Helen MacInnes, “Assignment in Brittany”

Oh, so retro! These Helen MacInnes thrillers were everywhere when I was a teenager — she might even be comparable to the Lee Child of the era, which says a lot about cultural changes in the last 50 years. I never read them because they moved pretty slowly and because the proportion of romance to action was low for the teenage me. But Assignment in Brittany was a laundry-room acquisition and it fit the bill perfectly when I was laid low by a migraine. (That’s the good kind of illness, when you feel too sick to do anything but lie in bed and read!)

Love that cover art.

Plot: an English military intelligence guy named Hearne parachutes into rural Brittany in 1941 to spy on German troop movements. He adopts the identity of a wounded Dunkirk evacuee, Bertrand Corlay, who is his physical double. Hearne speaks perfect French, etc. etc. and gets a complete briefing so the substitution while suspenseful is not the main motor of the plot. So far, the novel reminded me of a minor but wonderful Daphne DuMaurier called The Scapegoat: English guy drops into rural French setting and discovers that the French guy he’s pretending to be is a real jerk. The spying plot proceeds with slow, methodical detail which I quite relished, but which certainly dated the book as an entertainment. Though the biggest shock came when our hero Hearne is looking at his double Corlay’s bookshelf and says to himself, “Books are half of the man.” At which point I could not help thinking, “Not anymore, pal.”

Of course Helen MacInnes was a moonlighting librarian, married to an academic, so she would consider books an index to character. I knew that her husband was the Columbia University classicist Gilbert Highet, but I did not know until I checked Wikipedia that he had been in MI6. Nor that Assignment in Brittany “was required reading for Allied intelligence agents who were being sent to work with the French resistance against the Nazis.” Actually now that I think of it, MacInnes‘ books seem to cover a lot of the same territory as Alan Furst’s — but she’s earnestly informative, while he’s performing all those smoky, romantic riffs on the same themes.

It turns out that MacInnes‘ books are being reissued this spring in a spiffy new uniform edition. I wonder if their sincere pedantic quality and their relatively stately pace will appeal to contemporary readers. On the other hand, I can’t wait for Decision at Delphi, Message from Malaga, and the like.

Andrew Miller, “Pure”

If I describe Andrew Miller’s Pure as a novel about excavating a cemetery in 18th century Paris, you’re not going to want to read it. And maybe if you’re really, really squeamish the subject matter is going to be problematic.

On the other hand, if I present Pure as a coming-of-age novel set just before the French Revolution, in which an engaging  young engineer faces a great challenge, that may sound more attractive, and it’s equally true. The novel opens with Jean-Baptiste Baratte kicking his heels in an anteroom at Versailles, waiting to see a minister who has a job for him. Baratte is a farmer’s son from Normandy who has been educated at the elite Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and thus that useful fictional figure, the socially mobile protagonist. We see him, in Pure, as a supplicant, a boss, a lover, a son, a rube, and above all a man growing into his natural authority.

19th century print of the Cemetery of Les Innocents in Paris.

The task assigned to Jean-Baptiste at Versailles is the demolition of an overcrowded cemetery in the center of Paris. Les Innocents had been in use since the Middle Ages and by the 1780s presented serious health hazards to the neighborhood. Miller is pretty eloquent about the aesthetic issues as well — olfactory for the most part. The cemetery did indeed get demolished, the bones removed to a new location in what is now Montparnasse. The neighboring church was also destroyed, and Miller lingers over the irruption of light into the filthy dark medieval interior:

Once inside the church, they go in single file. The sun has risen above the roof line and where the roof is gone, the light breaks in a shallow angle on the facing wall, picks out, with a kind of unnecessary perfection, the fluting of a pillar, the bevelled edge of an arch, a stone face staring goggle-eyed at some wonder in the middle air…. Something falls, flickers through light into shadow and hits the piled pews with a noise of thunder.”

