Book Review: Blue at the Mizzen & The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey

Blue at the Mizzen by Patrick O’Brian (2000) 262 p.

And

The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey by Patrick O’Brian (2004) 192 p.

I’ve long had a habit of saving my reading of the Aubrey-Maturin series for holidays, because they’re books that deserve to be read in the life-affirming circumstances of a refreshing break from the daily grind, in warmer and more exotic locales. I finished the series this past January, travelling around the south-west of Western Australia after my sister’s wedding; completing the “true” ending of Blue at the Mizzen sitting on a balcony in the deep karri forest outside Pemberton, and completing the wistfully incomplete ending of The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey* on a remote and deserted stretch of coast at Cathedral Rock Beach. I know that sounds wanky and faffy but I’m right, right? I started reading this series on a park bench in London when I was twenty-six. I’m now thirty-four. It’s been too long and enjoyable a voyage to conclude it when I’m half-asleep on the train to the office at 7:30am on a bleak winter’s morning.

(*The title of this book is a frankly shocking affront by the publisher: it is the final unfinished voyage of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin and there is not a fan of the series alive who would deny that.)

However, there’s a reason it’s taken me a few months to get around to reviewing them: after twenty books, you know what you’re in for, and if you’d like to read my effusive praise of the series there are nineteen other reviews you can read. I find myself, anti-climatically, with little to say. I noted at the end of The Hundred Days that it’s a strange way for the series to pause, with nineteen books about the Napoleonic wars and then one-and-a-half about what comes next. Obviously this was driven by O’Brian’s own passing, and if history had played out differently then perhaps we’d have a more robust five-or-six-book career-postscript of Jack’s adventures in South America, but instead Blue at the Mizzen is a bit of an odd duck, one which has largely faded in my memory since reading it in January. It has aspects reminding me of many of the Mediterranean books in the middle stretch, when Jack is obliged to play diplomat with local lords and power-brokers, in this case assisting revolutionary factions in Chile and Peru; the strongest part of the book is when another Royal Navy captain attempts to unlawfully assert authority over him. The novel nonetheless ends on a proud and thoroughly deserved moment – made all the better by the fact that Stephen is the one given the pleasure of informing Jack – which I won’t spoil here, but which any astute reader will have guessed from the title.

The Final Unfinished Voyage… is, by its nature, the more interesting book to talk about. There’s an argument about unfinished work in general (and I’m sure it’s been made about this book) which is that it’s not morally right to publish the work-in-progress of a deceased author. In this case I believe it’s justified, partly because it’s very clearly presented as an unfinished work – a curiosity rather than a long-awaited new adventure – and partly because O’Brian himself, as we learn in this peek behind the curtain, was an exceptionally polished writer even in the early stages of a work. The Final Unfinished Voyage… is not even a quarter of a regular book’s length, and it literally ends mid-paragraph, but what we do see is almost indistinguishable to the casual eye from any other given chapter in the canon, and a reminder that what truly drove the pleasure of this series was not the weave and weft of the grander plots, but rather the day-to-day life of the characters in a vanished time and place. In fewer than a hundred pages we see Stephen’s combined sadness and delight at the unexpected specimens provided by a flock of brilliant green parrots literally flying dead into the maintops; encounters with grumpy Latin American quarantine officers and local “witches;” and, according to Wikipedia, we also see Stephen best a rival in a duel. (I regret that I read this as an ebook, in which these final handwritten pages were impossible for me to decipher; this is definitely one to buy in paperback.)

O’Brian is one of the few writers where I can pluck a book off the shelf and read a chapter alone, satisfied simply to inhabit his world; and it’s for this reason that The Final Unfinished Voyage… doesn’t merely feel like an academic curiosity. In fact, it ultimately feels appropriate as an ending despite not really ending at all: because what have these novels been but one long, ongoing, perpetual meta-novel? What really separates the opening chapters of The Final Unfinished Voyage…, thematically or tonally, from the closing chapters of Blue at the Mizzen? The series has been one beautifully unfinished voyage since Jack and Stephen first weighed anchor in Madeira – all those books and all those years ago – and in my view there could be no better place for it to ultimately “end” than the very locale from which Stephen always signs his letters:

Surprise, at sea