Book Review: HMS Surprise

A friend for whom I had done a small favour enquired as to what was my preferred poison. My reply was: “Books. Buy me a book that I wouldn’t normally read”. My friend did better than that. He gave me three Patrick O’Brian books.

I had watched the movie, Master and Commander, but I had not otherwise been exposed to O’Brian’s work. I had read a number of the Hornblower3 novels in my late teens and so was not averse to the idea of navy novels set during the Napoleonic wars. The books sat for several months among my shelf of unread books. (The only gifts I ever seek are books. Unfortunately, reading time comes in small finite packages.) Of the three books, I chose HMS Surprise to be my debut book of the Aubrey & Maturin series of books.

The thread that runs through HMS Surprise is the lightly sketched friendship between the two very different characters, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. Jack Aubrey, post captain, is a child of the navy, unsophisticated outside the world of lines, sheets, navigation and warfare. He is cheated by the Admiralty of prize money for naval captures made before the action of the novel begins. His indebtedness lands him in debtors’ prison. Although engaged to the lovely but equally unsophisticated Sophie, Jack has no chance of getting past her vigilant mother while he is a man of no means.

Stephen Maturin, of Irish-Catalan descent, is a man of science, well educated, medically qualified, privately wealthy in a small way, and knowledgeable across the whole range of human knowledge. He is a fanatically enthusiastic collector of specimens, living or dead, and the deliverer of papers to the Royal Society. His scientific endeavours, genuine though they be, also provide him with cover for his role as an intelligence operative for the Admiralty.

Stephen is also unfulfilled in love, pursuing the equally beautiful but much more sophisticated Diana Villiers who has gone to India with the rich and well placed, but married to another woman, Richard Canning. Jack also has previously been a competitor for Diana’s heart so that the subject is not one that can be traversed easily between the two friends.

Different as they are, Stephen and Jack respect, enormously, one another’s skills and qualities. Their friendship has survived many previous scrapes and the differing skills have proved essential when danger has threatened in its various forms in the past.

HMS Surprise promises to be an uneventful novel (once Stephen has been rescued from a place of torture in French occupied Spain). Through Stephen’s influence, Jack is offered command of the frigate that gives its name to the novel. The voyage is to India sailing well south of the Cape of Good Hope utilising the westerlies of the roaring forties. The voyage will allow Stephen to restore his scientific credentials; recover from the after effects of the torture he has endured; and improve his cover for future intelligence assignments. But the journey offers little opportunity for battles with French ships and precious little opportunity to earn the prize money that will ease the way past Sophie’s mother to Sophie’s hand in marriage.

O’Brian’s technical mastery of the naval world of the early nineteenth century is evident on every page of the novel. His descriptions of every aspect of a ship’s operations are achieved with apparent lack of effort. Jack’s successful efforts to change the ship’s sailing performance through shifting the respective positions of ballast and cargo and replacing and shifting a few pieces of wood is just one example of the author’s comfortable relationship with his subject. The mastery extends equally to O’Brian’s portrayal of the society which inhabits a frigate with officers, midshipmen and seamen all endowed with personalities of complexity.

Despite its interest, HMS Surprise builds slowly as a novel. The love stories which are introduced early in the novel are hardly mentioned by the narrator nor discussed by the two friends for much of the voyage and most of the novel.

The unfolding of the action is more like a series of short stories, some comic, some dramatic, as different events unfold at different ports of call or as changes in latitude, weather and prevailing winds spark small relationship crises on board ship.

Ultimately, there is no shortage of novel scale action and its associated tension. Jack gets a chance to engage the enemy and win great kudos or suffer a humiliating defeat. Stephen faces more than one opportunity to lose his life at the hands of the elements or another human being. There is also action on the relationship front with both men facing equally balanced prospects of happiness and despair.

It is, however, in the detail that O’Brian excels. Flashing naval guns and murderous broadsides clearing the decks of masts and covering the same decks with blood are not essential to his art. Jack and Stephen make two small decisions that change the course of lives. One is an act of kindness to a young street girl, Dil, who guides Stephen through the social intricacies of Bombay. The other is a strict, bureaucratically correct but quite ungenerous decision to refuse a woman passage on the Surprise on the return journey despite compelling reasons to decide otherwise. The decisions have their dramatic effect but, with O’Brian’s characteristic lightness of touch, are barely mentioned again.

I thank my friend for his introduction to the world of Stephen and Jack and the re-introduction to the naval world of the early nineteenth century. O’Brian is obviously a very good novelist. HMS Surprise is much more than sailing ships blowing one another out of the water although there is sufficient of that. It is a novel about relationships and the little things that affect them.

I look forward to going forward in time to Master and Commander, the first in the series.

 1. O’Brian was born in 1914 and died in 2000.

2. Harper Perennial is an imprint of Harper Collins. Harper Collins is an amalgam of a leading New York and a United Kingdom publishing firm acquired, respectively, by News Corporation in 1987 and 1990.

3. Written by CS Forester