Light, purification, education, social mobility — you see where Miller is going. A secondary character in Pure is an affable forward-looking doctor named Guillotin whose future invention would remove so many heads. The opening scene at Versailles is matched by a closing scene that foreshadows the coming irrelevance of the Ancien Régime. We even see a cameo of the firebrand Camille Desmoulins delivering a rabble-rousing speech at the Palais-Royal (homage to Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety?). But these themes are woven artfully into the trajectories of the characters. This is not one of those historical novels that feels studded with facts, like an overloaded fruitcake. Instead it feels like a seamless, illuminating experience. And here’s the clincher: I finished it two days ago and it lingers in my mind — enormously satisfying.

Patrick O’Brian, “Blue at the Mizzen”

No, I didn’t skip. Being a methodical person I did read The Yellow Admiral and The Hundred Days before embarking on Blue at the Mizzen, but as many an O’Brian fanatic has found, our beloved author does run out of steam at the end of this magnificent series. I didn’t actually intend to combine my comments on these three novels into one, but in fact there’s no reason not to. The Yellow Admiral maintains some of the energy and focus of the earlier books but the plot meanders: Jack is ashore, in money troubles again. He’s sent to join the Brest blockade, and we know from The Ionian Mission that blockade duty is necessarily dull. Napoleon surrenders. And in addition, Jack and Sophie are at odds. Worse is to come. The Hundred Days opens in Gibraltar with the dreadful news of Diana’s sudden death and Stephen is a shadow of himself. But grief, with its repetitions and unpredictability and general unpleasantness is not a good subject for a novel. What’s more the plot is choppy and confusing, involving various locations along the Mediterranean and levels of plotting that I found difficult to follow. Blue at the Mizzen places Jack and Stephen on the west coast of South America, fostering the development of a Chilean navy. Jack is functional but still fundamentally unhappy since the British Navy no longer exists to fight Napoleon.

Especially in the last two books, I sensed that O’Brian was going through the motions. So many of the set pieces recurred: Killick’s crabbiness, Stephen’s drug use, rigging church, knocking the rust off cannon balls, “a taut ship is a happy ship.” But new characters are barely distinguishable one from the next, and the plot tension is almost nonexistent. At the end Jack is finally given his blue flag in a very touching scene, so we are allowed to think of him as an admiral, in perpetuity. But as far as perpetuity goes, I’d like to return to a vignette from The Yellow Admiral that describes an ideal life for these characters we’ve spent so much time with. They are all at Jack’s inherited estate of Woolcombe, healthy and moderately rich, waiting while the Surprise is repaired for a long voyage:

The big, spreading old house lived at the steady pace it had been accustomed to for so many generations, a mild but continuous activity. Stephen, with the help of Padeen and old Harding’s grandson Will, established a pretty exhaustive census of the nesting birds…; Sophie, and often Diana, paid or received the necessary calls; while at all times Diana trained, exercised and took care of her Arabs; Clarissa taught George and Brigid Latin verbally, as well as French…: and always there were familiar faces at hand, in the house, in the stables, in the village and all over the countryside.”

I began reading this series at the end of August as a kind of farewell to my father, an avocational sailor and a writer himself. I don’t know that he was an O’Brian fan, though I rather think not. But reading has always been my source of refuge and some useful instinct guided me toward this immensely capacious, humane set of novels. I found them comforting, in their frank acknowledgement of pain. Also entertaining, amusing, enlightening, stimulating and wholly admirable.

Patrick O’Brian, “The Commodore”

We’re getting to the end here. The Commodore is number 17 in the Aubrey/Maturin series. Jack, as you will have understood from the title, has been promoted yet again, this time acting as commodore of a fleet that’s sent to Africa to harass the illegal slave trade. He finds — as many successful middle-aged people do — that managing a large group of individuals engaged in a common enterprise is less congenial than operating on his own. Jack Aubrey is no man for paperwork.

Lemur tardigradus on — perfect for Jack and Stephen! — a coffee plant.

