams and her awful mother, of Diana Villiers. These are future wives, and their presence changes these stories forever, and it's good to see how these relationships came to pass, but ugh, courtship porn.

Fortunately, the Seamen & Senselessness side of the story is more or less over relatively quickly, due to Jack's having run right into an even greater peril: debt. Houses and horses and country balls at which girls can look pretty and dance cost money, money Jack didn't quite have secured. He did many wonderful and potentially lucrative things in Master & Commander, but note that "potentially." His fortune was still vulnerable to legal and political maneuverings. What if, well let's not call them bad guys, let's call them other interests, won out against Jack?

Before we know it, he and Stephen are fleeing to Spain-by-way-of-France, but an end to the Peace of Amiens means they must make a hasty and rather ludicrous** overland escape from France to Spain. And then find their way back home because now that the peace is over, Jack can go back to work as a dashing naval captain and make some money to pay off his creditors. They don't call him Lucky Jack Aubrey for nothing, right?

Well, about that.

Because while Jack has been learning the perils of lubberdom, the Royal Navy has been experimenting with lunacy in the form of building a ship that can launch a giant rocket capable of destroying an enemy ship a mile away. And then scrapping the rocket idea after the lunatic inventor gets himself blown up the first time it's tested. But then building the ship anyway, because of reasons. Said ship being hailed as the "Carpenter's Mistake" and featuring all sorts of fangled notions like sliding keels and other nautical nonsense that makes it instantly recognizable from a distance and, as her captain will learn shortly, a horror to try to maneuver.

Guess who the captain of "that wicked Polychrest" is going to be?

But Lucky Jack isn't just lucky; he knows what he's doing, and while what he's doing looks quite comical to his fellows -- at one point a good friend on meeting the Polychrest at sea signals by way of alphabetical flags a reference to a line in psalms about delighting not in the strength of one's horse -- he actually finds a way to sail the thing, and even manages to fight an action with it that does everyone proud -- everyone except for his admiral, that same Harte with whose wife Jack meddled last novel.

Meanwhile, we get a satisfying look at Dr. Maturin's life when he is not playing music with Jack, or patching up Jack's crew, or gawking at seabirds from the deck of Jack's ship; Stephen is a secret agent! Whose achievements in that area wind up having direct bearing on what Jack gets to do after he's finished with the Polychrest! Huzzah!

My only regret with regards to this novel is its lack of news of my favorite subsidiary characters, for while Bonden and Preserved Killick and Tom Pullings and Babbington get to join in a touch of the fun, mostly because, well, someone has to be there, where is dear Mowett? Padeen, the Hodor of the Aubrey/Maturin books, we have not met yet but already I long for him. But that's part of the fun of re-reading these books, meeting everyone anew and then just anticipating their moments of glory.

There's plenty of that to go around, in over 20 novels.

*Please note that in saying this I do not mean to cast aspersions on Ms. Austen or her stories, though they are not to my taste. I simply don't think that "the masculine side of a bit of Jane Austen courtship porn"† is something anyone goes looking for. Prove me wrong?

†Courtship porn = any story in which the courtship, usually leading to marriage, is the only point of it to the exclusion of pretty much anything else, whether the participants in said courtship are willing or not. It's a genre (or would it be a subgenre?) that I find tiresome. Courtship stories are fine and good, but they need to be part of something larger to tempt me.


**Okay, actually very ludicrous. show less

There were one or two parts of this which didn't quite work for me—the incident with the bear was too different, tonally, from the rest of the book—and some of the plotting is a little lumpy. I have to disagree with most people, though, and say that I adored the opening sections; as big a fan as I am of Austen and of comedies of manners, I wallowed in how O'Brian sketched out Jack and Stephen's adventures on land.

I had kind of mixed feelings about Master and Commander, the first book in this series. I found it slow to the point of tedium, but I could see some real promise in it, so I gamely forged ahead to this second book. And, boy, am I glad I did! This one was a lot more readable, and it featured much more of the things I actually liked about the first book, mainly the humor and the weirdly wonderful odd-couple friendship between the hearty Captain Jack Aubrey and the scholarly Dr. Stephen Maturin. (My little geeky heart keeps wanting to compare them to Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, although the comparison really only goes so far.) That relationship is increasingly complex and entertaining in this one, strained as it is by the two of them show more having a conflicted interest in the same woman, and the humor was plentiful and delightful. And, although the plot meanders a lot, it felt like there was a lot more story here than in the first book, and that story was much more interesting. There were still a few places where navally-ignorant me had some trouble following things, but that wasn't nearly as much of a problem as last time. I'm very interested in reading the rest of the series now! show less

For me, there is no better summer reading than the Aubrey/Maturin series of Age of Sail adventures from Patrick O'Brian. Mix equal parts Jane Austen and geeked out historical descriptions of sailing, life in the English Navy during the Napoleonic wars on land and at sea all in O'Brian's enviable prose and you get broadsides of narrative firing off every 2 minutes.

Seriously, if you've never considered reading these do yourself a favor and give them a try. The stories are entertaining, the characters are as engaging as any in literature, and did I mention O'Brian's writing? The books are often undersold as adventures at sea but don't let the entertaining stories throw you, these books are indelibly crafted and very worth your time.