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crack_van2006-07-01 10:09 pm
soupytwist.livejournal.com) wrote in crack_van2006-07-01 10:09 pm
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Master and Commander: an overview
Master and Commander is the name given to the books in the 'Aubrey/Maturin series' by Patrick O'Brian and the film based on those books called Master and Commander: Far Side of the World*. They're about naval Captain Jack Aubrey and his best friend, the naturalist and secret agent Stephen Maturin, going around having exciting adventures on the high seas during the early 19th century. I promise that they're actually exciting, and a lot funnier than would usually be expected: there is plenty of good snark to be had, plus a narrative voice that is occasionally awesomely bitchy. Think Horatio Hornblower with extra Jane Austen, or (and I realise that this will make me look weird, but bear with me a second) a much more realist version of Jeeves and Wooster, gone back in time a century to fight Napoleon. It's awesome.**
Plotting a Course
(a.k.a. Stuff You Should Probably Know Before You Start)
- There are twenty (and a half - one was left unfinished when O'Brian died) books in the series, but it's less scary to get into than that sounds; you certainly don't need to have read all of them to have a good understanding of their characters. The movie also makes a very good introduction: it's very faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, of the books it's based on, and will let you know whether it'll be your kind of thing or not. They got some amazing shots of the Galapagos islands, if nothing else, and besides, you've got Paul Bettany, who's wonderful and brilliant as always as Stephen Maturin, and Russell Crowe, who isn't my type but is really very good as Jack. Well worth an hour and a half of your time, I think.
- It's based on actual historical events; O'Brian was a scrupulous researcher, and it's all very historical. There is fudging, as is pretty much inevitable given the fictional nature of the stories, but it's a very small amount - most readers, even knowledgeable ones, wouldn't notice that it's technically an AU on a first read. Accuracy and plausibility were very high up O'Brian's list of priorities. This is both awesome (for history geeks) and boring (for people who would rather skip the detailed descriptions of ropes and sails and naval maneuvers). Luckily it's quite easy to skip the most impenetrable naval jargon if you want, even easier to find about eighty seven people willing and ready to answer every question of naval minutae if you don't, and the payoff is well worth it - there's a whole load of honestly awesome historical detail and discussion of issues relevant to the time and what effect those might have had on individual people. O'Brian had resource to actual Midshipmen's letters and diaries and things, and you can tell. It's the sort of thing that makes me do the happy dance. :D (What, it's a very geeky happy dance. :P)
- The books don't exactly have an overall plot. Well, they do - they follow Jack's rise through the Navy. What I mean is, there isn't exactly emotional resolution. It's not a bad thing: there's still plenty of emotional storyline, it's just that the issues brought up for each character don't miraculously get resolved at the end of each book. If there's somebody who's really mean, he's not necessarily going to get his highly justified comeuppance at the end, that sort of thing. I mention it only because I found it a bit disconcerting at first: given the amount of time on character issues, I was expecting a much more traditional emotional arc for the main characters. I think it's a good thing I didn't get one, though - it's a lot more like real life, and it adds to a really cool sense that we're just kind of watching twenty years of these people living out their lives. This is also why I'm not going to go into the plot - there's so much of it that it can't really be summed up, and "Jack rises through the Navy" is about all you need to know for that anyway.
- There will be some potentially confusing terminology and names, many of which will be unintentionally amusing. Don't worry about it, it's usually easy to figure out (O'Brian thankfully realised, for the most part, that his audience was probably not going to know all this stuff) and if not, I've never yet met anybody who minded being asked "OK, so, do they refer to the crew by the name of the ship, or what?" or whatever.
... wow, that was quite a long digression. OK, on to the most important bit: the characters.
The Crew
(from the Gunroom to the Captain's cabin)
Main Characters
There are basically only two main people the books (and the fanfiction) focus on. These are Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin, and they are just so fabulous. The books start with their first meeting, where they're at the same concert and Stephen wants to strangle Jack for tapping along out of sync with the music. The very next day Jack, giddy from brand-new promotion, bumps into Stephen again and appologises. They bond over music, and Jack promptly offers Stephen a position on board ship. Stephen accepts, and they spend the next twenty years going round the world together, yay.
