Master and Commander/ Aubrey/Maturin Series, Book 1 – Audiobook Online
Master and Commander is the first novel in the Aubrey/Maturin series by author Patrick O’Brian.
Jack Aubrey’s superb novel establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, the Royal Navy, and Stephen Maturin, the ship’s surgeon and intelligence officer, against the thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. . The details of life as a fighter in Nelson’s navy are rendered perfectly: idioms in dialogue between the officers in the ward and the men on the lower deck, the food, the battles whips. The mysteries of the wind and the rig, and the road widens as the great ships build in battle.
The first clue you have that Master and Commander is not a typical sea adventure is when a sailor is hanged in the opening pages for sexually molesting the ship’s goat. This kicks off a gritty, realistic, and scrupulously-researched historical adventure that smashes C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels like a broadside from a seventy-gun frigate.
I first heard of Patrick O’Brian when he died three years ago and was movingly eulogized in George Will’s column. Now I don’t normally read historical fiction, especially military historical fiction, but Will made such a strong case that I felt obliged to at least check O’Brian out. I’m glad I did; Master and Commander is a well-written, powerful book that succeeds as a character study, an obsessively-researched recreation of early 19th-century life, and as an adventure.
The novel, the first in a twenty-book series, opens with Jack Aubrey, a young lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy, being granted his long-awaited promotion to the rank of captain (or officially, “master and commander”) and the command of the Sophie, a modest little vessel in the Mediterranean. At a concert, Jack nearly comes to blows with the haughty intellectual Dr. Stephen Maturin, but the two quickly reconcile over breakfast and Jack, whose ship is desperately undermanned, offers the penniless Maturin a post as ship’s surgeon.
The two men eventually become best friends, despite their being a sort of seaborne Odd Couple. Aubrey, unlike most fictional heroes, is not a silent, craggy-jawed Adonis; he’s fat, red-faced, good-humored, and a bit of a buffoon, the kind of person who laughs maniacally at his own jokes. As his second-in-command says, “He can be a very agreeable companion, of course, but there are times when he shows that particular beefy English insensibility.” Aubrey’s counterpart Stephen Maturin is a doctor, a natural philosopher whose idea of a good time is to obsessively catalog his lepidoptera…the very caricature of the effete intellectual. As Master and Commander unfolds, though, O’Brian shows us that both men have hidden depths. Aubrey, so clownish and naive on land, is a brilliant seaman and warrior, with an instinctual understanding of leadership and strategy. And Maturin, treated by everyone as a harmless eccentric, is eventually shown to be a master spy, fluent in a dozen languages and a cold-blooded killer with sword and pistol. Aubrey and Maturin are great characters, and
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