Master and Commander, Post Captain book thoughts ► Ludology Now!

Gonna try something new and record my thoughts while reading the first Jack Aubrey book with Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander after a decade of re-reading C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels.

Read on for what truly must be some of the coldest of entertainment takes.

On Master and Commander

It’s interesting to start off with Aubrey enjoying music, one of the things that Hornblower could never do. It’s impossible to approach this with anything other than “Forester died and the naval fiction market is wide open and yearning,” mentality, which is good because it’s clearly what was happening.

Still, to devote multiple pages and a clear, deep character passion for music instantly distinguishes Aubrey from Hornblower, despite both of them immediately being introduced as self-conscious and anxious in public.

It’s also quite surprising that we introduce Maturin this early on, I did not expect that.

Aubrey and Hornblower are both introduced to their audiences in a prime-but-youthful-enough time of their life to devote many more books in their future, but I am already somewhat melancholic that there are no books set when Aubrey was a midshipman. Vague references are made but not expounded upon.

It is increasingly apparent how much Aubrey visibly feels his thoughts and emotions.

Hornblower may have the same emotions and thoughts, but he buries them, bottles them up, pushes them away. Aubrey, meanwhile, is verbose, enthusiastic, and – crucially necessary – not afraid of asking for help, both consciously and subconsciously.

One cannot imagine Hornblower ever describing his problems to someone who might possibly think he was asking for sympathy, or, even worse in his mind, a favor.

This is not a bad thing. While I identify more with Hornblower, it is truly cathartic to have POV characters understand and discuss emotions, whether with themselves or others.

Aubrey felt himself go through the us-and-them change physically; Hornblower is never us nor them; a third, different type.

One leads to another. The immediate intimacy of the friendship between Jack and Stephen is something that Hornblower’s personality never would have allowed.

Personally, this is how we differ. I fully understand how Aubrey and Maturin could love each other so rapidly, honestly. Sometimes you click.

Hornblower had few best friends to confide in. There was Bush, Marie de Graçay, Barbara Wellesley; few lasted longer than a year.

You could tell there was a bond growing with Hornblower and young Wellard, but that went its unfortunate way. No one could pull his guard down – not that Aubrey’s guard is comparable.

Few others could drop his guard, I mean, as all three of course were at least somewhat of constants in Hornblower’s life.

Still, he was never as close to any of them (sans Barbara) as Jack was immediately to Stephen, without any hint of uncomfort or ill-ease. Maturin and Aubrey practically conspired to collaborate immediately.

On Post Captain

As I finish Master and Commander and move into Post Captain, all of the previous feelings are solidified and hardened.

Now, 37 pages into Post Captain, I yearn for a return to sea. Something about the Peace of Amiens really just engenders the most boring of subplots. I fear we repeat ourselves soon.

One thing O’Brian does not mind is passing time, chewing moments, earning each small step on the way to the next victory. On the whole, this is fine.

In practice, this tediousness can lead to unapproachability. I don’t know how much of the first few chapters of Master and Commander or Post Captain warrant re-reading.

Contrast this with Forester, who ended one book with the Peace and opened it with another. Of course, there’s also later on where Hornblower has to escape a re-occupied France, but there’s no chance O’Brian would copy the same plot for his novels about British naval officers during peacetime, right?

Right?

OH HO HO TURNS OUT THE PEACE OF AMIENS DOESN’T LAST HUH HARDEEEE HAR HAR HAR wait why are you dressed like a bear, Jack?

Why did you let Stephen put a collar on you, Jack?

Is this some sort of BDSM thing with you two now?

Good lord don’t let Sophia’s mother find out, she already suspects.

To briefly return to seriousness, if the first section of Post Captain teaches us anything for our comparison analysis it’s the differences in how O’Brian and Forester write love interests, along with women characters at large.

Forester presents a more old-fashioned, of-the-times sort of framing, while O’Brian’s depictions of the relationships between Aubrey, Maturin, Sophia, and Diana feel more influenced by writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

There are direct lines that can be drawn between this book, Great Gatsby, and The Sun Also Rises, which in an academic form would look like:

Of course, the more detailed version would look like this.

It’s interesting because much of the time Maturin feels like more of a self-insert for O’Brian than Aubrey does – we have never seen Aubrey journal, for instance, although we get enough of his thoughts aloud for it to be unneeded.

Aubrey himself feels both a combination of power fantasy and placing all of his own flaws into a single character, while Maturin remains the ever-abstracted scientist and observer. Despite this, there remains enough of the necessary self-loathing to have other scientists comment on Maturin’s state.