This is Jack. He is very tall, very English, and just about the most naval person you could ever meet: he's bluff, jocular, and likes food, wine, and women. A lot: to mis-quote Queer as Folk, saying Jack's a bit of a slut is like saying Hitler's a little bit naughty. He manages to get himself into a whole bunch of fairly terrible situations because of this; he's more than capable of making a fool of himself by getting drunk and hitting on somebody's wife. He is completely clueless about, frankly, quite a few things, and due to this makes some really awful gaffes and gets himself into terrible debt through awful financial decisions like 'handing power of attorney over to a mining prospector just before leaving on a long sea voyage'. (Oy.) He makes really awful puns at the slightest provocation and has some serious problems with dodgy metaphors. He is, if you don't mind me going back to my own kind of tortuous analogy, the Bertie Wooster of the two, reliant on his friend's superior wits to get him out of trouble.
But! Much like Bertie, there's a lot more to him than first meets the eye. It's only on land that Jack's so out of his depth. Jack is actually very intelligent indeed. He never thought so growing up, but he has discovered a love of maths (crucial for navigation), which he becomes good enough at to build his own telescope and write papers on various geometry-related things, and he is an excellent strategist in battle. He might not know all the names of the birds they see, but he knows his job all right, and it's truly a delight to get to see him learning his craft as the books progress, to the extent that you can't imagine him ever doing anything else. He fanboys Lord Nelson and wants to be as good a seaman as him. Seriously. In short, he loves the sea with everything he has, and he takes the Navy very seriously - he fights for England and he kicks ass doing it.
He's also a total, total sweetheart. He is just ridiculously nice, and this is often what gets him into trouble, because he has a hard time dealing with the fact that not everybody is so well-meaning. He doesn't think twice about doing nice things for people; being nice is just his nature, which only makes it more unfortunate when he accidentally says something stupid that makes somebody think otherwise. He's pretty much incapable of being mean; he's even got enough niceness in him to worry for people in the enemy ships he fights. He becomes kind-of friends with one of the French captains, enough to worry about whether one of the French Captain's relatives is in a ship that he just defeated. He's honestly glad when it turns out the relative is fine, too: because it's Jack, you know that gladness is completely genuine. Jack's one of the most honest people you can imagine. He'd be quite happy to go along never hiding anything about his life, and is saddened that as he advances along the Navy career path, he's forced to become more and more isolated from his crew. In his ideal world, he'd be bouncing around joking with everybody, with every bad thing just accepted and forgotten by the next good meal.Jack is, basically, just such a nice guy that you can't help but hope he stays that way.
The other thing you need to know about Jack is that he plays the violin beautifully. (This is relevant, I swear. :))
This is Stephen, who is pretty much Jack's opposite. He's short and dark and skinny where Jack is tall and blonde and bulky. He's the bitter and bitchy one to Jack's happy and relatively carefree cheeriness. He's half Irish and half Catalan - that is, from the Catalan region of Spain, and yeah, that distinction matters (especially since it is not the same thing, as I've just been informed, as being Castillian). That adds up to "all Catholic", which is another label Stephen takes very seriously, despite not appearing to be particularly religious by the standards of the time. He's a brilliant bastard: literally. His full proper name is Esteban Maturin y Domanova; he's related to some very rich people, but being born "on the wrong side of the blanket" can't use their name and such. He sucks at everything naval, so despite years of going round the world on a ship with Jack, he still doesn't know half the naval terms for things and has to be carried up the side to board. He balances Jack's ability to say really mortifying things with mis-haps of his own: he manages to insult the ship he's on while trying to be nice, and falls over the side to be rescued by Jack enough that at one point the crew, finding both Jack and Stephen gone, go "oh, it must be the Doctor" and turn the ship around to look for them. He persists in attempting to explain the intricacies of Naval life to the even less informed, however.
Stephen is also possibly the best thing ever. He's on board as the ship's surgeon, and since ships then were lucky to have somebody who knew how to amputate, let alone a real doctor like Stephen, he is possibly even more loved by the crew than Jack is - in one book, he even has fanboys, and at another point amazes the crew by doing brain surgery on a guy who actually survives. This was obviously rare 200 years ago, and you should be prepared for a whole load of potentially squick-inducing old-time medicine. It's fascinating, but some of it was really kind of gross. He's an ardent naturalist; he is the guy who climbs up trees to look in their nests, runs around finding specimens and drawing diagrams and squeeing over different kinds of eggs. Basically, he's a big geek who's endlessly fascinated by random facts, but especially birds, with people coming a distinct second. He's also, although this sadly didn't make it into the film at all, a super-spy.
