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    Post Captain
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    Post Captain
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    Post Captain
    Audiobook (abridged)4 hours

    Post Captain

    Written by Patrick O’Brian

    Narrated by Robert Hardy

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Whether on land or at sea, can Jack Aubrey stay one step ahead of his enemies?

    With the Treaty of Amiens, England is at peace. At least for now. . .

    Accompanied by his friend, ship’s surgeon and spy Stephen Maturin, Captain Jack Aubrey has returned home to England and the life of a country gentleman. But their comfortable experience is cut short when Jack is made a pauper overnight. He flees to the continent, narrowly escaping debtor’s prison, only to find himself a hunted fugitive from Napoleon’s regime as, yet again, war looms.

    ‘Outstanding dialogue, characterisation, humour and a golden thread of romance.’
    KATIE FFORDE

    ‘The Aubrey–Maturin novels, by Patrick O’Brian, are so addictive that after I finish one I have to hide the next from myself for a little while in order to do anything else but read.’
    LOUISE ERDRICH

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 15, 2005
    ISBN9780007217342
    Unavailable
    Post Captain
    Author

    Patrick O’Brian

    Patrick O’Brian was born in 1914 and published his first book, Caesar, when he was only fifteen. In the 1960s he began work on the idea that, over the next four decades, evolved into the twenty-novel long Aubrey–Maturin series (with an extra unfinished volume published posthumously). In 1995 he was awarded the CBE, and in 1997 he received an honorary doctorate of letters from Trinity College, Dublin. He died in January 2000 at the age of 85.

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    Reviews for Post Captain

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    • 5/5
      Following on Master and Commander, Patrick O'Brian continues his Aubrey-Maturin series in Post Captain. Having firmly established his characters in the previous novel, he now has the freedom to further explore the world in which they are set. The novel begins with Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin renting a house in a setting evocative of Jane Austen's work. Later, Aubrey suffers a reversal of fortune while Maturin begins working as a spy for the English navy. The more domestic scenes allow O'Brian to further develop his characters and show his in-depth understanding of England at the beginning of the nineteenth century while setting up some of the humor and tension of the novel, but there are points where the reader wishes Jack and Stephen would return to the sea. That said, O'Brian knows what his readers want and gives them several excellent battle scenes and adventurous moments. Post Captain is a worthy follow-up to the first novel and only whets the reader's appetite for more of Aubrey and Maturin.
    • 4/5
      The adventures of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin continues in this tale of war on the high seas. In this installment a pair of love interests are introduced in the persons of earnest Sophia and mysterious Diana. The fast friends find themselves once more on the verge of dueling over these women.

      Add to this the commencement of another war and the chance of prize ships. Fun, rollicking, and beautifully written, this one is a classic for a reason!
    • 3/5
      Good sequel in this great series.
    • 4/5
      Stuck at home - libraries, etc. closed - I was happy to have this to read. I wish I had checked out a few more in the series. Well - I enjoyed it but still found it difficult to read/understand - different phraseology, strange words and sentence structure, etc. Still I got the gist of what was going on and look forward to #3 in the series.
    • 4/5
      Vintage O'Brian. You can tell it's early in the series as Aubrey and Maturin are not as well fleshed out as characters as in later books, but all the same what page-turning yarn, very evocative of the time, place and people. Feel like reading another AubreyMaturin in straight succession!
    • 3/5
      After the events of Master and Commander, Captain Jack Aubrey and his good friend Dr. Stephen Maturin find themselves briefly ashore. Jack is hoping to be made post captain after his adventures on the Sophie, but things look grim. He and Stephen both meet some delightful ladies and another Sophia may hold his affections... but then Jack is swindled of his prize money and he's now in danger of debtors' prison if he doesn't get another ship.This book suffered from length - both itself over 500 pages and it took forever for the story to get going, but also the length of time I spent reading it. I remembered the first book as being pretty high action, but this one was plodding at times and it was often not the first book I wanted to pick up, even though much of the time I had to put it aside to read books more urgent, such as my book club read for this month. Simon Vance's narration is superb, and once I focused on reading/listening to this one almost exclusively, it worked a little better for me. I enjoy the characters and time period, and will try the next book in the series before I decide I've read enough.
    • 5/5
      The perils of life ashore are many and varied if you are Jack Aubrey, Master & Commander in His Majesty's Navy ca. 1802. Post Captain, the second Aubrey/Maturin novel (and one of the funniest) seems to exist to detail them all.Or at least a whole lot of them.

