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The Far Side of the World by Patrick O’Brian (1984) 312 p.
This is the halfway point of the series, and the book from which the 2003 Peter Weir film adaptation takes most (but not nearly all) of its plot. HMS Surprise is dispatched from Gibraltar in pursuit of the USS Norfolk, which has been sent to harass British whalers in the South Pacific. (We are, at this point, well into what O’Brian calls his fictional 1812b, in which he spun out the year indefinitely to avail himself of its most interesting historical events). And so The Far Side of the World takes us all the way down past the coast of Brazil, around the Antarctic storms of Cape Horn, up past Chile and the Galapagos and out into the warm tropical waters of Polynesia.
It’s a great book, one of the best in the series, and possibly the only book that features no extended naval battles. Peter Weir’s film of course ends with a confrontation of gunpowder and steel, but what happens in the novel when Surprise finally tracks down her quarry is infinitely more interesting – I won’t give away precisely what it is, but suffice to say it’s a sort of character-driven pressure-cooker situation of steadily increasing tensions between two opposing groups, the kind of thing (among many other things) which makes me dearly wish HBO would commission a multi-million dollar TV series of these books.
There’s another tremendous setpiece which unfolds perfectly. Fishing from the rear window of Aubrey’s cabin one night, the typically clumsy Maturin topples into the water, and with a cry of “clap on to the cutter!” Jack dives in after him without a second thought. Maturin’s constant ability to find himself in the drink has been played for laughs so many times by now that it’s quite a shock as the scene progresses and the reader realises Jack and Stephen are in far more danger than first thought: the cutter is not being towed behind the ship after all, there is nothing to clap onto, and Jack’s cries for assistance are drowned out by the singing of the sailors on the deck.
He had set Stephen to float on his back, which he could do tolerably well when the sea was calm; but an unfortunate ripple, washing over his face just as he breathed in, sank him again; again he had to be brought up, and now Jack’s “Surprise ahoy,” coming at the full pitch of his powerful voice, had an edge of anxiety to it, for although the ship was not sailing fast, every minute she moved more than a hundred yards, and already her lights were dimming in the mist.
Hail after hail after hail, enough to startle the dead: but when she was no more than the blur of the planet earlier in the night he fell silent, and Stephen said, “I am extremely concerned, Jack, that my awkwardness should have brought you into such very grave danger.”
“Bless you,” said Jack, “it ain’t so very grave as all that. Killick is bound to come into the cabin in half an hour or so, and Mowett will put the ship about directly.”
But Killick turns in early, and as the weaker Stephen lapses into unconsciousness through the night while the two of them float alone in the terrifyingly enormous Pacific Ocean, Jack’s mathematical calculations of time and distance and drift and endurance lead him to a bleak conclusion. Aside from being engaging in itself, this scene is a wonderful demonstration of their friendship: Stephen’s awkwardness has in fact got them both killed, but this never crosses Jack’s consideration, never leads to any acrimony or recriminations, even privately. Instead, knowing that being adrift in the ocean is far more terrifying for his friend than for him, Jack never treats him with anything less than gentleness.
In the midst of his calculations he became aware that Stephen, lying there as stiff as a board, was becoming distressed. “Stephen,” he said, pushing him, for Stephen’s head was thrown back so far that he could not easily hear, “Stephen, turn over, put your arms round my neck, and we will swim for a little.” Then as he felt Stephen’s feet on the back of his legs, “You have not kicked off your shoes. Do not you know you must kick off your shoes? What a fellow you are, Stephen.”
And cleverly – as in The Fortune of War, when Stephen and Jack’s different strengths play off each other as they find themselves stranded alone in Boston – it’s Stephen’s skills as a naturalist and anthropologist which come in to play when the two men are rescued by a Polynesian vessel crewed entirely by women, and it slowly becomes clear to Stephen in particular that this is not a society in which men will be welcomed; indeed, it’s only his memory of a very specific Polynesian word which saves Jack from an unpleasant fate.
Overall, one of the very finest entries in the series. I usually only read a few of these per year, but just burned through The Ionian Mission, Treason’s Harbour and The Far Side of the World in a single month while travelling, so I’ll have to back off and pace myself again.
The Last Continent by Terry Pratchett (1998) 416 p.
