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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Yeah, it depends on how much you believe Diana and how much you believe Stephen was willing to believe Diana. I think her explanation is pretty emphatic though. She mentions that when she first went to Sweden with him he assumed she wanted to sleep with him, and that it took quite a lot of refusing on her part before he took the point. That goes along with her speech on how she'd never let any man hurt her again, or put herself in any man's power.
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Mar 29, 2013 20:41
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BriceFxP posted:Yes sometimes it has grated on me that his range doesn't seem to be as great as Tull when it comes to unique voices, but I'm such a stickler for proper pronunciation in speech it is almost an OCD issue. I listened to a little bit of Vance reading one of the books after listening to Tull read them, and the thing that really made it unbearable for me was the way he did Stephen's voice. Tull's is perfect, slightly croaking with an Irish accent but very obviously well educated, while Vance gave him this prissy english voice.
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Sep 26, 2013 14:13
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Murgos posted:The amount of considered detail in these stories is really pretty impressive. Villiers is the name she got from her first husband though, but you can see from Sophie's family that even before she was married she was in pretty much the same state, a family whose fortunes are declining somewhat but who are still "Gentlemen" and thus get admitting privileges into high society. Though reading those books today it's really interesting how class intersects throughout, especially since the Navy was one of the more meritocratic institutions of the time. Sure, sometimes midshipmen didn't get promoted for not being posh enough, but it seems a good chunk of the navy's contempt for the army comes from the fact that any rich idiot could just buy a commission and never had to learn any set of skills even remotely as difficult as seamanship or navigation.
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Jan 17, 2014 02:30
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ItalicSquirrels posted:I always read that as the other captain desperately trying to find a way out of a social obligation to Jack. Pullings had just said a word a certain way and Jack either had to take the explanation or call him out (and Jack's a little simple on land). Also, Jack certainly understands captains having preferences for bringing mids/lieutenants on (like his near hatred of bringing aboard mids who don't know mathematics). Yeah, O'Brien makes it clear throughout that money and connections are worth alot, even in the Navy. There's a scene in one of the earlier books where Pullings is talking to another one of his lieutenants (Dick Richardson?) and O'Brien mentions that though they're bothgood seamen Richardson is pretty much guaranteed a post-captain's rank (and thus an admiral's rank, eventually) while Pullings would be lucky to make it past lieutenant. Still, that was why I contrasted it with the army, where you literally bought your commission with money, which is why it ended up being filled with the useless younger sons of gentry.
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Jan 20, 2014 17:02
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Austen Tassletine posted:Further on the wonderful bickering/trolling between the pair, could anyone possible identify a scene for me? I can't remember the context of the discussion or the exact wording, but Jack was talking to Stephen about somebody when the latter interrupted him with a completely undeserved bit of sarcasm. They were talking about Bach and his son, the context was Jack had bought some of his scores, and I'm pretty sure it was one of the earlier books.
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Jun 20, 2014 18:23
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I have a pet theory that we actually see Stephen's dad at one point, which I posted in this thread roughly a year or two ago: In Post Captain it's said that his father was Irish, so I don't think don Patricio would be it, because while Fitzgerald is an Irish name, Saavedra definitely isn't.
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Nov 14, 2014 00:06
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Arglebargle III posted:I'm jealous. The next ten books are really good and don't have the melancholy of Stephen and Jack reaching late middle age. I feel like all the tension in Blue at the Mizzen comes from wondering whether Jack's actually improving his chances of a flag or just wasting his time, but since the title spoils the end there isn't any tension at all.
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Sep 4, 2016 17:25
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PerilPastry posted:"Lobscouse and Spotted Dog: Which It's a Gastronomic Companion to the Aubrey/Maturin Novels" is supposedly great and written with a good deal of appreciation for O'Brian's sense of humor. Been meaning to get it myself It is pretty great, and the only cookbook I've ever seen which tells you that some of the recipes in it are terrible and should not be attempted.
