November 3, 1996



Don't Give Up the Ship

By TERRY TEACHOUT

THE YELLOW ADMIRAL

By Patrick O'Brian.



O'Brian's present popularity is to some extent a fad, but it is also justified. To say that his books are a cut above the average historical novel is to miss the point: Aubrey and Maturin are to Capt. Horatio Hornblower what Philip Marlowe is to Perry Mason. Nor is his superiority merely a function of his ability to tell good stories in stylish prose. Having read the entire cycle more than once, I continue to be astonished by the breadth of O'Brian's cultural awareness -- among many other things, he writes about music with the knowledge and gusto of a highly cultivated amateur -- and while he wears his learning lightly, it is central to the effect these wonderfully civilized books make. In "The Letter of Marque" (1990), for instance, Stephen Maturin and his wayward wife, Diana, reconcile in a scene modeled on the finale of "The Marriage of Figaro," and the reference is not gratuitous: rather, it adds immeasurably to the richness of the novel's emotional texture.

In the end, what makes the Aubrey-Maturin novels memorable is their moral gravity: rarely does one encounter in nominally popular fiction so Trollopian an understanding -- and acceptance -- of the divided nature of men's souls. O'Brian does not deal in cardboard heroes, which is why the acts of heroism he describes make so powerful an impression. We read him for his plots; we reread him for his philosophy.

Yet I must confess to having felt vaguely disappointed by the last three or four installments of the Aubrey-Maturin chronicle, and "The Yellow Admiral" is no exception. This is no doubt partly due to the inevitable flagging of inspiration that comes in the final stages of so protracted a literary undertaking: though there are enough plot devices in "The Yellow Admiral" to keep at least two ordinary novelists busy, more than a few of them are suspiciously familiar, as are their resolutions. Once again, Stephen Maturin loses his fortune (though he gets it back); once again, Jack Aubrey and his jealous wife, Sophie, find themselves on the outs (though they kiss and make up); once again, Jack's imprudence by land causes him to lose favor with the Admiralty (though he proves indispensable at sea).

Still, the surprising thing is not that O'Brian is showing signs of diminishing inspiration -- he is, after all, 82 years old -- but that "The Yellow Admiral," while somewhat predictable, is nonetheless full of life. The Aubrey-Maturin novels float on a sea of talk, and the talk in this one is as stimulating, and occasionally outrageous, as ever: I expect my Catholic friend will blanch when he gets to the part where Diana seeks to persuade the sexually timid Sophie that the best way to ease the pain caused by her husband's intermittent adulteries is to give him a double shot of his own medicine ("The only thing to do, if you knew your lover or husband or whatever was being unfaithful, was to pay him back in his own coin, not out of wantonness or revenge but to avoid worse: to avoid self-righteousness").

What, then, is the problem? The first 12 novels were given sweep and unity by the twin arcs of Aubrey's erratic career and Maturin's obsessive pursuit of Diana. But at the end of "The Letter of Marque," with Aubrey redeemed in the eyes of the Admiralty and Stephen and Diana happy at last, the series lost much of its volume-to-volume momentum, and what had once seemed to be on the verge of turning into a full-fledged multivolume novel ended up being something rather less ambitious. At first, we wanted to know what would happen to Aubrey and Maturin; now we are content merely to bask in the comfortable glow of their company, secure in the knowledge that whatever obstacles a crafty author may choose to place in their paths, they will prevail. The doubt is gone, and with it the tension.

If Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Powell (or Anthony Trollope, for that matter) had been writing these books, the curve balls would have started flying several volumes back; Diana, for example, might have been killed off, and Stephen's resulting grief used to deepen our understanding of his personality. But O'Brian coddles and cossets his darlings instead of murdering them, a sure sign of loss of nerve: there are by now at least a dozen untouchable continuing characters in the series, all of whom must be tended, watered and trotted out for their annual star turns. To be sure, tragedy continues to strike without warning in O'Brian's fictional universe -- there is a particularly jolting death in "The Yellow Admiral" -- but the one thing his faithful readers can count on is that nobody they really like will ever vanish over the side.

O'Brian's American publishers call him "the 20th century's answer to Jane Austen," and it is surely worth noting that the current surge of popular interest in Austen is taking place simultaneously with the O'Brian boom. A great many intelligent readers have no use whatsoever for post-modern fiction, and the serious middlebrow novelists of yesteryear, who once plugged the gap between high modernism and trash, no longer exist (it's a long, long way from John Marquand to John Grisham). In their absence, a reading public hungry for thoughtful yet accessible storytelling is looking for palatable alternatives. Hence the renewed appeal of Jane Austen -- and hence, too, the tendency for certain readers and reviewers to overvalue O'Brian, not infrequently with a touch of near-hysteria born of the need to have one's tastes ratified with the critical equivalent of a Good Housekeeping seal.

It is not my purpose in saying this to slight an author whose work I admire greatly. Taken as a whole, the Aubrey-Maturin novels are by a long shot the best things of their kind, so much better than the competition that comparisons long ago ceased to be relevant: they are uniquely excellent, and deserve the widest possible audience. One might easily say of them what F. R. Leavis said of Thomas Peacock: "His books, which are obviously not novels in the same sense as Jane Austen's, have a permanent life as light reading -- indefinitely rereadable -- for minds with mature interests."

But Leavis's praise, right down to the mention of Austen, embodies an essential distinction, the same one that must be made, however reluctantly, in the case of Patrick O'Brian. Fine as they are, these books are of their kind: brilliant entertainments, rich in implication and almost certainly of permanent interest, yet not quite up to the mark set by Austen and Trollope. They come pretty close, though, and I think that's the ultimate source, oddly enough, of my nagging dissatisfaction: O'Brian, like Moses, has seen the promised land, but cannot enter it.