This isn’t a book about Australia. It’s a book about a place that just happens to be a bit… Australian. Following another mangled geo-spatial spell at the end of Interesting Times, Rincewind has found himself not in the familiar comfort of Unseen University, but instead stranded in sunburnt country – XXXX, or Fourecks, the Discworld’s equivalent of Australia. And with the Librarian unexpectedly, magically ill, the University Faculty decide the only way to bring him back is through a magical cure – but the only person who might remember his real name for spellmaking purposes is Rincewind. So they set off to retrieve him, instead finding themselves inadvertently stranded on a desert isle. Pratchett weaves the usual disparate story threads together with something less than his usual aplomb – what unfolds across the book, and the manner in which Rincewind and the Faculty are eventually reunited, is generally just via authorial handwaving. This is definitely one of the Discworld novels which puts any serious plot or commentary to one side and just has fun making a bunch of jokes; so be it.
The British relationship to Australia, at least for a man of Pratchett’s generation, was of a sunny and far-away place which they would never personally visit but would experience second-hand through pop culture and the waves of Aussie backpackers infesting London throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Australian pop culture was curiously prolific in the 1980s – Crocodile Dundee, Mad Max, Neighbours and all that – which meant that for a long time after, foreigners had a perception of the country that was somewhat dated. I was interested to see that by 1998, when The Last Continent was published, Brits like Pratchett had apparently already started to encounter Australians who (no doubt affected in the first place by our long-standing cultural cringe and nagging sense that we’re an unimportant outpost at the edge of human civilisation) were miffed at that portrayal:
The bar went quiet.
“An’ you’re gonna come here and make a lot of cracks about us all drinkin’ beer and fightin’ and talkin’ funny, right?”
Some of Rincewind’s beer said, “No worries.”
His captor pulled him so they were face to face. Rincewind had never seen such a huge nose.
“An’ I expect you don’t even know that we happen to produce some partic’ly fine wines, our Chardonnays bein’ ‘specially worthy of attention and compet’tively priced, not to mention the rich, firmly structur’d Rusted Dunny Valley of Semillons, which are a tangily refreshin’ discovery for the connesewer… yew bastard?”
…which is more or less the same joke used straight-faced twenty years later in this Tourism Australia Superbowl ad. My own personal experience on the changing relationship between our countries is deeply coloured by the year I spent living in a post-GFC Britain, in which most of the young people I met expressed bafflement as to why on earth any Australian would move to the UK. To British people – young British people, at any rate – Australia’s material standard of living and level of opportunity is higher than anything they can expect in their own country. (And this was before the Brexit vote). Who knows whether that will remain the case in the future, but it’s an interesting thing to consider how the relationship has changed over the decades.
Overall, The Last Continent is… fine. The jokes are cheap shots at Australia, like that Simpsons episode, and like that Simpsons episode I love them. I prefer the Discworld novels that have a stronger plot holding them together, but these are fine.
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929) 355 p.
I’m more a fan of Hemingway’s short stories than his novels, and the only reason I read this was because I was travelling in Italy and like to match my holiday reading to my location. But I liked this far more than his other novels, because it actually has a plot. Following an American fighting for the Italian army during World War I, A Farewell to Arms takes us through wartime, devastating injury, a long convalescent period, blossoming love, a return to the front, a catastrophic retreat, desertion, a hurried escape to Switzerland and personal tragedy, all in a couple of hundred pages.
Hemingway still maintains an obsession with making sure we know precisely what the protagonist is having for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and precisely what he’s drinking at any given moment (grappa and vermouth, mostly) but who am I to deny a Pulitzer winner his schtick? There’s a particularly good sequence, with shades of the short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, where the protagonist is detained along with dozens of other officers following the rout at Caporetto, and witnesses them being quickly questioned and then executed – a reminder that fascism was not many years away from seizing Italy.
“It is you and such as you that have let the barbarians onto the sacred soil of the fatherland.”
“I beg your pardon,” said the lieutenant-colonel.
“It is because of treachery such as yours that we have lost the fruits of victory.”
“Have you ever been in a retreat?” the lieutenant-colonel asked.
“Italy should never retreat.”
We stood there in the rain and listened to this. We were facing the officers and the prisoner stood in front and a little to one side of us.
“If you are going to shoot me,” the lieutenant-colonel said, “please shoot me at once without further questioning. The questioning is stupid.”