      Chief among these perils is that you might be trapped in a bit of Jane Austen-flavored courtship porn* for a good third of your novel. You might take a house to share with your shipmates and start thinking of starting a hunting pack when all of a sudden you run right into a pretty face. A pretty face with a wickedly grasping, calculating mother who is the chief reason that pretty face is still unmarried. But because you're only a dashing, commanding, formidable figure on the deck of a ship, you might be helpless and kind of thick when confronted with this pair. And if the pretty face has a pretty widowed cousin who is well on her way to being something of a courtesan for you to pursue as well, even though your best friend kind of likes her, too, well!

      All that's going to be enough to drive your typical naval action, Napoleonic War-fixated O'Brian fan just a little batty, although it is nice to see that O'Brian conjured up some female characters that could more than hold their own against our sea captain and his physician friend. And I do mean more than hold their own! The boys are dished, simply dished, in their company, kind of hilariously helpless, mostly because they've not been prepared to deal with the likes of Sophie Williams and her awful mother, of Diana Villiers. These are future wives, and their presence changes these stories forever, and it's good to see how these relationships came to pass, but ugh, courtship porn.

      Fortunately, the Seamen & Senselessness side of the story is more or less over relatively quickly, due to Jack's having run right into an even greater peril: debt. Houses and horses and country balls at which girls can look pretty and dance cost money, money Jack didn't quite have secured. He did many wonderful and potentially lucrative things in Master & Commander, but note that "potentially." His fortune was still vulnerable to legal and political maneuverings. What if, well let's not call them bad guys, let's call them other interests, won out against Jack?

      Before we know it, he and Stephen are fleeing to Spain-by-way-of-France, but an end to the Peace of Amiens means they must make a hasty and rather ludicrous** overland escape from France to Spain. And then find their way back home because now that the peace is over, Jack can go back to work as a dashing naval captain and make some money to pay off his creditors. They don't call him Lucky Jack Aubrey for nothing, right?

      Well, about that.

      Because while Jack has been learning the perils of lubberdom, the Royal Navy has been experimenting with lunacy in the form of building a ship that can launch a giant rocket capable of destroying an enemy ship a mile away. And then scrapping the rocket idea after the lunatic inventor gets himself blown up the first time it's tested. But then building the ship anyway, because of reasons. Said ship being hailed as the "Carpenter's Mistake" and featuring all sorts of fangled notions like sliding keels and other nautical nonsense that makes it instantly recognizable from a distance and, as her captain will learn shortly, a horror to try to maneuver.

      Guess who the captain of "that wicked Polychrest" is going to be?

      But Lucky Jack isn't just lucky; he knows what he's doing, and while what he's doing looks quite comical to his fellows -- at one point a good friend on meeting the Polychrest at sea signals by way of alphabetical flags a reference to a line in psalms about delighting not in the strength of one's horse -- he actually finds a way to sail the thing, and even manages to fight an action with it that does everyone proud -- everyone except for his admiral, that same Harte with whose wife Jack meddled last novel.

      Meanwhile, we get a satisfying look at Dr. Maturin's life when he is not playing music with Jack, or patching up Jack's crew, or gawking at seabirds from the deck of Jack's ship; Stephen is a secret agent! Whose achievements in that area wind up having direct bearing on what Jack gets to do after he's finished with the Polychrest! Huzzah!