The Commodore returns to some of the satisfying, swashbuckling activity of the heart of the series, but it is certainly shaded with melancholy. Jack and Sophie are maritally at odds and Jack — so direct, so commanding, so competent at sea — has no idea how to mend matters. There are more references to the encroachments of middle age, and there’s a sudden death that has lingered with me since the first time I read the series. Here’s a snippet of another scene that conveys some of the elegiac flavor. Stephen is staying at the Aubreys’ Ashgrove Cottage and wakens in the middle of the night to hear Jack, in the summer house, “dreaming away on his violin with a mastery that Stephen had never heard equalled, though they had played together for years and years.” Stephen has long recognized Jack as much the better player, aware that Jack tempers his expertise so as not to show off when they play together.

Now, in the warm night, there was no one to be comforted, kept in countenance, no one who could scorn him for virtuosity, and he could let himself go entirely; and as the grave and subtle music wound on and on, Stephen once more contemplated on the apparent contradiction between the big, cheerful, florid sea-officer whom most people liked on sight but who would never have been described as subtle or capable of subtlety by any one of them…. and the intricate, reflective music he was now creating. So utterly unlike his limited vocabulary in words, at times verging on the inarticulate.”

Which when you think of it, is a subtle point for the novelist Patrick O’Brian to make: words don’t suffice for everyone.

For old O’Brian hands I will add that this is the novel where we are introduced to the potto, an extremely winning African lemur that Stephen possesses all too briefly. Like the sloth of H.M.S. Surprise, it is a character more fully-realized than many humans stalking the pages of many other novels.

Patrick O’Brian, “The Wine-Dark Sea”

The Wine-Dark Sea takes up very much where The Truelove left off, in location and mood. Both books are relatively short and I wonder if Patrick O’Brian originally intended them as one volume. However, 500 pages of the frustration and glumness that Jack and Stephen endure in these novels would make for depressing reading, so it’s just as well they were split up. The most memorable sections of The Wine-Dark Sea are the passages when Stephen is ashore in Peru and then in Chile, crossing the Andes with a group of Indians, fuelled by roasted guinea pig and coca leaves. This long diversion does nothing to move the plot along — a goal that O’Brian has long since demonstrated he cares nothing for — but it’s quite remarkable, and our fondness for Stephen makes it possible to participate in his wonder. (I did wonder a bit about Stephen and his arduous climb and The Pilgrim’s Progress, given my earlier suspicions about O’Brian’s literary borrowings, but it’s very hard to find much in common between Stephen Maturin and that book’s protagonist, Christian.)

Stephen has nothing to say to llamas, but likes vicunas: quite charming, and native to the South American mountains.

Yet just at the end, as the Surprise and her crew have been battered almost beyond redemption, redemption heaves into sight as a sixty-four gun vessel captained by Jack’s old friend Heneage Dundas. And just like that, the mood shifts.

Two quotations that more or less bracket the tone of the book: Early on, the Surprise and many of her people are injured in a volcanic eruption. Stephen and Jack part after surveying some of the damage on the deck and in the sea.

‘A late breakfast? I hope so indeed,’ said Stephen, making his way down by single steps and moving, as Jack noticed for the first time, like an old man.”

At the end of the book, after being rescued by his friend Dundas and recounting his grim adventures, Jack says,

‘No. Harking back to this voyage, I think it was a failure upon the whole, and a costly failure; but,’ he said laughing with joy at the thought, ‘I am so happy to be homeward-bound, and I am so happy, so very happy to be alive.’”

Patrick O’Brian, “The Truelove”

Yes — this is where the Aubrey/Maturin series starts to bog down. In which, perhaps, it reflects life as we know it: Jack and Stephen are now in full middle age and The Truelove is full of testiness, misunderstanding, and emotional malaise. Sure, we need conflict to keep a novel going and the contrast between our two protagonists is one of the wonderful sources of interest in the series. But for the first time, Jack and Stephen are philosophically, ethically at odds. Furthermore Stephen’s mate, the naturalist/cleric Nathaniel Martin, has somehow changed into a less congenial companion for Stephen. This does sometimes happen in the course of a long friendship, but the result is to make this novel a little bit discomfiting.

A Western expedition to the Sandwich islands, drawn in 1816. Similar to Jack’s stay on Moahu, surely.

