The first book is the best of the Maturin-Aubrey series. But that requires one to assess the books individually; a shabby approach, and inadequate, for the later heights could not be achieved in a single book. As one reader observed about a culminating episode:
I think you could make a case that the effect of that single sequence, relying as it does on 1,000 cumulative insights/relationships/details spread throughout the previous novels, is one of the great literary moments in English literature.
(David Wilmington in Facebook, Sept 2, 2010))
I agree with the high commendation; also that the brilliance belongs to the oeuvre rather than the single volume. In that light, it’s natural that the first book should excel above the others. It is sublimely clever; but this is Patrick O’Brian, and I must merely say natural in order to save on superlatives.
Chapter One introduces three men. We are given a glimpse of each, in the privacy of early morning, and in each glimpse the name of Lord is spoken in vain or earnest:
‘Christ,’ said Jack, as the shattering din of the carpenter’s hammer prised him from his hold on sleep. He clung to the soft darkness as hard as he could, burying his face in the pillow … But there was no sleeping; the echoing crash of the hammer right next to his ear made certain of that. They were in his sleeping cabin, of course. Jets of pain shot through Jack’s head as he lay there. ‘ ‘Vast that bloody hammering.’ he called and almost against his shoulder came the shocked reply, ‘Aye-aye, sir,’ and the tip-toe pattering away.
[Stephen Maturin] opened his eyes and stared about very stupidly: a moment before he had been so solidly, so warmly and happily in Ireland, with a girl’s hand under his arm, that his waking mind could not take in the world he saw … He had been exceedingly attached, and she was so bound up with that time … He had been quite unprepared for this particular blow, striking under every conceivable kind of armour, and for some minutes he could hardly bear the pain, but sat there blinking in the sun. ‘Christ,’ he said at last. ‘Another day.’ With that his face grew more composed.
‘Christe,’ hummed James Dillon under his breath, shaving the red-gold bristles off his face in what light could make its way through the scuttle of the Burford’s number twelve gunport. ‘Christe eleison. Kyrie …’ This was less piety in James Dillon than a way of hoping he should not cut himself; for like so many Papists he was somewhat given to blasphemy. The difficult of the planes under his nose silenced him, however, and when his upper lip was clean he could not hit the note again.
I have never understood what O’Brian is saying about blasphemy among Papists, and it’s curious that he uses that prejudicial term while we are visiting Dillon’s mind. But this bit of narrative is an epigram; it foreshadows the man’s fate. When we close the last page of Master and Commander, we will understand Dillon’s red hair, his hopes and perils, his inability to hit the note again, his dim lighting, and his private intonation of the doxology.
My impression is that to invoke the name of God as a talisman against the trivial chance of cutting oneself while shaving, constitutes a lesser kind of blasphemy: Jesus Christ, God of Personal Grooming.
I think Justin’s got the papist blasphemy explanation and Scott’s observation about the foreshadowing of Dillon’s fate in the singing of the Kyrie is excellent. I think I could make the case that Stephen’s waking invocation is a genuine prayer of a sort. Not a “de profundis” in a historically important sense, but considering 1) what we know about how shattered he was by “that time” in his life and 2) the fact that the appeal to Christ moves him from hardly able to bear the pain to being more composed – I think Stephen “cries out” in genuine faith, even if as a “mere” habit, and receives a moment of grace that lifts him up from the depths.
I’ve been thinking for a while about how POB presents the experience of God in the series. See the passage about Stephen sitting in the woods below the Aubrey house in Reverse of the Medal and POB’s description of nature and time. I wrote a tiny bit about this here.
David, do you mean POB is a “nature writer” and he is thus presenting how God is experienced?
I also feel that it’s the best of the books in many respects, perhaps because when he wrote it O’Brian was only expecting to write one. It’s more self-contained than the others, more complete. Later, when he settled into a groove, I think he began to pay slightly less attention to detail.
Catholics, particularly Irish Catholics, invoke the Almighty with a frequency and flippancy that would would shock the southern American fundamentalist Protestants that I grew up around. These latter are quite particular about the third (Catholic second) commandment against taking the name of the Lord in vain, and extend its meaning far beyond making false oaths. Hence the rather peculiar non-swearing to be found in American English, especially old-fashioned country speech: “What in tarnation?,” “Goldarn,” etc. By contrast the many Irish Catholics of my acquaintance think nothing of saying, “by Jesus” as a form of meaningless emphasis, although they pronounce it “bejaysus.”
That is valuable background, Ernest. My question is this: Catholic or Protestant, who despises a man for murmuring the Latin while shaving? If O’Brian had explained Dillon’s self-preserving motive as “superstition”, that would make more sense. Calling it “blasphemy” would take a stern Reformer, an Enthusaist, a blue-light Tractarian. None such is present, so it seems off.
The thing that seems off may be this larger reference I cling to — what I called an epigram. That theory satisfies me, but I have wondered if there’s a more straightforward understanding.
BTW, I enjoyed your “My Perfect Game” page and some of your other bits.
Well, the “nature writer” label was just my provocative jab (since a mere “nature writer” is generally seen as not sophisticated in literary circles…like a mere landscape painter among art elites). But you’ve got it – I think that if you keep track of the points at which people, especially Stephen, have an unusual experience or awareness of God, it is often via an experience of the natural, non-human world (so: trees, light, animals) or even of the strangeness of time itself.
As a knowledgeable, if eccentric, Catholic, O’Brian would have either studied or simply absorbed some level of teaching about natural law…and I am specifically convinced that he knew a decent bit of Pascal’s blend of philosophical theology on this point.
BTW – I think POB’s use of “blasphemy” is playful rather than blue-light stuff. An epithet used from “the inside” of a culture that practices a bad habit.