This is also a book which I’m glad I read on an ereader. Obviously in a physical book you can tell very easily when you’re approaching the end of the story; in an ereader, your only clue is “page 300 of 355” at the bottom of the screen. This edition happened to have a lot of afterwords and appendices tacked on to the end, and so I thought I still had another hundred-odd pages left when the ending – one of Hemingway’s most emotionally brutal – arrived unexpectedly. I liked that.
Treason’s Harbour by Patrick O’Brian (1983) 330 p.
Jack Aubrey’s Mediterranean cruises are typically the novels I’m least interested in, since they so heavily involve naval battles and all their associated strategising, which is easily the most difficult part of this series to comprehend. Treason’s Harbour, which uses Malta as its hub, is a nice surprise: it’s another book which deftly balances Jack’s maritime escapades with Stephen’s more shadowy land-based work in the intelligence service.
One of the things which appealed to me from the outset was the opening scene, in which Jack is at a garden party with a number of other officers, while Stephen is dining some way off with another friend. Both men are under observation from a tower by a pair of French spies, and O’Brian shifts the scene cinematically back and forth between Jack and Stephen by means of the spies’ discussion as a segue. And he maintains, as always, a wonderfully readable ability for his prose to skip along across so many different aspects: a walk along a country road, a glimpse of nature in motion, idle thoughts of literature, and encounters with foreign tradition:
It was an unfrequented road: one ox-cart, one ass, one peasant in the last half hour. Unfrequented by men, that is to say; but in the olive-trees on either hand the cicadas kept up a metallic strident din, sometimes rising to such a pitch that conversation would have been difficult had he not been alone; and once he left the small fields and the groves, walking over stony, goat-grazing country, the highway was very much used by reptiles. Small dun lizards flickered in the scorched grass at the edge and big green ones as long as his forearm scuttled away at his approach, while occasional serpents brought him up all standing: he had an ignorant, superstitious horror of snakes. On a walk of this kind in the Mediterranean islands he usually saw tortoises, which he did not dislike at all – far from it – but they seemed rare on Gozo, and it was not until he had been going for some time that he heard a curious tock-tock-tock and he saw a small one running, positively running across the road, perched high on its legs; it was being pursued by a larger tortoise, who, catching it up, butted it three times in quick succession: it was the clap of the shells that produced the tock-tock-tock. “Tyranny,” said Jack, meaning to intervene: but either the last blows had subdued the smaller tortoise – a female, or she felt that she had shown all the reluctance that was called for; in any case she stopped. The male covered her, and maintaining himself precariously on her domed back with his ancient folded leathery legs he raised his face to the sun, stretched up his neck, opened his mouth wide and uttered the strangest dying cry. “Bless me,” said Jack, “I had no notion… how I wish Stephen were here.” Unwilling to disturb them, he fetched a cast quite round the pair and walked on, trying to recall some lines of Shakespeare that had to do not exactly with tortoises but with wrens, until he reached a wayside shrine dedicated to St Sebastian, the martyr’s blood recently renewed with startling brilliance and profusion.
Similarly impressive, as I noted in the sad case of Lieutenant Nicolls way back in HMS Surprise, is O’Brian’s ability to give the commonplace tragedy of historical fiction – the daily reality of injury and death – an emotional note which must be read in between the lines. Halfway through the novel, a foreign representative assigned to Jack’s ship meets a sudden and grisly end:
“What the devil is he about?” said Jack, as he saw the dragoman take off his shirt and stand on the rail. “Mr Hairabedian,” he called. But it was too late: although Hairabedian heard he was already in midair. He dived into the warm, opaque sea with scarcely a splash and swam aft along the side under the surface, reappearing by the mainchains, looking up at the quarterdeck and laughing. Abruptly his cheerful face jerked upwards – his chest and shoulders shot clear of the water. A long dark form could be seen below him and while his face still looked up, his wide-open mouth uttering an enormous cry, he was shaken from side to side with inconceivable ferocity and he vanished in a great boil of water. Once again his head rose up, still recognizable, and the stump of an arm: but now at least five sharks were striving furiously in the bloody sea and a few moments later there was nothing but the red cloud and the fishes questing eagerly in it for more, while others came racing in, their fins sharp on the surface.