No, really. It's awesome.
He goes around finding secret documents and kicking ass in the the hope of helping defeat Napoleon. He's very, very good at it - the man writes his own journals, to himself, not just in secret code, but in different languages in a secret code. (I pretty much swooned and was lost forever to Stephen-love at that point, I will admit.) He is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a whole load of bitchiness; if you wondered whether that secret-keeping might be part of an inability to be carefree and open, you would be right. Stephen analyzes everything to the bitter end and keeps everything, including himself, under very strict control. This is probably at least partly a good thing, in that Stephen losing his temper tends to result in a duel, which Stephen always wins. Stephen is not a happy bunny: his dark depths are really quite deep and dark indeed. He's the one with the Tragic Past; he was involved in the Irish rebellion which went horribly wrong, although he still dreams of a day when Ireland will be free, has his heart broken multiple times, gets tortured, has various people he cares about die, and it's just all very sad. This is part of the reason why he's a drug addict (he gets himself addicted to laudanum, and then weans himself off it... only to start on cocaine). He's like Sherlock Holmes, if Holmes was a whole lot more bitter and Irish, and just as much the hero of the series as Jack is. I love him to little itty pieces, and not just because he speaks multiple languages and is canonically fabulous in bed. He plays the cello - although not as well as Jack plays the violin, a fact Jack's hidden from him, and the scene where he finds this out is just, oh, so gorgeous and achey. Stephen is bitter and broody, yeah, but he cares, a lot, and works incredibly hard because of it. He's fantastic.
Other People, The Wives, Etc.
Oh yes, Jack and Stephen are married! Additionally, because Jack is such an awesome captain, quite a lot of his crew tends to try to follow him to his new ship when he gets promoted, so over the roughly twenty-year timespan covered by the books, we get to know some of them pretty well. The other people you might meet in fic are:
Sophie Williams is a very normal, sweet and boring kind of girl who marries Jack. This was probably a bad idea, given that she is very much a homebody kind of person who would like a husband to serve hot meals to at the end of every day and to help her in the fight against her manipulative harridan of a mother, and Jack is very much not that person. (He tries, since he loves her, but with being too nice for his own good and also out of the country nine months of every twelve, it was never going to happen.) She'd be scandalized if she really got how very much a hearty Naval man her husband is, but somehow manages to have a few kids with him anyway. She and Jack are really quite sweet, and manage to be reasonably happy despite not really understanding each other. She gets mentioned in the film only as the person Jack's writing a letter to, which is very representative of her role generally.
Diana Villiers, Sophie's cousin, ends up married to Stephen. Whether or not this is a good thing depends on whether you can forgive her really terrible treatment of Stephen as being a result of the restrictive and oppressive society she's in and how fucked up that's made her. She breaks his heart multiple times, at one point accepting his marriage proposal only to imminently run off with somebody else. There are plausible reasons for this; she's been married before and so she's looked on as 'used goods' and she has all this intelligence and talent and beauty but isn't allowed to use it, and so on and so on, but it does mean that the fandom is pretty much divided between those who love her, and those who want to tear her guts out with a spork. This is not helped by the fact that she made Jack and Stephen nearly fight a duel over her. Had she been born at a time when contraception was any good, she'd never have had any kids, but as it is, she and Stephen have a daughter, Bridget. My favourite things about her are the fact that once they're married, she and Stephen get separate houses and find this arrangement works just fine, and the time when she explains to Sophie why sex is fun. Heh. Oh, and: she dies.
General Aubrey is Jack's dad. He's a total embarrassment; he's an MP, and the only definite thing about his politics is that they will be 1. extreme and 2. in opposition to the government. He's basically only ever mentioned when he's causing some kind of PR problem for Jack (as people tend to think his dad reflects on him).