      My only regret with regards to this novel is its lack of news of my favorite subsidiary characters, for while Bonden and Preserved Killick and Tom Pullings and Babbington get to join in a touch of the fun, mostly because, well, someone has to be there, where is dear Mowett? Padeen, the Hodor of the Aubrey/Maturin books, we have not met yet but already I long for him. But that's part of the fun of re-reading these books, meeting everyone anew and then just anticipating their moments of glory.

      There's plenty of that to go around, in over 20 novels.

      *Please note that in saying this I do not mean to cast aspersions on Ms. Austen or her stories, though they are not to my taste. I simply don't think that "the masculine side of a bit of Jane Austen courtship porn"† is something anyone goes looking for. Prove me wrong?

      †Courtship porn = any story in which the courtship, usually leading to marriage, is the only point of it to the exclusion of pretty much anything else, whether the participants in said courtship are willing or not. It's a genre (or would it be a subgenre?) that I find tiresome. Courtship stories are fine and good, but they need to be part of something larger to tempt me.


      **Okay, actually very ludicrous.
    • 3/5
      Plot: 3/5 Not a lot happens compared to some books, like a lull in the main story. Enough to keep you interested though.
      World: 5/5 Very interesting and different, most particularly the naval conflict.
      Writing: 3.5/5 The language is trial; often I haven't a clue what the characters mean and sometimes even who is talking. The perils of period English!
      Characters: 3.5/5 The characters are interesting but tend to behave stupidly. It's a bit difficult to know whether that is intended, the period or just shallow characterisation.
      All in all quite enjoyable & interesting but not stellar. I'll read the next one ;)
    • 4/5
      I liked this much more the second time around - it is still very sprawling, and Diana is still something of a stereotypical cipher, but knowing where each of the setpieces was leading to, I think, helped make it hang together a little better. It is a wild ride, all the way from the peace through to the _Lively_.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this Aubrey novel - the second for me. I can a long line of novels ahead of me. The author tosses so much jargon and antiquated words and phrases amid a recreation of the Napoleonic Naval era that it was fun for a joyride. Who cares how accurate it is? Lots of action and budding romances and spy plots! It was fun reading for me.
    • 4/5
      The language is very nautical-technical and a glossary is desirable. The book is excellent, the male friendhips nicely observed.
    • 5/5
      There is a point in this book where Stephen Maturin goes back and secretly enters the empty house that Diana Villers had been staying in, but was no longer. The writing as he quietly moves from room to room, observing and remembering and experiencing different emotions...It is just incredibly good. I really had no idea what a writer O'Brian was, that I would be reading literature instead of just sea tales. I already am starting to feel sad that this series will be over after only 20 books, and I haven't started number three yet!
    • 4/5
      While the first book in this series is great fun, this book really sets the stage for the rest of the Aubrey-Maturin novels. You can expect a lot more filling out of the characters. Definitely a fun read that I am certain I'll be returning to again (this was already my second read).
    • 3/5
      I did not enjoy this nearly as much as the first book in the series. I have to admit, I found most of the scenes while Jack and Stephen were on land incomprehensible. Apparently 18th century English courting customs are beyond my understanding, as is most of the terminology of daily life. The most interesting part was the fact that apparently Jack was so far in debt he was eligible for debtor's prison, but how he evaded it and how he was supposed ot be apprehended was still a confusing muddle. The sailing scenes were great as usual, but they were few and far between.
    • 4/5
      This series continues to be a bit of a mixed bag for me. Another good audio book option - so you can zone out when it gets somewhat tedious.
    • 2/5
