A few months ago, I embarked upon my Salty Sea-Dog Era of reading and now we review progress. I’ve already covered Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo at a level of detail that I probably won’t reach in this post, but I will be covering several books, so there is that. Let’s get to it:
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson – There are books that are archetypal to certain genres or sub-genres. Books with outsized influence on all that come after it. They may not be the first to cover a certain topic, but they are always in the conversation whenever someone tackles the subject. Such is the case for Treasure Island and Pirate adventure stories.
All the tropes we know and love are here: treasure maps where X marks the spot, peg legs, eye patches, and parrots on shoulders as standard pirate accessories, the “black spot” as a death sentence that pirates hand out to traitors, copious amounts of rum, mutiny, lovable rogues, euphemisms for pirating (namely “gentlemen of fortune”), shipwrecks, marooned survivors, and oodles of nautical slang (“Shiver my timbers!”). Heck, even the title “Treasure Island” is a trope.
The novel is shorter and more accessible than I thought it would be, a sorta 19th century YA novel complete with plucky teen protagonist Jim Hawkins who undergoes a bit of a coming of age through the whole ordeal. And it is quite an ordeal, most of the crew dying once the treachery begins, and Hawkins finds himself in real danger often. Stevenson’s prose is mostly straightforward, occasionally veering into a sort of baroque patois for the pirates, but there are plenty of classic lines that originate right here and it all comes together in a thrilling way. It’s hard to hear Long John Silver intoning “Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.” before battle and not get worked up, is what I mean. It’s a book I probably should have read 30 years ago, but it still plays pretty well even now.
Master and Commander and Post Captain by Patrick O’Brian – The first two entries of the 20-novel Aubrey-Maturin series, set mostly in the era of the Napoleonic Wars. The series centers on the (sometimes contentious) friendship between Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin, a physician, natural philosopher, and intelligence agent.
I can see why the series has gained such popularity, but I must admit to being a bit underwhelmed by a few factors that just rarely play well for me. For instance, the novels are largely episodic in nature (and I mean this within each novel – obviously a 20 book series is episodic by its very nature), meaning that the overarching story is haltingly progressed in an oddly paced way. There’s plenty of connective tissue, to be sure, but this sort of approach rarely works for me.
O’Brian’s prose is a little more imposing here than I usually care for as well. He’s obviously well versed in nautical concepts and terminology and the character of Maturin, unfamiliar with the high seas, presents a sort of audience surrogate that allows explanations for ideas we might not be familiar with. More surprising is the influence of Jane Austen on O’Brian’s writing (particularly in Post Captain). I was not expecting Austen-style social commentary, irony, and even romance in these novels, but it’s all there.
Again, the episodic nature of the stories does tend to harm the pacing, and there are several episodes that tend to undercut the overarching sense of storytelling that I usually look for in these types of books. I don’t need protagonists to be superheroes, but ending the first book with Captain Aubrey’s ship being captured by the French and subsequently released to face court martial is… not quite the rousing ending I was hoping for. I suppose I should note that I listened to these in audio-book form (I read the other books in this post in dead tree format) and that the narrator was, in some ways, excellent, but I also found myself spacing out from time to time. Obviously, these are all “me” problems, as the series has quite a following and I suspect later installments would improve upon these first two, but I must admit, I’m not particularly inclined to continue the series myself.
Stay tuned, Moby Dick and Beat to Quarters (the first Horatio Hornblower novel) are next up…