Ric is the man

The series is a masterpiece. The best I’ve heard or read. Ric is the ultimate in verbal performance, never have I enjoyed a story telling as I have by him. I’ve listened multiple times and always get great joy and happiness from the telling. So cool. Thank you both. Regards.

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A Very Good Spy Story

The narrator lost track of the character's at times but it doesn't spoil the story.

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Jack and Stephen Mostly Ashore

After the showy towing of a prize (a British whaler that’s been recaptured from the Americans during the ongoing War of 1812) into the West Indies squadron and the exciting chase after an American privateer, the eleventh novel in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series of Age Napoleon British navy books, The Reverse of the Medal (1986), occurs completely ashore, back in England. The story mostly develops the spy side of O’Brian’s series, with a treasonous “rat” making trouble for British intelligence, Stephen Maturin, and Post-Captain Jack Aubrey. The prime odd couple and best friends Jack and Stephen are entertaining and compelling ashore, where Jack is a gullible mark for every “land shark” and is caught in a tangled web of legal and financial difficulties from which he expects to extricate himself by using his prize money to engage in a little “harmless” stock-purchasing, and where Stephen is much more in command of himself (at sea he is prone to mistaking starboard from larboard, falling down hatches, and drowning). Although it should be said that Stephen has been knocked a bit off stride by the burning down of his comfortable London lodgings and the absconding of his wife Diana to Sweden with a handsome young Lithuanian hussar.

And yet… O’Brian’s novels lose much of their attraction (for this reader) when Jack and Stephen are on land. O’Brian is so good at evoking what it must have been like to be at sea in the early 19th century with sails propelling a ship through every kind of weather over every kind of water in every kind of spot on the globe. He does give us some of that good stuff early in this novel, as in the two following examples:

Short and fast:
“There was a pure keen delight in this flying speed, the rushing air, and the taste of sea in his mouth.”

Long and slow:
“There were mornings when the ship would lie there mirrored in a perfectly unmoving glossy sea, her sails drooping, heavy with dew, and he would dive from the rail, shattering the reflection and swimming out and away beyond the incessant necessary din of two hundred men hurrying about their duties or eating their breakfast. There he would float with an infinity of pure sea on either hand and the whole hemisphere of sky above, already full of light; and then the sun would heave up on the eastern rim, turning the sails a brilliant white in quick succession, changing the sea to still another nameless blue, and filling his heart with joy.”

Ashore, the novels tend to turn one part comedy of manners and two parts cloak-and-dagger. And since about the eighth book in the series, we’ve known that the alcoholic, gambling blackguard Andrew Wray is in fact the “Judas” in British intelligence selling his country out to Napoleon and hatching schemes against Jack and or Stephen, so it’s increasingly hard to believe that Stephen, who in addition to being a famous naturalist and doctor is a veteran ace spy, never suspects the guy, and it increasingly feels like O’Brian is contriving Stephen’s obtuseness to generate conflict. So as I’ve read on in the series, I’ve been increasingly finding it flawed in this area, and here this book has seven of ten chapters devoted to this plot strand.

Moreover, O’Brian is not averse to setting up a fine climax and then cutting it short and ending a novel without any resolution, so the reader is left having to read the start of the next entry in the series to find out what happened at the end of the previous one. This happens at the end of the tenth book, The Far Side of the World, when everything is leading up to a conflict between American and British sailors stuck on an otherwise deserted island in the Pacific, only to have a deus ex machina presumably save the day, but the novel ends so abruptly that we don’t know exactly what was going on with the American ship’s captain and crew, how the Surprise happened to show up at just that moment in the nick of time, and so on and so forth. This eleventh novel pulls a similar disappointing trick: abrupt climax and absent resolution.

There are surely many virtues in this book. Plenty of interesting things about Jack’s natural dark-skinned son, the British legal system, about cricket played between two ships’ crews, about how quickly and competently sailors can renovate a cottage, about how to set up as a privateer, and of course about Jack and Stephen’s friendship (e.g., “Brother, I told you I had inherited from my godfather”). And O’Brian is a fine, wise writer, so of course there are nice lines revealing human nature, like “Ever since I had a great deal of money, I have found that I much dislike being parted from it, particularly in a sharp or overbearing manner,” as well as great descriptions of the natural world, like a “living silence” when “the green world and the gentle blue sky might have just been created.”

But I’m hoping that the next book will mostly take Jack and Stephen to sea again!

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