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Nov 27, 2016 17:18
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This is superb
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Dec 26, 2016 18:38
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I've been listening to a bunch of O'Brien's non-Aubrey-Maturin novels on audiobook, so I figured I'd post some thoughts. I've arranged these by date of publication, rather than my preference or anything like that. The Catalans: A french catalan scientist comes home after a long absence to help deal with some family drama, set post-WW2. Very much concerned with everyone's inner emotional states, everything takes its time happening, might be classified as a literary novel on that basis I guess. Some of the main character's musings on people, their chracters and motivations, kind of resemble Maturin's, but at much greater length. Honestly found it a bit boring because I couldn't bring myself to care that much about the characters and their problems. Interesting that there's no real reason for the characters to be either french or catalan, other than that I guess O'Brien had become interested in the culture and wanted to include it. The Road to Samarcand: A fun little adventure novel about an orphaned teenager who ends up on an expedition across China with some of his relatives and a motley crew, set between the world wars. It's written kind of like a romp, but from what I can tell he really paid attention to the details of the setting, it feels quite authentic, and captures both the interesting culture and chaotic situation of China at that time. The Golden Ocean: An O'Brien naval adventure about an Irish kid who signs on as a midshipman for Anson's expedition in 1740. A good read, and a very different perspective than the Aubrey books because the protagonist isn't in command, and so doesn't have any real say in the fate of his ship. O'Brien's first naval novel, but the nautical jargon already flows freely. Interesting historical point: The ships themselves, and the manner of sailing them, don't seem to be too different between 1740 and 1800 or so (when the Aubrey books are set), but they hadn't figured out that citrus juice could prevent scurvy, so in any circumnavigation either you got really lucky with your opportunities for resupply, or your men just started dropping like flies after a while. Strange to think of lime juice as a technology, but it made a huge difference. Also the English weren't yet in the habit of rounding the horn, so much is made of it, as opposed to the Aubrey novels where it seems to have become pretty routine. The Unknown Shore: I haven't gotten too far through this, so I can't say much, other than that previous comments about Jack and Toby being prototypes of Jack and Stephen seem pretty spot on. Kinda funny to read another book set in the same expedition that includes some of the same characters in the beginning, though their fates diverge. Richard Temple: This book is honestly kind of strange. It opens with the protagonist being tortured in a jail in Nazi-occupied France on suspicion of being a spy, but then shifts to him reminiscing at great length, and in great detail, about his childhood, schooling, and pre-war career as a starving painter in London. These reminiscences bring him right up to the start of the war and his enlistment, but then there are only a few pages about his actual spywork and capture before it switches back to his present state, then he's liberated and the book ends. It seems like the bits in the prison were almost added as bookends to try and spice up a story which really wasn't particularly interesting.
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Jan 12, 2017 20:16
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The hardcover box set is convenient but if it's the one I have then it has really thin pages and some serious editing and typographical errors. Fava instead of Java, for instance, and some parts with mis-aligned text.
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Sep 13, 2017 15:17
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Read the books first
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Jan 22, 2018 22:34
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When she denies sleeping with Jagiello she says that when she first went away with him he clearly expected she wanted him as much as all the other girls (I think she mentions him smirking when she tells him she doesn't want his dick), but that after a while of her not throwing herself at him he gets used to the idea. I think at this point Diana would consider sleeping with a man she openly traveled with to be gauche, as opposed to a deniable secret affair.
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Apr 4, 2018 19:39
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Nuclear War posted:So.. did Stephen have the Duke of Habachtal killed? Since Stephen wasn't even in the country at the time, I think it's implied that either Sir Joseph Blaine or one of the deceased's criminal associates did it.
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Feb 10, 2019 02:41
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Hard to know what O'Brian intended in the beginning, given that he's admitted that if he'd known he was going to make a whole series he would have started the books much earlier chronologically. But he clearly liked Maturin as a character, and realized that he needed to give him a purpose beyond surgeon and naturalist. It also gave him a great hook for the plots of a lot of the books, since it meant he could make things more complicated than just "ships go bang", as fun as those parts are.
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Jun 1, 2020 22:35
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Notahippie posted:There's an important adjunct to this though which is that the Navy got to decide when the ship was paid off, not you. So you could switch careers easily enough once the ship was paid off, but until then if you tried that was desertion and you'd be hung (edit: hanged - pictures are hung, people are hanged). Yeah there's at least one point in the books where a ship sails in and is about to get paid off but the navy just reassigns the crew to other ships since they're all undermanned. And Jack skips about with glee because now he has 50 more actual sailors in his crew instead of 50 more useless criminals.
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Jun 9, 2020 23:04
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Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's before the books. They're both in their mid-late twenties when they meet, so there's time before that for some interesting things to have happened.
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Jun 11, 2020 15:04
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Notahippie posted:A few paragraphs later he says he won't play dice because he promised his godfather never to touch them after he "got him out of a sad scrape when he was younger," so there's an interesting picture of young Stephen there. Well, the gambling issue is very in character, given his substance abuse issues in the books, clearly he has an addiction-prone personality. His inner rationalizations in the books are way too real.
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Jun 11, 2020 20:19
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Notahippie posted:Resurrecting this post because I'm rereading the series and in The Thirteen Gun Salute O'Brian explicitly deals with this - he has Maturin reflecting on his history and remembering how he was when he first met Jack. He suggests that he was basically incredibly depressed after his romantic reversal and the failure of the uprising, to the point of disinterest in everything including politics, but that shortly after the events in M&C he meets a British intelligence agent and is recruited as he slowly recovers from depression and becomes more horrified with Napoleon. Yeah I thought in M&C they explicitly say he just hung out on the beach by himself for a while, he just wanted to get out of the ship.