As an aside, I’ve quickly flipped a good way forward hoping to catch random words to excite me in my journey through (a common practice, I assure you) and I’ve caught glimpses of ‘Diana’ and ‘Hampstead Road’ and ‘shrubbery’ and I swear to god if we spend this whole book on land I’m gonna lose it

We are intermittently on the sea. Pullings is here. Everything is beginning to align, but at what costs?

Again, I am stuck by the determination to set up almost everything at a tedious pace before getting to the interesting bits, despite scattering other interesting bits throughout. It’s not ideal.

The first hundred-ish pages of Master and Commander felt like watching someone set up a chessboard. The first hundred-ish pages of Post Captain feel like watching someone BUILD a chessboard.

There’s nothing wrong with setting a scene, but there is something unwarranted in focusing on the process of cooking when all we want is to eat the dinner.

To be clear, I have no problem with stories which focus on process. The Name of the Rose is process. The Caves of Steel is process. Better Call Saul is process. Post Captain is just scene-setting and where-are-they-now character check-ins for a hundred pages before the action starts.

I don’t think it’s asking too much for a book with a big ship on the cover to at least set part of its story on a big ship within the first 100 pages. This is like the 1972 equivalent of hearing the writer’s life story and thoughts about food waste before getting to the actual recipe you googled.

Like Master and Commander before it, once you hit roughly the 170 page mark Post Captain really starts to become exciting again.

I love the jankiness of the Polychrest and the small smattering of returning characters balanced against new ones.

The continued development of Pullings concerns me as, if we continue to follow the pacing and structure from the previous book, it almost surely means he may be dead before this one is over. There’s no better signifier of a tertiary character’s upcoming demise than allowing our main two viewpoints to meet his family, who are all kind and loving.

However, the fact that I do actually care about whether Pullings lives or not does mean O’Brian is doing a lot of things right, and some of those things are only possible because of the glacial way in which time moves at certain points.

It is interesting to see what he decides to linger on and what is relegated to simple commas in single sentences.

In the middle of page 198, for example, Aubrey decides to put the Polychrest about. We get a half page of hands being called, a half page of preparing for the mainsail haul, a full page of Aubrey’s thoughts as this is happening concerning the nearby lee shore, and then a full page of the results of the crew box-hauling her.

The thing is, halfway through that last page, O’Brian changes the way time passes mid-sentence. Let’s quote it directly, starting one sentence prior:

“For a moment all the certainties of his world quivered – he caught a dumbfounded, appalled glance from the master – and then with a sigh from the masts and stays, the strangest straining groan, the Polychrest’s motion passed through a barely perceptible immobility to headway. She brought the wind right aft, then on to her larboard quarter; and hauling out the mizzen and trimming all sharp, he set the course, dismissed the watch below, and walked into his cabin, relief flooding into him.”

I find these choices in writing fascinating. Only the author decides time.

For all my complaints, I do so love these characters. Killick returning brings real joy, like a home that suddenly sees the return of a child from boarding school. And Jack and Stephen’s relationship, it’s pure, unfiltered, unabashed love both surface-level and underneath, is a joy to behold.

You can see it in the terms they use for each other. “My dear,” “my peace,” “joy.”

Maturin writes in his diary, “It is affection which brings me here, no doubt.”

When Aubrey gets his commission, he immediately gets one for his partner without a thought, “I had taken it absolutely for granted that we were to sail together, Stephen,” cried Jack. “And I was so happy to bring you these orders.”

And Stephen, so used to his routine, scrambles to assure him that it was simply the abruptness of the change and not the concept itself, and shows up earlier than expected immediately after to report.

To momentarily return to our comparison, the closest Hornblower ever came to such closeness was when he and Brown were tending Bush’s injury and also waiting for spring, so the river would thaw and they could escape France during the previously-mentioned Peace of Amiens breakdown. Near incomparable.

Final Thoughts

I want to phrase this as delicately as possible, because I truly do mean no offense: Are Jack and Stephen having sexual relations? It really seems like they are.

In describing Jack while admiring something about Stephen, O’Brian says “yet he had known him intimately.”

Has the subtext become text and I missed it? It’s fine if so. It would work thematically, with Aubrey bristling against the former captain’s constant want to charge two of his crew with “buggery,” and it would not lessen the relationship between the two men.

If anything, it might strengthen it. They clearly will live together forever already.

It is curious to have all of this in the same book that contains what I previously described as a Hemingway/Fitzgerald-like romance, of course.

Perhaps it’s less about combining the writing styles of those men and about putting those two men in a room with each other.

A room with a view, and maybe a bed.