Of course Patrick O’Brian was 78 when he wrote it, which is a fine age, and he might conceivably have seen some disappointments in all of those years. But I think what I take away from this book overall is… well, maybe it’s a diminished appetite for life. For instance, the one battle on a Pacific Island is a frank bloodbath, necessary but devoid of the usual elation for both Jack and the sympathetic reader. For another thing, “the people” behave badly. I’ve always loved the way the crew of Jack’s ships become a unit, and are alternately known by the name of the ship (so you could be a Surprise, a Sophie, a Nutmeg, a Leopard, etc., a lovely bit of identification with the sailing craft itself). And the crew is often known as “her people.” Well, there’s a woman aboard the ship, and she sows all kinds of havoc. She is a handsome, well-spoken, appealing convict, escaping from the penal colony of New South Wales, and her name is Clarissa Harvill. Now, in an earlier book, Stephen discusses Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa,which deals at great length with a young woman’s attempt to remain virtuous despite her family’s manipulations and the ardent efforts of a rake. The Clarissa of The Truelove is also, despite all odds, virtuous, in a very modern way, but her presence aboard the ship is terribly destructive.

And Jack, throughout the book, is ageworn, careworn, grim. He finds gray streaks in his long yellow hair, but finds little pleasure in what has usually made him happy. Jack is in fact depressed, and depression doesn’t suit him. I mentioned earlier how much I enjoyed the Mozartian interweaving of major and minor keys in these books, but the The Truelove moves us into something very much more melancholy. And, possibly, more modern: Bruckner? Richard Strauss? Would Jack appreciate the “Four Last Songs,” do you think?

Patrick O’Brian, “The Nutmeg of Consolation”

I had forgotten how many ships Stephen and Jack sail in: somehow I conflated them all into the Surprise, but in The Nutmeg of Consolation, Jack commands a little Dutch-built sloop that has been captured by the English. He calls it the Nutmeg after the Sultan of Pulo Prabang (see The Thirteen Gun Salute, volume 13 of the series) and consolation is needed, for one reason or another, throughout the book. Goodness, it opens with the crew of HMS Diane shipwrecked on a deserted island, running out of food. In fact, although the ultimate mission of the Surprise — a South American visit — is still envisioned, our friends get no closer to it during the course of this book.

Instead, they go to Australia. I get the sense that Patrick O’Brian has read Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore. He paints a very harsh picture of the penal colony, sharpening his criticisms by having various members of the crew fall afoul of the administration in one way or another. Stephen, for instance, gets off on the wrong foot by fighting a duel with a grotesquely rude soldier, making it almost impossible for Jack to get the Surprise fitted out for her long voyage to Chile. O’Brian is so adept with the physical descriptions that there’s almost a grayish dusty feeling to the pages.

A platypus, also known as “water-mole” in rural Australia. It plays a rather major part in “The Nutmeg of Consolation.”

But there are consolations. For Stephen and his friend Martin, the flora and fauna beggar belief. Jack has the maritime pleasure of sinking a French frigate and saving most of its crew, including an old friend’s nephew — a friend, though French. I’ve mentioned before that the Aubrey/Maturin series is above all a portrait of masculine friendship; one feature I just grasped is how often O’Brian mentions affection. Brutal as the seagoing world is, the bonds among these men are very strong and often warmly expressed, whether in words or, more often, in actions. In fact the final pages of the book are extremely touching, as Stephen recovers from a near-mortal wound — a situation that would have been sentimental in another author’s hands.

Miscellanea: substance abuse continues to be an interest of O’Brian’s. After Stephen’s addiction to laudanum (his mental justifications for indulging were familiar to any twelve-stepper), he is introduced to cocaine, in the form of leaves. So, alas, are the rats aboard the Nutmeg, which devour not only his entire store but their wrappings as well. “They stood about me as I gazed at the ruins of my store… gibbering, barely able to contain themselves.”

And finally, these words on fiction, delivered by (naturally) Stephen: “I look upon good novels … as a very valuable part of literature, conveying more exact and finely-distinguished knowledge of the human heart and mind than almost any other, with greater breadth and depth and fewer constraints.”

So there.

