Master and Commander: Patrick O’Brian: Book 1 (Aubrey-Maturin)

Product Information

Director Taika Waititi has called it his comfort film as well as his favorite romance movie, saying their relationship is “palpable.” Aubrey, now a considerable though impoverished landowner, has dimmed his prospects at the Admiralty by his erratic voting as a Member of Parliament; he is feuding with his neighbour, a man with strong Navy connections who wants to enclose the common land between their estates; he is on even worse terms with his wife, Sophie, whose mother has ferreted out a most damaging trove of old personal letters. And what adventures! O'Brian's books are filled with espionage, warfare and the stinking reek of gunpowder. They are also full of humanity: perverse and humorous, dear and terrible, wonderfully alive. The performances of the protagonists are gentle, subtle and lifelike. Crowe gives a rugged and charismatic performance as the tradition-loving Aubrey. Bettany as the charmingly lubberly Maturin is the perfect complement to Aubrey, even as he differs from his book counterpart, his role as an intelligence agent being conspicuously absent from the script.

Is Aubrey’s humiliation and the threatened ruin of his career a deliberate plot? Master and Commander Books #12: The Letter of Marque (1988) But stowed away in the cable-tier is an escaped female convict. To the officers, Clarissa Harvill is an object of awkward courtliness and dangerous jealousies.

Other pleasures involve the exciting scenes of naval action that suddenly pop up, from inconclusive minor skirmishes between pairs of ships to major battles involving multiple ships and shore batteries (for in the year 1800 when the novel takes place England is at war with Spain and France), as well as the occasional brief, vivid, and lyrical descriptions of the world viewed with relish from a ship at sea: The online “manosphere” can seem like an opportunity for some men to deal with their very real issues of hopelessness and isolation. These online communities say they are looking to combat feminism and restore the role of traditional male dominance in society, offering men a space of connection and comradeship. This instalment takes Aubrey and Maturin sailing on the pirate-plagued waters of the Red Sea, trudging over the Sinai Peninsula and even the depths of the sea floor in their efforts to stay one step ahead of the treachery afoot. Master and Commander Books #10: The Far Side of the World (1984)

To quote Garth Franklin, editor of DarkHorizons.com: “Needless to say this is not real, but God I wish it were.” A tweet announces the “hot new bachelor party activity” is historic gunnery exercises, with the “boys hooting and hollering as they drink grog firing three broadsides in two minutes.”The Aubrey/Maturin series are classics. They are quite simply the best historical novels ever written.