      This is the second book in the Aubrey/Maturin series and follows on from where Master and Commander left off. Jack Aubrey is without a ship and living on land as a country gentleman when he suddenly finds himself bankcrupt and in danger of being thrown into a debtors' jail. Aubrey and Maturin flee to France before finally returning to the UK where Aubrey is given command of an experimentally designed ship,the Polychrest.Now I love historically based novels but I found some of this book rather maddening as there seems to be several continuity gaps. O'Brian goes to great lengths to portray Aubrey and Maturin's journey across 300 miles of French territory with Aubrey dressed as a bear trying to escape arrest by the French. Once they arrive in Spain there is a sudden jump and they next appear in Gibraltar. Apparently Aubrey had been taken seriously ill but this fact hardle appears at all. Then Aubrey and Maturin have such a falling out that they are scheduled to fight a duel against one another, suddenly Aubrey is sent to sea and on return he and Maturin are best of friends again. On other occasions Maturin seems to be able to beam himself straight into Aubrey's company at will. Is this the fault of the author, publisher or editor? No idea but I found it very disconcerting.This book introduces two female characters who will no doubt feature heavily in the following books but on the whole I felt this in many ways detracted rather than added to the overall storyline in this particular book. However, my main gripe is the simple lack of 'on ship' action which I personally found annoying. It is possible to see how O'Brian's writing style has evolved from Master and Commander but this was not as good as the former IMHO.
    • 4/5
      I had kind of mixed feelings about Master and Commander, the first book in this series. I found it slow to the point of tedium, but I could see some real promise in it, so I gamely forged ahead to this second book. And, boy, am I glad I did! This one was a lot more readable, and it featured much more of the things I actually liked about the first book, mainly the humor and the weirdly wonderful odd-couple friendship between the hearty Captain Jack Aubrey and the scholarly Dr. Stephen Maturin. (My little geeky heart keeps wanting to compare them to Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, although the comparison really only goes so far.) That relationship is increasingly complex and entertaining in this one, strained as it is by the two of them having a conflicted interest in the same woman, and the humor was plentiful and delightful. And, although the plot meanders a lot, it felt like there was a lot more story here than in the first book, and that story was much more interesting. There were still a few places where navally-ignorant me had some trouble following things, but that wasn't nearly as much of a problem as last time. I'm very interested in reading the rest of the series now!
    • 3/5
      I was determined to finish this damn book after giving up on Master and Commander, and I did, eventually, but I doubt I will ever read another of the remaining twenty novels in Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin series. If I were to venture a sexist stereotype of the average O'Brian demographic, I would say that I am the wrong gender - and lack a good twenty years of the right age - to really enjoy these books. The dialogue is witty and suitably colourful for a seafaring gentleman and his learned physician friend, and I love O'Brian's unflagging grasp of history and all details nautical, but the characters always seem to come second to the action, so Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin remained thinly-sketched strangers to me throughout most of the book. I did appreciate the 'drawing room' scenes with Diana and Sophia, which were very reminiscent of Austen, but even then I nearly missed why Maturin was so upset with Jack's behaviour. O'Brian has this infuriating knack of skimming vaguely over minor events in his narrative, unless recounting battles, so that a lot can be imported - and missed - in a line or two. That, and I kept nodding off mid-chapter, which is another reason why I took so long to reach the end. I know that Mr O'Brian - and C.S. Forester, author of the Horatio Hornblower series, which I also considered reading - have a loyal league of readers, but the nautical terms and the constant battle scenes completely lost me, I'm afraid. I couldn't even cheat and watch the film adaptation of Master and Commander to get my bearings, because I can't stand Russell Crowe! I think I'll retire to the drawing room, and keep to Jane Austen's land-based perspective of the early nineteenth century!
    • 1/5
      This is one of the few books that, having started, I could not finish and have no intention of returning to.