Patrick O’Brian, “The Thirteen Gun Salute”

The Thirteen Gun Salute is volume 13 of the Aubrey/Maturin series and the tale itself, like its protagonists, is showing its maturity. (A good thing, not a bad thing.)  This novel is one of several that takes Jack and Stephen back to the South Seas on a complex mission: they are nominally headed for South America but once again they are diverted, this time to the fictional Pulo Prabang in the South Pacific. The Sultan is being wooed as an ally simultaneously by France and by England: aboard the Surprise is a special envoy, empowered to negotiate an alliance.

The high point of this book for Stephen: making friends with an orangutang named Muong.

This is a marvelous opportunity for Stephen, of course, both in his capacity as a naturalist and his role as an intelligence agent. But it is also a wonderful chance for Patrick O’Brian to get his teeth into the question of morality. Stephen, as you might guess, is his vehicle. For several volumes he has been chafing at his metier. Or, to put it more precisely, the duplicity of his intelligence career grates on him increasingly. Early in the book he is confronted with a moral dilemma as the Surprise comes close to capturing a ship with an Irish renegade aboard. Though the man is clearly in French pay, Stephen recoils from the prospect of contact with him: his “old loathing for informers rose up with overwhelming force, his utter revulsion from anything and everything to do with them and the result of their betrayals… he could not bear the slightest hint of a connexion between himself and such people…” Yet later in the book, he devises a quite fiendish end for two turncoat Englishmen. O’Brian has previously painted the pair quite black, but Maturin’s revenge is almost inhuman.

Stephen contains multitudes: Jack, on the other hand, can only be himself. O’Brian contrasts him with the envoy Edward Fox, an intelligent man who nevertheless manages to make enemies aboard ship. Again, in Stephen’s head,

Once again his mind turned to the question of integrity, a virtue that he prized very highly in others, although there were times when he had painful doubts about his own; but on this occasion he was thinking about it less as a virtue than as a state, the condition of being whole; and it seemed to him that Jack was a fair example. He was as devoid of self-consciousness as a man could well be; and in all the years Stephen had known him, he had never seen him act a part.

Fox, on the other hand, occupied a more or less perpetual stage, playing the role of an important figure, an imposing man, and the possessor of uncommon parts… what he desired was superiority and the respect due to superiority, and for a man of his intelligence he did set about it with a surprising lack of skill.”

Fox is not the only character like this in the series: the unsteady Lord Clonfert of The Mauritus Command is another. O’Brian’s fascination with the question of identity is especially interesting considering that he himself shifted identities and names in early middle age.

O’Brian also gives Stephen a tremendous gift: his visit to the Kumai crater which is inhabited by some Buddhist monks and an enormous wealth of completely tame animals who pay no attention to him at all, save the orangutangs who consider him a potential playmate: “The whole effect was very like being in a waking dream, of losing human identity, or even of being invisible.” I’ve always wanted to be invisible, haven’t you?

Patrick O’Brian, “The Letter of Marque”

More literary references here — I really don’t want to be sounding like a graduate student, but in The Letter of Marque, Patrick O’Brian practically shoves Aristotle’s Poetics in our faces.  Stephen’s sidekick, the one-eyed naturalist minister Nathaniel Martin, is attempting to translate the Poetics from Greek, and trips on the word peripeteia, which Stephen renders as “a reverse.” It seems that the poetry-writing Lieutenant Mowett intends to write an epic about Jack Aubrey called The Sea-Officer’s Tragedy, which prompts discussion of the nature of tragedy or comedy, as laid out by Aristotle. O’Brian’s characters discussing his own literary project? How meta is that?

More lit-crit: does the plot of this novel reflect the plot of “Figaro?” Discuss.

As The Letter of Marque opens, Jack is what we might consider clinically depressed. Despite the satisfying successes at the end of The Far Side of the World, he is still an exile from his beloved Royal Navy: “his open, florid, cheerful face had grown older, less full; it was now lined and habitually sombre, with a touch of latent wickedness…” You know how that feels, right? That sensation that if one more person crosses you, terrible things could happen? Stephen feels like that often, but it’s new for Jack. And the habitually irritable Stephen begins the novel tiptoeing along the very edge of despair, because he has so deeply offended Diana, whose now lives in Sweden.

