The Commodore

(Vol. Book 17)

De: Patrick O'Brian

Narrado por: Ric Jerrom

Having survived a long and desperate adventure in the Great South Sea, Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin return to England to very different circumstances. For Jack it is a happy homecoming, at least initially, but for Stephen it is disastrous: his little daughter appears to be autistic, incapable of speech or contact, while his wife, Diana, unable to bear this situation, has disappeared, her house being looked after by the widowed Clarissa Oakes.

Much of The Commodore takes place on land, in sitting rooms and in drafty castles, but the roar of the great guns is never far from our hearing. Aubrey and Maturin are sent on a bizarre decoy mission to the fever-ridden lagoons of the Gulf of Guinea to suppress the slave trade. But their ultimate destination is Ireland, where the French are mounting an invasion that will test Aubrey's seamanship and Maturin's resourcefulness as a secret intelligence agent.

The subtle interweaving of these disparate themes is an achievement of pure storytelling by one of our greatest living novelists.

©1994 Patrick O'Brian (P)2014 Audible, Ltd

Jealousy, Responsibility, Slavery, and the Sea

After having circumnavigated the globe and been away for over two years in previous books in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin splendid series, in the seventeenth, The Commodore (1995), Jack and Stephen finally sail home to England. There Jack is to be made a commodore in command of a squadron of ships whose mission will consist of making a sensational attack on the slave trade off the coast of Africa and then scooting over to intercept a French squadron escorting transports with which Napoleon is planning to invade and “liberate” (i.e. rule) Ireland.

Much of this novel, then, is concerned with preparations ashore for the new mission as well as with touching base with family. All is not well on the home front: Jack’s wife Sophie is jealous of Clarissa Oaks, whom Stephen has sent to his wife Diana to help her raise their little girl Brigid, while Jack is jealous of the handsome local parson who’s been advising Sophie way too much in Jack’s absence and has even taken to sitting in HIS chair in their home. With great anticipation and trepidation, meanwhile, Stephen, arrives at his home only to find Diana absconded, having fled their supposedly unresponsive “idiot” daughter and assuming that Stephen would loathe her for it.

Luckily, Clarissa (the former prostitute murderess transported to Australia who ought to receive a pardon for having given vital intelligence to Stephen with some highly placed traitors could finally be nailed) is an utterly cool, intelligent, and caring woman, and through her efforts plus those of Stephen’s monoglot Irish assistant Padeen (also rescued from Australia), Brigid begins improving “day after day like a flower opening,” communicating with Padeen in fluent Irish and starting to act like a natural sensitive alive little girl (the scenes featuring Brigid are poignant).

Unluckily, Stephen and his colleague/boss in intelligence work Sir Joseph Blaine have an outstanding bitter and resourceful foe in a Dutch Duke related to the British royal family, and he’s out for revenge and won’t hesitate to destroy people close to Sir Joseph (like Stephen, Clarissa, and Padeen).

Once the story shifts back to the sea (where O’Brian belongs), Jack discovers that being a captain in charge of a single ship is a far different matter than being in charge of a multiple-ship squadron. The responsibility and stress and costs of failure are much greater, and he’ll have to rely to a great degree on the captains of his various ships, and two of them are Trouble: Captain Duff is a rumored pederast, favoring certain men above others, such that his officers are scheming to accuse him of the capital crime of sodomy, while Captain Thomas, aka the Purple Emperor, is a tyrannical incompetent whose crew is in a constant state of near mutiny.

Up through the first nine chapters and well into the tenth and final one there is no real time violent naval action. There are some false alarms (as when inveterate landlubber Stephen thinks some canon practice is a battle) and some small actions against slave ships reported second hand, but otherwise the book mostly consists of Stephen’s naturalizing among the flora and fauna of Africa, some discussions of pederasty in the navy, some horrific depictions of slave ships, some speculations on the relative benefits and harms of opium and cocoa leaves, some pleasurable interactions between Stephen and Jack (yay!), and detail on naval gunnery and Sunday sermons and dinners and prize money and discipline and winds and tides and currents and sails and so on and so forth.

But it is all so pleasurable! I didn’t miss the violent action, which is, after all, usually a minor part of an O’Brian novel relative to the other stuff (though readers who require exciting, graphic violent naval battles might be bored).

For me, the characters O’Brian created and set interacting with each other are so appealing that it’s just a pure pleasure to listen to the wonderful Ric Jerrom read their lines and interactions in the audiobook. That’s especially the case for Commodore Jack Aubrey (17 stone, blue eyed, blond haired, open, Anglican, uniquely suited for life and action at sea) and surgeon/naturalist/spy Stephen Maturin (9 stone, dark eyed, dark haired, secretive, Catholic, woefully incapable at sea). By this novel, they have been friends for many years and been through many adventures at sea and ashore together and understand and appreciate and love each other like a platonic old married couple. As they continue aging (“Sometimes I feel that I am no longer twenty”), they complement each other ever more perfectly:

“I am very deeply obliged to you, Jack, my dear.”
“There is no such thing as obligation between you and me, brother.”

And the novel is full of O’Brian’s splendid writing:

--The breeze freshened in the afternoon: they took a reef in the foresail and the main, and the Ringle was filled with that happy sense of making a good passage: ten knots, ten and two fathoms, eleven knots, sir, if you please, watch after watch; and Brigid spent all her time in the bows, watching the schooner rise on the now much longer swell, race down and split the next crest at great speed, flinging the spray to leeward in the most exhilarating fashion, always the same, always new. Once a line of porpoises crossed their hawse, rising and plunging like a single long black serpent. And once Stephen showed her a petrel, a little fluttering black bird that pittered on the white traces of broken waves; but otherwise the day was made up of strong diffused light, racing clouds with blue between, a vast grey sea, the continuous rush of wind and water, and a freshness that pervaded everything.

--“You was born with sea-legs, my dear,” said Slade, as she came careering aft for supper.

--“I shall never go ashore,” she replied

The novel ends rather abruptly, if satisfyingly, and I’m starting to dread finishing all twenty novels in the series because I don’t want it to end.

Fabulous

Absolutely loved it - O’Brian is a consummate author and the production was superb. Would definitely recommend.

Still going strong

This series continues to immerse and beguile. Get lost once again in the world of Maturin and Aubrey during the Napoleonic wars.

Audible for a long time had managed to confuse the book of the same title from C. S. Forester with this book by Patrick OBrian. So it has taken me nearly a year to pick up the series again. I nearly succumbed and went with the same title read by another narrator. but Ric Jerrom was worth waiting for.