I have the same issue, but I figure it out since I’m such fan of the series, I remember the passage. And he certainly go the emotions right. And I guess that is how the accents should sound.
I saw Master and Commander and enjoyed it, and read HMS Surprise and liked it, but didn’t feel compelled to rush out and read any of the other books.
As I’ve posted on the Dope before, a high school friend of mine is a huge O’Brian fan but doesn’t enjoy the long descriptions of sails, ropes, masts, yardarms, etc. Whenever he gets to such a passage he thinks to himself, “They are handling the ship very skillfully,” and skips ahead.
[quote=“DeptfordX, post:79, topic:772078”]
Who was the reader?
They’ve been several.
As said upthread Patrick Tully is **the **voice of the Aubrey/Maturin books.
Example.
[/QUOTE]It’s Patrick Tull. (no Y at the end)
The actual audiobook recordings are of a much better quality than the youtube video linked to. I’ve never had an issue understanding the narration.
I love the Maturin/Aubrey series. I have read the entire 20.5 book series all the way through at least 5 times over the years. I have all the hardbacks lined up on a shelf in my living room, and I have all the Kindle versions saved in my iPad. In addition I have some, but not all of the audio versions.
I mostly liked Hornblower, and I did enjoy the video series from the late 90s/early 2000s, but it always seemed lighter fare than O’Brian’s works. Yes, P O’B beats the technical details to death sometimes, but honestly I kind of like that.
Reviving this thread ten-plus days after last action on it – I’m maybe at a bit of a loose end, and I was essentially Net-deprived while it was going.
Just a thought or two about the Aubrey / Maturin novels: tending (I’m apt to be rather a miserable so-and-so) toward what I like “less” about them, rather than “more”. On the whole, I greatly like this novel series – without attaining the “impassioned devotee / geek / perennial re-reader” category.
My chief peeve about the novels, could be characterised as the “too much of too much” factor. I feel that O’Brian is perhaps a bit too aware of his great gifts of creativity and imagination – to the point of, in the twenty-maybe-plus volumes, getting drunk thereon, and going overboard and just heaping overmuch on, too thick. Sometimes – just too much going on, and too many lesser characters and sub-plots, for a lukewarm semi-fan such as me, to be able to be comfortable with. I feel the same way, to a greater degree, about Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novel series: am basically “pro” author and author’s output, but sometimes want to scream, “don’t load it on with a shovel so much ! Less can be more…”
On a different aspect of “too much”: like other posters in the thread, I feel a bit uncomfortable with the “bear suit escape” episode – verging on the kids’-comic-ish grotesque and implausible. Other happenings in the novels, strike me the same way (again, like others: I seem to have been passed-by, by the South-Seas-lesbians stuff). Some of the characters’ doings when back home in England can get to annoy me, for similar reasons. I find particularly irritating, the whole business about the Channel port of Shelmerston where much of the ship’s crew in her “privateer” role is found; and that place’s strange “Sethian” sect. Arouses for me, visions of the author, in “I’m a creative genius and all that comes to my mind, is wonderful” mode, musing, “What’s another goofy thing I can think of, to enmesh Jack and Stephen in? – I know; I’ll dream up a weird and very-way-out Christian sect, thought up by ignorant bumpkins in a backwater, and pull the stops out to the max with that.” As with a fair number of authors: one may be liable to think, “Too much, getting too embarrassingly silly ! Rein it in a bit !”
My feeling is, that the Aubrey / Maturin series would likely be better if it numbered not quite so many books – with the daftest stuff, thus eliminated. Passionate devotees would of course wish for the opposite – let there be many more than the mingy twenty-odd which O’Brian was able to produce before he died. There are a very few authors, re whose output my wishes would be similar; but for me, I’m afraid O’Brian isn’t among them.
I wonder how many of the unusual incidents O’Brien wrote of were found by him in his research of things naval.
What was that incident where Jack was going to be arrested for something, but he was okay as long as he avoided being touched by the guy’s staff? Was there a historical basis for that? Maybe I’m misremembering…
It sounds very English. I do not know how to google for it, though.
The tipstaff was a very real thing. Originally, the arrest warrant itself was rolled up and placed inside a hollow part of the staff.
Most!
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IIRC, shortly afterwards Jack turns the tables by pressing the tipstaff / bailiff guys into naval service. I like that…
I haven’t read this book, but this description of trying to avoid being touched by a stick to avoid arrest is complete unhistorical nonsense. O’Brian got the wrong end of the stick, and added his own fantasy to it.
A tipstaff was a short, heavy, metal-tipped baton. It was an emblem of authority, and could also be used as a weapon. It could have a hollow tip to contain a warrant, but the warrant wasn’t a warrant of arrest - that would have been a pretty silly way to arrest someone - it was a warrant appointing the holder to his position as an official of the court, and giving him authority to execute court orders.
Arresting someone was a serious business, not a children’s game. Since there were no uniforms for court officials, a tipstaff served to show authority, and could be used to knock someone down if necessary.
It’s this kind of comic-book-fantasy history which is the reason I don’t like O’Brian’s books.
I believe that the guy in the bear suit during the office robbery had a tipstaff.
While at the same time, Maturin in the “batting” role in a cricket match, was confusing cricket with his Irish sport of hurling…
I’m noticing that most listeners are Patrick Tully fans. I listened to all the audiobooks over a few years, with judicious spacing between books as needed, and much preferred Simon Vance as a reader. Probably because I was already about ten books in, and had already imprinted on Mr Vance’s voice, when the only version of the next book available at the library was by Mr Tully. I just couldn’t handle it. Kind of the same as never watching the movie so it doesn’t destroy my mental pictures of the characters (and that I’m not a Russell Crowe fan). I like Mr Vance’s reading enough that I’m happy since to listen to even marginal books that he’s reading.