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Jun 30, 2020 20:09
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Funny story about mess night: All males have to do two years of mandatory military service in Singapore. The Singapore army takes some of its traditions from the British Army, what with being a former colony and all, so we say leftenant instead of lieutenant etc. One of those traditions is the mess night etiquette, except that you only do it once, when you're a new officer getting your commission. You wear a special uniform tuxedo whose sleeves drag through your food, and you have a catered meal with random traditions that no one understands that you had to learn about in a whole separate lesson. Like how the youngest person at the table gets called "Mr. Vice" and is in charge of the toast (I think we toasted the president instead of the king, but it's been a while). But then you never do any of this again and wonder what the hell the whole point of it is. I could tell that this was all some archaic British bullshit but most of the guys were very confused.
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Jul 20, 2020 21:39
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Also to give Stephen something interesting to do the book would have had to be set much more on land. Since most of the movie is sailing around and ship fights there's no real role for him beyond doctor and naturalist. I guess we'll have to wait for someone to give the series the game of thrones treatment.
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Aug 7, 2020 21:58
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Sax Solo posted:Even Jack's maximum 17 stone, 238 lbs, is not that overweight for a fit dude over 6'+. It's like Channing Tatum at prime movie weight +50 lbs. Jack's not really fat as much is Stephen is caustic and PoB English. Not that fat by today's standards maybe, but they're from an era where starving to death was common. Even being chubby meant you had plenty of food and a non-physical job.
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Aug 10, 2020 18:40
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Also I think some people were turned over to the navy as an alternative to a prison sentence, which also can't have been great for either discipline and morale. And O'Brien does touch on the effects of tyrannical captains, look at Corbett in The Mauritius Command.
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Aug 21, 2020 18:32
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I don't think it's ever spelled out, but my guess would be he would leave the ship and plan some scheme of his own to get Padeen out of Australia. I don't think he intended to stay in the bush, since he knew he had the connections to get Padeen a pardon eventually, but if he left him there he would be dead before too much longer.
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Feb 11, 2021 17:15
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Raskolnikov2089 posted:Aside from being too pretty and too tall to be Maturin, Paul Bettany is perfect. He has fantastic chemistry with Russell Crowe. He wasn't terrible, though to be fair the movie didn't give him all that much to do. He played him as kind of calm and stoic, but in the books I think he's much more alive, often grouchy, capable of excellent ranting and rhapsodizing, and I think generally much less sure of himself than he was in the movie.
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Feb 16, 2021 21:24
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Fire Safety Doug posted:Have you seen Bronson? Lots of punching, not much cheer. For Aubrey though I genuinely think a fattened-up Chris Hemsworth would be good, he has the baseline goofiness while still being able to be serious when the situation calls for it.
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Feb 28, 2021 18:44
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I hope it's good, but I gotta say I've been hoping we would get a big budget HBO-type series instead, the books are so rich I feel like they need some room to breathe.
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Jun 5, 2021 02:27
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Also colonization was the main game at that point, Napoleon wouldn't have been happy just holding most of Europe and leaving the brits free to rule the waves, there was too much wealth out there to be plundered. Though I guess if you control Spain you also control most of South America.
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Jul 2, 2021 16:15
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As far as I'm concerned the whole thing is basically in dream time. I mean, the only time I think he actually mentions their ages is in the beginning of Master and Commander, where he implies they're both in their mid-twenties, but after that I don't think he mentions actual dates or even years very often, so I really have no idea how old they are at the end of the series, other than that they're both starting to feel old.
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Sep 13, 2021 22:01
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I think at one point he explicitly says that he's heartbroken by the failure of the rising, and is smart enough to see that the conditions aren't right for another attempt, so he basically gives up on Ireland and uses his position in British intelligence to push for other things he cares about like independence for Catalonia and South American colonies. He also talks about how he was in Paris during the revolution, and as an enlightenment thinker was ecstatic for the possibility of rights and rational government (also at one point he mentions that he had personally written several bills of rights, such a nerd), then got a front row seat for the whole thing going to poo poo and ending up with the terror and Napoleon. He's fundamentally a heartbroken romantic disguising himself as a cynic, which I think applies to his love life as well.