Thomas Pullings, a long-serving officer of Jack's who kind of gets screwed over by the system, was in the film, played by James D'Arcy, who is really very pretty. Pullings isn't, at least he doesn't think so since he got a huge-ass scar on his face. We still love him, though, because he's a bit shy and bashful in a sweet kind of way, likes Jack, and pulls his weight without being an arse about it. Because he's such a good guy in the face of some really bad luck, you end up really feeling for him and being thrilled when it looks like things are going his way. He's cool: it's difficult not to like Pullings.
Queenie was Jack's nursemaid as a child, and taught him maths. She's kind of awesome and marries Lord Keith. She was also a real person, although as far as I'm aware never actually looked after anybody called Jack Aubrey. Heh.
Preserved Killick is Jack's steward. This basically means he follows Jack from ship to ship, setting out his uniforms and bitching at Stephen for being such a slob. (He is: Stephen wore carpet slippers in public, once. Scandal!) He's grouchy and rude, and both Stephen and Jack would have a lot more trouble interacting with the world without him. Luckily, they know this and therefore haven't smacked him yet, not even for his weirdly obsessive love of the silverware. His 'catchphrase' thing is "which is", as in "which it's waiting for you this minute, sir". This is, I'm assured, kind of weird even for the time.
Padeen is a very tall, burly Irishman who was Stephen's loblolly boy. While he gets a bit of English, mostly he can only speak Irish, so he and Stephen have a special bond. He gets arrested, Stephen and Jack save him from spending the rest of his days in prison in Australia, and he ends up being Stephen's devoted servant. He's very gentle and quiet and really very sweet and devoted.
Nathaniel Martin is a naturalist friend of Maturin's who joins him in geeking expeditions and stuff sometimes. He's also an Anglican minister, but sadly not a super-spy.
Sir Joseph Blaine is Stephen's boss at British Naval Intelligence. He thinks Stephen is the best thing ever, and Stephen kind of likes him, too, especially as they can bond over a shared love of bugs and hatred of Napoleon.
Samuel Mputa is Jack's illegitimate son. Jack had smuggled a girl onto a ship, back in the day when he was a midshipman. He got caught and 'turned before the mast', that is, demoted, and never knew that the girl he'd smuggled in had got pregnant until he found Sam, who looks just like a black version of Jack. Sam ends up becoming a priest.
William Mowett was on Jack's very first command, and becomes one of his lieutenants later. He's a poet, which leads us to some rather unfortunate rhyming. (If you think "Mowett's a poet and doesn't know it" is bad, you wait and see some of the howlers he comes up with.) He has an ongoing poetry competition with another lieutenant, Rowan. Basically they try to outdo each other with random epics about tragic sinkings and "th'impervious horror of a lee shore" and suchlike.
Barrett Bonden is one of the longest-serving of Jack's crew. He's awesome: he's Jack's coxswain and a very skilled sailor, but when Jack offers him a position as midshipman, which is effectively a promotion, he cheerfully turns it down. Without even a blink of awkwardness, he says that he can't read and points out somebody he considers a better candidate. Stephen then teaches him how to read, in what's one of my very favourite sections of the whole series. He often does duty as Stephen's bodyguard (and does it well - Bonden is a big dude and a hardcore amateur boxer). Bonden is also one of the relatively few major characters who dies, and it's really sad. Poor Bonden.
Clarissa Oakes (previously Harvill) is a female convict who was smuggled on board ship, then discovered. Jack, since he has marriage rights as Captain, presides over her marriage to Midshipman Oakes. She turns out to be quite cool and have all sorts of secret spy information that helps Stephen. Especially after her husband dies, she becomes more or less adopted into the Aubrey-Maturin family, despite being a Woman Of Ill Repute, looking after Bridget Maturin when Diana freaks out and runs away.
Villains and Scoundrels
The main bad guy throughout the series is Napoleon, who Jack and Stephen hate with a passion. He doesn't actually appear, though, so here are some of the others that might get mentioned.
Captain (then Admiral) Harte is Jack's superior for most of the series and his greatest personal nemesis. Harte hates Jack, mostly cause Jack keeps shagging his wife, Molly. He also kind of has a Napoleon complex, which is what we call ironic.