I totally get what you’re saying, while being on the “passionate devotees” side myself. As I’ve said before, a willing suspension of disbelief is necessary to fully enjoy the novels - if any deviation from grim reality is a negative for you, you’re going to have problems with these books. But the Sethians weren’t particularly “strange”, IMHO - the only real problem Jack had with them is when one of them painted an “S” on the Surprise in thanks for the prizes they had caught, and refused to let it be erased or painted over. If that’s weird or daft to you, I’m certain I can find some mainstream beliefs common in 1800 that are way beyond that.
It was described in the book as a “crowned truncheon”, so yes, probably a tipstaff.
To be fair to poor Stephen, he had meant to watch the match to see how cricket differed from hurling, but was called away.
Remember that the description of the tipstaff came from Jack, not someone particularly well versed in law. Here’s what happened in the famous tipstaff incident, from a more objective point of view:
Several lawyers had issued civil arrest warrants against Jack, due to prizes he had taken in the previous war. The owners had sued that they should not have been legal prizes, and won in court, so Jack had to pay back 11,000 pounds at a time when he “did not have eleven thousand pence”.
Jack was given command of a sloop, the Polychrest. While on the ship, he was safe from arrest, since he could control who came on board. I believe more than once a bailiff tried to get on board but was turned away.
Jack came ashore for a celebratory dinner for one of his officers, Tom Pullings. During the dinner, a group of bailiffs led by one with a tipstaff invaded the inn. Jack got up to the 2nd story, and called for his gigs crew, who got in a fight with the bailiffs. Barrett Bonden grabbed the tipstaff from the head bailiff, threw it in the harbor, and knocked him unconscious. Jack told Bonden to bring the bailiff on the ship and pressed him. The rest of the bailiffs scattered.
So what really happened was that a party of bailiffs tried to arrest Jack, they were beaten and repulsed by a group of sailors and the head bailiff disappeared, and possibly died (the Polychrest had heavy casualties later in the book). Since the head bailiff was gone, the sailors were essentially unidentifiable, and it was a civil suit, there were no repercussions.
The way it was presented in the book (and I’m happy to be corrected if that wasn’t reality), was that although the bailiff with the tipstaff was an officer of the court, he was also an independent contractor, at least as it came to civil suits. So lawyers would issue suits against defendants, along with rewards for anyone who could arrest them. It’s not like the bailiff was assigned by his superiors to arrest Jack at any cost - he was just after the reward, so once he disappeared no one was looking for him.
Note that in the next book, the bailiffs catch up with Jack again, and since he doesn’t have a group of sailors to fight them off he goes with them quietly.
Did Scrivener lead them to Jack?
We see him just before they come in.
They’re great - some of the best historical fiction around, IMHO. I’ve read through the series twice.
Reading the books in order is fairly important with this series, so start with Master and Commander, and go forward from there.
Scriven? Huh, I never thought of it that way - I thought Scriven was trying to warn Jack that they had found him. But since the bailiffs literally follow him through the door, you may very possibly be correct. Certainly we never see him again after that.
My problem with the Sethian stuff is not the craziness as such – just a more general (if relatively low-key) peeve which I have with O’Brian, per attempted outline in my previous post. A matter of – for my taste – overdoing things in a way with which I feel uncomfortable, and which strikes me as embarrassing. Again as per my other post: I feel the same way, to a greater degree in fact, about Diana Gabaldon. There are times when I want to say to the authors: “you produce great stuff – you have no need to go outright nuts with it, and it harms the general body of your work when you do”.
These are historical novels which so far as I can tell, on the whole take care to stay pretty closely with the historical facts (others’ mileages may vary here). Splendid imaginative fun is nonetheless had within these confines: author’s getting wildly fanciful, feels to me needless and like gilding the lily / going over the top / the author indulging themself and getting pleased with themself for their imaginative-ness, in a to me “precious” and annoying way (and, as PPs have said, with a bit of a kids’-comic-book flavour intruding). In the main, the Aubrey / Maturin books tell of events in places (at least in the then better-known parts of the world) which actually existed; why does the author need suddenly to involve a fictitious port in the south of England, home of a fictitious nutty-and-naïve religious sect, whose weird doings can then be lovingly dwelt on? There were at the time, plenty of real eccentric and “specialised” (or more standard) flavours of Christianity, quite bonkers enough to afford plenty of fun to authors / readers – as you, muldoonthief, intimate at the end of the above-quoted. (I did, by the way, do a Google to make quite sure that O’Brian’s Sethians were indeed fictional: learned that there was in the first century or two AD in the Mediterranean region, a Gnostic sect by that name – but nothing about any such-titled in Sussex / Hampshire around 1800 AD.)
The above may seem weird – after all, the definition of “fiction” is, people making stuff up – but I consider that I have a valid point: some historical fiction does try to – mostly, successfully – stick close to real history; it can be jarring – and, in my view, off-puttingly “look-at-me-aren’t-I-imaginatively creative?” on the author’s part – when the author suddenly departs therefrom.
It’s only the occasional element in “Aubrey / Maturin”, which irritates me this way (the Sethians, my chief “hate”): rightly or wrongly, I have no problem with the bailiff / tipstaff caper discussed in recent posts. I much like the great majority of the series – there are just a few elements which (whether my view thereof make sense or not) spoil it a bit for me.