The shocked silence went on and on until at last the quartermaster at the con gave a meaning cough: the sand in the half-hour glass was running out.
“Shall I carry on, sir?” asked the master in a low voice.
“Aye, do, Mr Gill,” said Jack. “Mr Calamy, my sextant, if you please.”
This appears to be the end of the matter; it’s only in small asides or glimpses of sullenness among the ship’s company, across the remainder of the chapter, that we understand how deeply shaken Jack and his seamen are by what befell Hairabedian. On a similar note, early on in the novel O’Brian reveals to the reader (but not to the other characters) that a high-ranking member of the Admiralty’s intelligence division is in fact a French spy; I expected Stephen to eventually expose him, but this doesn’t occur, and in fact our hero is none the wiser by the novel’s conclusion. Perhaps the man will meet his just desserts in the next book; perhaps they won’t come until several more books down the line; or perhaps he’ll never face justice at all, since O’Brian, like Larry McMurtry, knows the universe can be cruel and unfair and has no hesitation about applying those rules to his characters, as in the case of poor Hairabedian.
But, also like McMurtry, O’Brian has a marvellous sense of humour. It’s far too long to replicate the whole thing here (and the only reason I included the above passages at all is thanks to internet piracy allowing me to copy and paste) but there’s a great scene in which Jack and an excited Stephen row out to the supply ship Dromedary, which has delivered Stephen’s newly-ordered diving bell (as proudly mentions several times, “Dr. Halley’s model”) and Jack realises that Stephen, utterly oblivious to the needs and concerns of a Navy man-of-war, expects Jack to carry the enormous device aboard his own vessel.
Jack had meant to take his friend aside and tell him privately that it would not do; that the machine would be obliged to be set ashore or sent home; that Jack was tolerably fly, not having been born yesterday, and was not to be taken in by a fait accompli; but these very shocking figures so startled him that he cried “God help us! Five foot across – eight foot high – close on two ton! How can you ever have supposed that room could be attempted to be made for such a monstrous thing on the deck of a frigate?” All around him the smiling faces turned grave and closed and he was aware of a strong current of moral disapproval: the Dromedaries were obviously on Stephen’s side.
…
“What do you say to the convenient little space between the foremast and the front rail?”
“Two tons right over her forefoot, pressing on her narrow entry? It would make an angel gripe: it would cut two knots off her rate of sailing on a bowline. Besides, there is the mainstay, you know, and the downhauls; and how should I ever win my anchors? No, no, Doctor, I am sorry to say it will never do. I regret it; but had you spoken of it earlier, I should have advised against it directly; I should have told you at once that it would never do in a man-of-war, except perhaps in a first-rate, that might just find room for it on the skids.”
“It is Dr Halley’s model,” said Stephen in a low voice.
“But on the other hand,” said Jack with an unconvincing cheerfulness, “think what a boon it would be to a shore establishment! Lost cables, hawsers, anchors… and I am sure the port-admiral would lend you a broad-bottomed scow from time to time, to look at the bottom with.”
“For my part I shall always acknowledge a great debt to Dr Halley, whenever I take the altitude of a star,” said the master of the Dromedary.
“All mariners must be grateful to Dr Halley,” said his mate; and this seemed to be the general opinion aboard.
“Well, sir,” said the master, turning to Stephen with a most compassionate air, “What am I to do with your poor bell – with poor Dr Halley’s bell? Set it ashore as it stands, or take it to pieces and strike it down into the hold until you have considered in your mind? One or the other I must do to clear my hatchway, and double-quick, do you see, for the lighters will be putting off the moment the Clerk of the Chequer reaches Admiralty Creek. There he is, just by Edinburgh over there, nattering with her skipper.”
“Pray take it to pieces, Captain, if that should not be too laborious,” said Stephen. “I have some friends in Malta upon whose attachment I believe I can rely.”
Anyway, in reviewing, I find myself reduced once again to merely picking out pieces of prose I admire. Such is the lot of reviewing a Proustian meta-story split across twenty books. I once more heartily recommend this series.
Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne (1873) 198 p.
I had a bunch of long plane and car trips recently, and got around to downloading Inkle’s acclaimed iOS interactive fiction game 80 Days. As you’d imagine, it’s loosely based off the famous novel, but is set in an alternate steampunk world and lets you take more or less any route you please; on various playthroughs I ended up at the North Pole, aboard Captain Nemo’s submarine, or stranded on Pitcairn Island. It’s a great little game that made me more interested in the original novel, and as it turned out I had the public domain copy sitting around on my ereader, so I figured I’d give it a read.