Of course there are battles, and even successes, for our old friends. A particularly delicious feat of courageous seamanship, in which Jack invades a French harbor and captures a French frigate, helps to restore his reputation. Thanks to some strategic captures, Jack is even rich. The subterranean battle of international intelligence that concerns Stephen continues, but in the background here. Stephen renews his acquaintanceship with “the horrible old Leopard,” and is aboard when it runs aground (good delaying tactic on O’Brian’s part; distracts the reader while postponing resolution). A voyage to South America is discussed and planned, but Jack and Stephen actually end up in Stockholm, where Stephen intends to return Diana’s immense blue diamond to her. Both Stephen and Jack undergo terrible physical wounds as well as the psychic ones.

But The Letter of Marque is a comedy, in Aristotelian terms. O’Brian refers several times to Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, which involves suspected adultery and subsequent forgiveness — Jack and Stephen play morsels of it and the final scene of the book finds them, with their wives, singing the final chorus from Figaro: Ah tutti contenti saremo cosí. Can I really imagine Sophie singing freely in Italian? Can Stephen sing at all? Never mind: they are united in “surprisingly melodious full-throated happiness” and that’s good enough for me.

Patrick O’Brian, “The Reverse of the Medal”

Oh wow, are you sitting down? Major Literary Discovery here. I was happily absorbed in The Reverse of the Medal when PLOT SPOILER (sorry) I got to the section when Jack is imprisoned at the Marshalsea — what we might call the white-collar prison of Georgian London. Stephen goes to visit him and there’s a description of Jack’s daily routine, Sophie’s presence as a visitor, all very pleasant…. but something’s tickling at my memory, some familiarity: Patrick O’Brian is referring to Little Dorrit! It’s plain as day. I remarked earlier on O’Brian’s borrowing from Stendhal in The Surgeon’s Mate. That was very clear — and I did feel, reading through The Far Side of the World, that Moby-Dick was present in a shadowy way. Of course as reader Antony pointed out, you can’t write about whaling without Herman Melville somewhere in the offing. And I’ll add that in the earlier books, when Jack is courting Sophie, the social machinations and the dry humor did remind me of Jane Austen. (But I tend to see her everywhere.)

Actually the first prison on the site: Jack was probably confined in the second one. But you get the idea.

I’m too lazy to do the research to substantiate these claims, but I offer them freely to O’Brian scholars who may have a field day with them. I would just add that these literary references don’t in any way spoil the fiction; even when you perceive the source, you are still firmly anchored in the Aubrey/Maturin world. Which is quite complicated, in The Reverse of the Medal. A lot happens. O’Brian goes from  gentle, generous comedy (the introduction of Jack’s black illegitimate son Sam Panda, for example; he is far more sophisticated than his father and resembles him very closely except in the matter of skin color), to the greatest tragedy that could befall Jack. This is one of the novels that takes place mostly ashore, and Jack off his ship is prone to misfortune. To add to the melancholy, Diana Villiers has bolted from London, furious at Stephen’s apparent wooing of another lady. (An intelligence stratagem, of course.) So both of our protagonists are severely distressed and it is moving to witness their different kinds of courage in the face of their trials. Stephen attempts distraction, whether with work or with laudanum. But Jack faces his pain proudly and stoically, accepting no help. After a criminal trial he is sentenced to the pillory, and Stephen brings him some laudanum to get him through it.

Stephen saw that he had no intention of taking it, and that the underlying pain was quite untouched. For to Jack Aubrey the fact of no longer belonging to the Navy counted more than a thousand pillories, the loss of fortune, loss of rank, and loss of future. It was in a way a loss of being, and to those who knew him well it gave his eyes, his whole face, the strangest look.”

I have to mention that the scene of Jack in the stocks is one of the most moving I know in fiction. A friend once told me about reading this series with her husband; she began each book as he finished it. One night they were reading side by side in bed and she became aware that her husband was awash in tears. He wouldn’t tell her why — he was crying too hard anyway — but when he got control of himself, all he could say was, “You’ll see.” Read it. You’ll see.