Andrew Wray is Harte's son. He's in the Admiralty and hates Jack too. (Jack found out he was cheating at cards, and dude, if Jack notices you're skeevy, you're seriously screwed up.) He basically tries to make things as difficult as he can, and turns out to be a French spy. He's also shagging a dude who works at the Treasury, Edward Ledward, and they both do evil French spy things together, Wray mostly using the money he makes to pay off his gambling debts. They are both also shagging the Duke of Habachtsthal, who is yet another evil gay spy***. All of them end up dead, thank goodness. Stephen even does, like, autopsies. It's pretty awesome, in a very badass way.
Admiral Linois is one of the French commanders who Jack has most respect for - he's an excellent sailor and knows enough about the sea and sailing to be a formidable opponent to Jack.
Capitan de Vaisseau Christy-Palliere is also in the French navy. Jack ends up quite liking him, and it's rather cute; at one point, Christy-Palliere has defeated Jack, and where usually the winning captain relieves the other of his sword as a ceremonial illustration of victory, he refuses to humiliate Jack like that and lets Jack keep his. They're sort-of friends.
Ropes and Sails
(the boats)
First I should appologise to those people who will want to kill me for referring to them as 'boats'. Heh. This overview properly requires some discussion of the ships where Jack and Stephen spend so much of their time: the ships are part of the soul of the series, they make up most of the world that Jack and Stephen live in, and are really pretty cool in and of themselves. Sadly, I don't know anything like enough to do them justice, so I'm just going to kind of skim over this. The two main ships you'll need to know about are:
HMS Sophie: Jack's first command, a small, old brig-rigged sloop. She's not the best of ships, but Jack thinks fondly of her, and a lot of Jack's oldest-serving crew were first on the Sophie.
HMS Surprise: Jack's favourite ship, later bought by Stephen. Surprise is an old frigate, but runs beautifully, and Jack has often kicked ass with her, despite her only having 28 guns. She is the ship they spend by far the most time in, to the extent that we know an awful lot about her. Jack spent some time on her as a Midshipman; she's the ship where Jack was caught hiding a woman, and he shows Stephen the place where he carved his initials into the wood, way back when.
If you are particularly interested in the ships, then you might want to try out![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
tallshipgeeks.
The Shipping Forecast
(if the hammock's rockin', don't come a knockin')
Despite being canon, the wives have relatively little fanfic. There's often an assumption of it, given they're married, but it's rarely the focus. When it's there, Jack/Sophie is rather sweet and clueless and domestic, and Stephen/Diana is fiery and angst-ridden.
Jack/Stephen is by far the biggest ship in this admittedly small fandom. This is because they are totally OTP: they go through thick and thin together, miss each other when the world gets between them, and everybody on board always knows that them having an argument is the worst thing ever, because Jack gets cranky and Stephen gets extra bitchy and starts dosing people with extra-icky medicine. They canonically make beautiful music together, and specially transcribe their favourites into violin/cello duet form in order to do so. They both judge people by their response to the other one: Stephen doesn't like people who don't appreciate Jack, and Jack loves anybody who is even vaguely positive to Stephen. I mean, god, Stephen even named a tortoise after Jack - testudo aubreii. That's love, people. It's adorable, whether they're shagging or not. :)
The perception that they might, however, is immensely aided by O'Brian kindly clarifying right at the beginning of the series that neither Jack nor Stephen look harshly on those who commit the sin of buggery, and that a whole load of people are already convinced Stephen's kind of gay. This happy level of canon slashiness only increases throughout the series, what with Stephen explicitly wanting to learn how to swim in order to save Jack's life one day, and ordering Jack to take his trousers off and bend over the locker, and so on. Basically, they are the OTP of most of the fandom, and I love it. Their relationship is far more complicatedly beautiful than I can do justice to here, so I shall just point you at the ship_manifesto article on them, and hope that my recs communicate rather better than I do.
Jack/Pullings is quite plausible, at least that Pullings has a huge crush. I've not seen much, but it wouldn't take much to get there, particularly from movie canon.
Stephen/Nathaniel Martin is very geeky and cute, and also, Jack canonically gets jealous of it. And if you're thinking I'm reaching a bit, here, well, you'd be right: Jack/Stephen is the main draw to the fandom, and is difficult to avoid.
Ports Of Call
(links and stuff)
The Harper-Colins official site has a reasonable description of the plot of all of the books, and you can buy them there and such. The Norton official site is also pretty good.
