Master and Commander

Aubrey/Maturin Series, Book 1

This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, Royal Navy, and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against the thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of life aboard a man-of-war in Nelson's navy are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the road of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"The best historical novels ever written." (The New York Times Book Review)
"No writer alive can move one as O'Brian can; no one can make you laugh so loud with hilarity, whiten your knuckles with unbearable tension or choke with emotion. He is the master." (Irish Times)

Superb Adventure, Interesting Characters

I heard this book on tape and am thrilled that it is now available from Audible. O'Brian's characters are truly that, fully rounded human beings, whose faults are viewed as candidly as their virtues. The adventures are based on actual events during the Napoleonic Wars, and the author brings them to life with his portrayal of the telling details and the sweeping political events. The narrator's gritty voice, rather like that of an old salt, adds to the tale well told.

Narrator drags on this story like a sea anchor

I didn't realize there was a choice of narrators for the first 2 books of this series.. I'm going to excahnge my Tull version for the Vance version and listen again. A quicker paced narration will probably raise this book to a 4 or 5 star overall rating. To prove my point, Tull's version: 16hrs 39mins, Vance's version: 13hrs 17mins. Both are unabridged. The sad thing is that from book 3 on there's no choice of narrator. What a pity. I had just finished CS Forester's great series, and after the disappointment of this first book, I went on to Alexander Kent. The only problem with Kent's series is that not all of the series is recorded, but at least what's there moves along and keeps you interested.

Make note of your narrator

Patrick Tull and Simon Vance are both gifted narrators. However, when you start with one you may find it a jarring change when you start listening to the other. Each brings their own life to the characters, but it is a very different life. My own personal preference are the characters created by Mr. Tull, but Mr. Vance's acting is no less compelling, only different. If you care about such things, don't make the mistake that I made, buying the edition without first checking by whom it is narrated.

Fascinating Narrative Damped by Narrator

I'm two hours in and have heard the narrator - recorded in the 1980s - swallow painfully and at improbable length more times than in all 60+ Audible titles combined which I have heard thus far.

Lots and lots of nautical

So, I figure there are two kinds of people: those who like immaculately detailed nautical novels, and those who don't. I am 'meh' about them, which is probably why I've never gotten around to reading Moby Dick. I love paintings of naval battles, but when it comes to reading many pages detailing the operations of a sailing vessel and the Royal Navy's rank hierarchy, I would rather skip to the story.

So, Patrick O'Brian, known for his historical and nautical accuracy, wrote about twenty of these Aubrey/Maturin novels apparently. I can see them as fine reading for those who really love the time period or reading about naval battles, but while the battles were thrilling enough, the story at times moved at the pace of an over-laden frigate with a weak breeze.

Jack Aubrey is a captain without a ship until he is given command of a sloop (a very small, low-end warship) and assigned escort duty. Unfortunately, the former captain, who got an upgrade to a better ship, took most of his crew with him. One of the first things we learn about the Royal Navy in the 19th century is that captains were often responsible for outfitting and crewing their ships with little financial support from the crown. In need of a ship's surgeon, among other things, Aubrey is lucky enough to encounter a physician in need of a job, a half-Irish Natural Philosopher named Stephen Maturin. Initially, Maturin's primary purpose is to have everything aboard ship explained to him, allowing O'Brian to dump exposition on the reader. However, Maturin has some secrets, one of them being that he was involved in an Irish uprising that went badly (as most Irish uprisings did). Despite this, he and Aubrey soon become good friends - surprisingly quickly, in fact.

The rest of the book is mostly a realistic depiction of life aboard a warship, long weeks of tedious routine interrupted by occasional bloody action. The officers and the common seamen are a rough lot, and this is the era of rum and floggings. Aubrey, as befits a protagonist at the beginning of his own series, pulls off a spectacular victory against a much larger Spanish ship with several times the guns and crew of the Sophie, but promptly gets screwed over by a spiteful superior officer and is thus robbed of his rightful glory. He's then captured by a French admiral after another overwhelmingly one-side battle, but he and his crew are paroled back to Gibraltar, where he faces a court martial for losing his ship.

The historical details are great and Aubrey's naval encounters are described with plenty of action mixed with sea terms. He has narrow escapes, narrow victories, wins and losses, and we get to know him and his crew over the course of the book. However, the only characters who are memorable are Aubrey, Maturin, and an important secondary character, who dies in the final battle. They're also all rather same-ish. While the developing friendship between Aubrey and Maturin is rendered in many humorous and heartwarming scenes, Master and Commander is otherwise not a particularly character-driven novel, and the story serves only to introduce us to Commander Aubrey and his ship.

So, if this is the kind of book you like, this is the kind of book you will like. I would not say I absolutely wouldn't read any more of these, but book one wasn't enough to hook me on the series.

Patrick Tull's reading of the novel was fine, with the right accents and vocal expressiveness for all the characters, but I found his frequent swallowing and licking his lips to be slightly distracting.