It’s not good! It starts out well enough, with the classic set-up of the excitable, emotional Frenchman Passepartout becoming valet to the ludicrously rigid Englishman Phileas Fogg, a gentleman of leisure with a mysterious fortune who does nothing with his days but read the newspaper and go play whist at the Reform Club. On literally the first day of his employment, Passepartout is dismayed to learn Fogg has taken on an expensive wager with his friends at the club, after an argument about a newspaper article which claims it’s now possible to travel around the world in eighty days. The point of contention is that the newspaper published it merely as a hypothetical, based on train timetables and steamer routes; Fogg’s friends claim that delays and mishaps would inevitably throw the schedule off track, while Fogg claims that no delay or mishap is insurmountable. Personally I found this far less interesting than if Fogg had merely been putting his faith in the transport marvels of the modern age and was striking out blind, but whatever: off they go, pursued by a Scotland Yard detective named Fix who’s convinced Fogg is responsible for a £20,000 Bank of England robbery and is taking a circuitous route to flee justice.
As the book goes on, it’s just really dry and dull. There are perfunctory adventures in there, but Verne sort of skips over them, telling rather than showing. One of the core offenders is a Sioux attack on a train in the Midwest, in which Passepartout is abducted and Fogg leads some American soldiers off to rescue him; Verne for some reason decides to convey this scene from the perspective of Fix, who’s sitting around at the train station waiting for them to return. Enthralling stuff. It’s also very much a product of its time, marvelling at the accomplishments of the British Empire and falling in lockstep with the White Man’s Burden. (The game 80 Days, penned mostly by black science fiction writer Meg Jaynath, takes a more even-handed view.) Fogg is not a particularly interesting character beyond being a stereotype of English reserve – it would have been far more interesting if Fix turned out to be right and he really was the bank robber – and the actual facts of his accomplishment are uninspiring. Of course delays and mishaps won’t put a spanner in the works when you’re rich enough to just buy a boat if you miss your departure. On the whole I don’t recommend it, though I very much do recommend 80 Days.
Jingo by Terry Pratchett (1997) 448 p.
Discworld #21 (City Watch #4)
Jingo is one of the Discworld novels I remember best, since I think I started aged around 12 with The Fifth Elephant and, for some reason, worked my backwards through the City Watch books. I remember most of them fairly well, but this must have seared itself into my brain – I remember almost every scene and quite a lot of dialogue. Which makes it difficult to assess. Frankly it’s less interesting than I remember, but perhaps that’s because I remember it so well that there was nothing to surprise me?
Concerning a confrontation between Ankh-Morpork and its neighbour across the Circle Sea, Klatch (a stand-in for vaguely Middle Eastern countries), you’d imagine the fundamental theme of the book to be war. Not really. It has much to say about statecraft and patriotism and of course jingoism, but not about the business of war itself – though Pratchett returns to the subject in Monstrous Regiment. And despite the fact that the war is kicked off (or at least hastened along) by an assassination attempt on a visiting Klatchian dignitary to Ankh-Morpork, it feels like an odd book for Sam Vimes to be the centre of. (Though this is far more egregious in Monstrous Regiment, where even as a teenager, I thought he had no business being in.)
There’s some good stuff in here as always. A particularly clever plot trick is the use of Vimes’ magical PDA, which begins giving him more useful appointments by telling him what is about to happen in the immediate future; and the twist which occurs (which only Pratchett could pull off) when, at a critical moment of decision, two Vimes in alternate universes accidentally grab each other’s PDAs. And so while Vimes is going after one of his abducted officers, dragging along whichever members of the Watch he could round up to get to Klatch where Captain Carrot starts playing Lawrence of Arabia, he begins receiving rather eerie and brutal butterfly-effect updates of what’s happening in a parallel universe where he stayed in Ankh-Morpork. Put like that it seems confusing and silly, but on the page, Pratchett makes it work beautifully.
Next up is Carpe Jugulum, a Witches book which many consider to be excellent but which I don’t recall very well. Hopefully that’s actually a good sign.
Grub Street 