      I enjoyed Master and Commander, and so turned to this book with an expectation of the same, but what I remember getting was a slow-paced, turgid account of two fox-hunting gentleman. I expect that had I had the fortitude to plough on through the first 100 pages or so, I would have got to that part of the story where Aubrey and Maturin set out to sea again, and my interest would have been galvanised. I just couldn't bring myself to do so, however, and thus ended my voyaging with the Captain and the Doctor.
    • 2/5
      I'm glad I didn't read this one in order, because it would have put me off the series. Too much romance, and unsatisfying romance at that.
    • 4/5
      Post-Captain is too long and episodic in structure – in this the novel conforms to its over-stuffed 19th century ancestors: Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper, the Conan Doyle books nobody reads. O’Brian periodically takes a break from battle scenes and descriptions of nautical minutia to focus on a romantic sub-plot, a love triangle or quadrangle which puts a strain on the bromance between our heroes, the red-blooded, beef-eating Captain Jack Aubrey and his etiolated, opium-eating ship’s surgeon (also part-time spy and minor Spanish nobility) Stephen Maturin. In a nutshell, both men are love with Diana Villiers, an officer’s widow who’s come to live in the country with her three nice cousins, the Williams’ sisters, and their not-so-nice mother. Stephen Maturin is a rational man – not the same thing as a reasonable one – and his feelings for Diana have an obsessive character, made both better and worse by his consciousness that the attachment is unhealthy. Unhealthy, and futile: Diana’s only interested in Jack, who has decided that he will marry Sophia Williams, a more respectable match than poor Diana, who is, for nebulous but inescapable social reasons, is damaged goods. But this planned marriage runs into trouble, when Jack learns that his prize-agent (the guy who manages his share of the booty from ships captured in war) has mismanaged his money, leaving our Cap’n both broke and threatened with debtors’ prison: a nice girl like Sophia can’t be expected to marry a bankrupt. So Jack breaks off his engagement with Sophia, and while trying to get his shit together again begins an affair with Diana.Since I know nothing about boats and sailing, the battle scene descriptions, which rely heavily on naval jargon, were sometimes hard for me to follow, though exciting enough when I was reasonable sure I knew what was going on. You will learn things along the way, but even if you still feel totally at sea, har har har, when you reach the last page, you can still enjoy the book, as I did, on the levels of prose style and of period detail, which the well-supplied O’Brian heaps on the reader’s plate with merciless largesse.In the matter of period detail, O’Brian avoids that fault of much historical fiction, where you get the feeling that the author has put into his characters’ mouths as dialogue things he or she read in a volume of general-interest history. Characters in these books (or movies, or TV shows) spend a lot of time explaining to each other things that would, in reality, have been understood by everyone, and so not discussed by anyone, leaving the reader or viewer with the impression that conversation in the past consisted mostly of clumsy exposition (see, e.g., the first episode of the History Channel’s new series, Vikings, where big chief Gabriel Byrne, presiding over a murder trial, gives a little lecture to the unshaven assembly on the cultural practices which inform Viking criminal law.) O’Brian’s people, by contrast, may be living through events of world-historical importance, and in a world with very different codes and customs from our own, but they don’t discuss these historically significant events in terms of historical significance, and they don’t explain their beliefs and practices to each other over tea, in language borrowed from the modern social sciences. They don’t do this for the same reason that you or I don’t discuss the news, or our lives, in this way: they can’t, we can’t; perspectives of this kind lie beyond our horizons of daily concern – more than that, they are of necessity false to the richness of lived experience, and of historical causality, however necessary they may be for making sense of the past. O’Brian’s knows the Regency period well enough that he can allow his characters live in this immediate world, and they prefer to talk about the everyday things that actual people prefer to talk about: food, clothes, gossip, the latest music, professional shop.But O’Brian’s imaginative residency in the era is most apparent in what is really the ultimate period detail, his adept mimicry of a range of vintage-early-19th-century prose styles. He can do De Quincean solipsistic reveries:So he paced this strange, absolute and silent landscape of firm damp sand with rivulets running to its edge and the lapping sea, eating