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Dec 26, 2021 16:34
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OpenlyEvilJello posted:I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time just last month and had the same thought. I wouldn't say Mrs. Williams is Mrs. Bennet, but they sure seem related. It's my grandma's favorite book, and I remember her telling me once that everyone bags on Mrs. Bennet, but since she has no sons making sure her daughters marry well is literally the only thing keeping her (and whichever daughters are still unmarried when her husband happens to die) out of the poorhouse, so it's not surprising it becomes an obsession. There's a passage in one of the books where Stephen is musing about the fact that Mrs. Williams is so avaricious because on some level she realizes that without her wealth she has no marketable skills and would be reduced to scraping together a few pennies doing manual labor like any other peasant.
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Feb 8, 2023 21:06
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Prolonged Panorama posted:Nice 3D breakdown of Victory: Thanks for posting this, it's really well done and clarified a lot of things I didn't have clear in my mind from the books.
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Mar 16, 2023 03:58
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jazzyjay posted:
It is just like Bridie Colman’s washing day, I do declare. Everything is within an easy hand’s reach, so it is.
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Mar 31, 2023 02:50
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Notahippie posted:It's possible he could have avoided the specific way the story ended if he'd been more sensitive and come up with a way to highlight (even if he had to stretch the truth) how Clonfert's earlier actions contributed to the victory. But to me that's not really the issue. To me the criticism of Jack isn't in how he behaved, but the fact that he never even knew he was having that impact on Clonfert. Jack's pretty generally clueless socially in general, and this is just an extension of it. It's all apiece with how he's taken in by Amanda whatshername in Canada or with his political problems, and I don't know if I'm as willing as Stephen is to just shrug and say you can't blame him for that because that's who he is. It's like when you run into somebody who uses "I'm a blunt person" to excuse being an rear end in a top hat - awareness and acknowledgement of a character flaw doesn't excuse you from trying to address it. If I knew Jack personally, the fact that he was completely unaware of how Clonfert was seeing him and acting towards him would diminish him a little in my view. I think it's an interesting commentary on Stephen and his love for Jack that it doesn't, since Stephen is both by nature and by his profession extremely attuned to social relationships how people see each other and he's also generally not hugely forgiving except towards his intimates. Stephen has insight into Clonfert's character because he is around Clonfert when on missions together, treats him as a patient, and discusses his mental health at length with his therapist. He's also not Clonfert's commanding officer, so naturally Clonfert is more open around him than he would be around Jack. There is literally no way for Jack to gain the same level of insight without Stephen spelling it all out for him, which obviously he can't do. I think Jack has a decent superficial read into Clonfert's character, which is that he has real abilities but is also a touchy show-off, and Jack's goal is to figure out how to channel that productively, but he has no way of knowing that Clonfert is literally obsessed with him and constantly comparing himself against him. It's also not Jack's job to manage the mental health of a subordinate commander to that level, Clonfert is supposed to be the leader of his crew and part of that is having his own poo poo together. Fundamentally they're both adults with a defined professional relationship, and if Clonfert can't hack it it's on him to resign his commission and go back to London and be the general consolation of the ladies of the town.
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Apr 12, 2023 20:00
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Huggybear posted:O'Brian can be very hamfisted with his sense of humor. I just re-read the Surgeon's Mate and forgot how good of a book this was. Jack has a fling with a somewhat neurotic Amanda Smith who becomes very clingy and then at the end of the book, he learns that she has been married and hails from Knocking Hall, Rutland, and of course knocking and rutting are both synonyms for loving. Diana describes Rutland as "Slow horses and fast women" which is a war-crime level burn, especially coming from her.
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May 8, 2023 14:45
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I'd also put in a good word for Hilary Mantel, the Wolf Hall trilogy is fantastic.
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May 9, 2023 20:51
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Kylaer posted:My opinion is that that's just another example of O'Brian's willingness to use off screen deus ex machina to both cause and resolve problems for the viewpoint characters. Jack's father was another big example of this. It flies in the face of storytelling convention by which the readers expect the characters to have some agency over things, and it's also kind of lazy, but O'Brian wanted a shortcut to the story he wanted to tell and so he took it. I don't know, I feel like "poo poo happens" is a big theme in the books, and is both realistic and sets the series apart from books which try and have everything fit into a neat narrative. Like HMS Surprise They sail halfway across the world to deliver an envoy and then he just dies right before they get to their destination, so they just turn around and head back again Mauritius Command Jack has pulled his fleet back from the brink and is ready for the final assault and then an entire armada shows up and takes his job away Sometimes people die and everyone just has to deal with the consequences, good or bad, even if those deaths aren't really connected to anything else that's happening.
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Sep 22, 2023 15:53
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A Proper Uppercut posted:I can highly recommend the audiobooks if you do that kind of thing. It's a whole different experience. Get the audiobooks read by Patrick Tull, not Simon Vance (imho)
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Jan 12, 2024 19:01
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