bread with one hand and cold beef with the other. He was so low to the sea that Deal and its coast were out of sight; he was surrounded by an unbroken disc of quiet grey sea, and even the boat, which lay off an inlet at the far rim of the sand, seemed a great way off, or rather upon another plane. Sand stretched before him, gently undulating, with here and there the black half-buried carcasses of wrecks, some massive, others ribbed skeletons, in a kind of order whose sense escaped him, but which he might seize, he thought, if only his mind would make a certain shift, as simple as starting the alphabet at X – simple, if only he could catch the first clue. A different air, a different light, a sense of overwhelming permanence and therefore a different time; it was not at all unlike a certain laudanum state. Wave ripples on the sand: the traces of annelids, solens, clams: a distant flight of dunlins, close-packed, flying fast, all wheeling together and changing colour as they wheeled.His domain grew larger with the ebbing of the tide; fresh sandpits appeared, stretching far, far away to the north under the cold even light; islands joined one another, gleaming water disappeared, and only on the far rim of his world was there the least noise – the lap of small waves, and the remote scream of gulls.Or elegant drawing-room observationalism a la Austen or Thackeray:She came back to England with a wardrobe of tropical clothes, a certain knowledge of the world, and almost nothing else. She came back, in effect, to the schoolroom, or something very like it. For she at once realized that her aunt meant to clamp down on her, to allow her no chance of queering her daughters’ pitch; and as she had no money and nowhere else to go she determined to fit into this small slow world of the English countryside, with its fixed notions and its strange morality.She was willing, she was obliged, to take a protectorate, and from the beginning she resolved to be meek, cautious, and retiring; she knew that other women would regard her as a menace, and she meant to give them no provocation. But her theory and her practice were sometimes at odds, and in any case Mrs Williams’s idea of a protectorate was much more like a total annexation. She was afraid of Diana, and dared not push her too far, but she never gave up trying to gain a moral superiority, and it was striking to see how this essentially stupid woman, unhampered by any principle or by any sense of honor, managed to plant her needle where it hurt most.I wish that O’Brian had written in this elegant, worldly voice more often: the book would have shed some excess pages, and the plot and pacing tightened up, if he had indulged less often his desire to write wind-wave-and-sail prose poems.So: if you’re a Napoleonic war nerd, or a sailing geek, you probably already know about these books and don’t need my recommendation. If you like good prose and immersive historical fiction, you could choose worse bedside reading than Post-Captain.
    • 3/5
      A fun continuation of the series, although there's quite a lot of romance on land. I found "Master and Commander to be more enjoyable, but this was still very good historical fiction.
    • 4/5
      An excellent follow-up to the first adventure in which the epithet "Lucky Jack Aubrey" begins to turn ironic and love interests are introduced for the two heros.
    • 3/5
      There are many writers who have tried their hand at the historical novel. Some have achieved a certain amount of success, but few have succeeded on the scale of the likes of Patrick O’Brian, whose star has not faded one bit since his passing 11 years ago. Perhaps that is attributable to the fact that there are few names that are so intimately linked to fiction set in the glorious age of sail. C.S. Forester and Alexander Kent are probably the only real competitors to the title of the most famous chronicler of the Royal Navy of the 19th century.Apart stands this one novel. Post Captain is the second novel in O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series. It follows the adventures of Jack Aubrey, a dashing young master and commander and Stephen Maturin, his best friend and ship’s surgeon. Here we follow the pair as they make their way into both career and social advancement, with special attention to the latter.As the peace of 1802 with Napoleon smoothes out the tensions between England and France, the number of ships necessary to the Royal Navy begins a period of decline and the commands are being awarded to the seniormost officers. Our hero, having only been promoted as ship’s commander the year before, he finds himself one of the many commanders without a ship.As he takes vacation in rural England and awaits news from his prize agent, the man who handles the sale of the captured ships, he makes the acquaintance of the Williams family and their daughters, of whom Sophie captures his heart. He soon learns that the prize agent had fled to Bordeaux, leaving nothing behind him and that he found himself penniless and unable to settle his affairs on land and in a hefty debt.The novel explores in detail the intricate inner workings of social interaction in 19th century English society as Captain Aubrey tries to secure a command and make good on his promises to Sophie, while dodging his debtors. Stephen Maturin on the other hand tries his best to juggle between a love interest of his own and the underworld of political intrigue and espionage into which the admiralty has dragged him.This novel takes place more on land than at sea, and certainly has a different pacing than its predecessor, Master and Commander. That is not to say that there is not plenty of seagoing adventure to be had and enjoyed, but simply that the emphasis here has been put more on the development of the social status of the protagonists. It has earned Post Captain a well deserved reputation of being Patrick O’Brian’s homage to Jane Austen.
    • 5/5
      One of my favorite in the series, with Aubrey broke and without a ship. When he does get a ship, it is the recalcitrant Polychrest, a failed experiment. O'Brian was pretty gutsy to take on Austen on her own turf. Also having read this immediately after Emma, Austen seems to be the more "contemporary" author because being of that time, she doesn't have to do any work to evoke it.
    • 5/5
      I've been surprised at how compelling these books are -- the writing is certainly not contemporary, the detail of naval warfare unfamiliar and at times confusing, the dialogue even more difficult given the colloquialisms often in use, and I've read less fiction than I used to in recent years -- but nonetheless, I read 80 pages a night of this slightly unapproachable period-piece historical fiction and can't help but finish the book once I start. Same thing happened with the first book in the series. I shave a star off because I figure that there are 20 some odd books in the series and we can't start with marks that are TOO high. There's got to be room for improvement.....right?
    • 4/5
      Jack Aubrey would like to be promoted to Post Captain in HMS. Sadly, due to the lack of war and ships, even if he were promoted, there would be no ship for him to command. So this book finds him on land a lot. His friend, Stephen Maturin is with him for the most part, though missing at times without an altogether good explanation of his whereabouts.Happily, thanks to Napoleon, these two do manage to get on some ships; that is where they are at their best in my opinion. The joy of watching their friendship weather storms worse than nature is very prominent here. I love the very subtle humour throughout. I could have done without the women, and wonder if Mr. O'Brian does a better job with women characters in later books. That being said, I think he wrote them well as characters, I just didn't think much of them. Not good enough for our boys.The writing style can be very choppy. The author flat out tells you he is going to use a Deus ex machina to accomplish the story, so you can't really complain about that. I am rather fond of happy endings, anyway. I do wish there were a translation of the French, Latin and Spanish phrases, even if you don't need it to understand the story.
    • 4/5
      Jack finds his fortunes reversed in this second installment. A good portion takes place on land, as Jack tries to avoid debtor prison, imprisonment in France, and a permanent place on land. The relationship between Stephen and Jack continues to deepen. This novel is a good example of the strains that women can put on the friendship between two men. Some interesting battles and insight into the delicacy of feeling among the men on a ship.
    • 5/5
      I’ll offer a single review of the late Patrick O’Brian’s twenty Aubrey/Maturin novels. I’ve never read another series of novels so consistently excellent. These sweeping yet personally engaging stories of the British Royal Navy of the early 19th Century are about war, espionage, exploration, politics, treason, science, medicine, great and ordinary men and women, friendship, morality . . . the grand themes of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I’ve read the entire series four times. My Christmas present to myself this year was to replace the few remaining paperbacks in my collection with hardbacks, and once they arrive I’ll start reading the series again, in order. Every time I re-read these books I discover they’re not only as good as I remembered, they’re better.
    • 5/5
      The second in the Aubrey/Maturin saga; maintains the pace of the first and unfolds the personalities of the key characters in a way that intrigues and always rings true. The action sequences are very gripping and in this book and those that follow O'Brian proves a master of suspense. That said, action never dominates and you cannot afford to skip a single paragraph - there is always something to delight in the way the story unfolds or a detail of early 19th century life is given.