HMS Surprise.org is the biggest fansite around, and includes info on the life of the time and so on.
The Gunroom Guide To Patrick O'Brian Web Resources is huge. If you're looking for info, you can probably find it here somewhere.
If you are interested in learning more about the various medical emergencies Stephen deals with (why he makes the decisions he does, or what books he might have consulted, or whatever) you need to see Maturin's Medicine. This site is terrifying in a good way.
The Articles of War of 1749 are the laws for sailors of the time. Jack quotes them a lot, and he and Stephen regularly debate them. Article 29 is the one most often violated in fanfiction.
aos_resources has some useful and informative links too.
perfect_duet is the Jack/Stephen shipping community.
hms_surprise is a fic community, and has the main archive for the fandom.
mandc100 is the drabble challenge community.
If you want something other than Jack/Stephen,hms_polychrest and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mandc_rairpairs are the place to go.
masters_mate is the Tom Pullings/James D'Arcy fan community.
Talking of, both the main actors in the film also have communities dedicated to them:paulbettany and russellcrowefan are just two of them.
*Caveat: there are people who very strictly refer to the books as "The Aubrey/Maturin books". These tend to be the old-skool gen fans.
**And if you're wondering whether it's as gay as its name suggests, the answer is yes.
***I"d say O'Brian was trying to say something about gay people there, but there's a decent amount of nice gay people in the books, too. In fact, the subject of homosexuality comes up a lot, and only occasionally in relation to being evil. So all is good. :)
So, there we go. I hope you found it at least slightly interesting: I love these people and think their world is a fascinating one. Do feel free to ask questions or offer suggestions or whatever. It can be a bit daunting on first look, I know, but it's totally worth it. Also, if you see any typos or mistakes or anything, just say the word and I'll, y'know, edit or something, because obviously they were nothing to do with me. *cough*
- There are twenty (and a half - one was left unfinished when O'Brian died) books in the series, but it's less scary to get into than that sounds; you certainly don't need to have read all of them to have a good understanding of their characters. The movie also makes a very good introduction: it's very faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, of the books it's based on, and will let you know whether it'll be your kind of thing or not. They got some amazing shots of the Galapagos islands, if nothing else, and besides, you've got Paul Bettany, who's wonderful and brilliant as always as Stephen Maturin, and Russell Crowe, who isn't my type but is really very good as Jack. Well worth an hour and a half of your time, I think.
- It's based on actual historical events; O'Brian was a scrupulous researcher, and it's all very historical. There is fudging, as is pretty much inevitable given the fictional nature of the stories, but it's a very small amount - most readers, even knowledgeable ones, wouldn't notice that it's technically an AU on a first read. Accuracy and plausibility were very high up O'Brian's list of priorities. This is both awesome (for history geeks) and boring (for people who would rather skip the detailed descriptions of ropes and sails and naval maneuvers). Luckily it's quite easy to skip the most impenetrable naval jargon if you want, even easier to find about eighty seven people willing and ready to answer every question of naval minutae if you don't, and the payoff is well worth it - there's a whole load of honestly awesome historical detail and discussion of issues relevant to the time and what effect those might have had on individual people. O'Brian had resource to actual Midshipmen's letters and diaries and things, and you can tell. It's the sort of thing that makes me do the happy dance. :D (What, it's a very geeky happy dance. :P)
- The books don't exactly have an overall plot. Well, they do - they follow Jack's rise through the Navy. What I mean is, there isn't exactly emotional resolution. It's not a bad thing: there's still plenty of emotional storyline, it's just that the issues brought up for each character don't miraculously get resolved at the end of each book. If there's somebody who's really mean, he's not necessarily going to get his highly justified comeuppance at the end, that sort of thing. I mention it only because I found it a bit disconcerting at first: given the amount of time on character issues, I was expecting a much more traditional emotional arc for the main characters. I think it's a good thing I didn't get one, though - it's a lot more like real life, and it adds to a really cool sense that we're just kind of watching twenty years of these people living out their lives. This is also why I'm not going to go into the plot - there's so much of it that it can't really be summed up, and "Jack rises through the Navy" is about all you need to know for that anyway.
- There will be some potentially confusing terminology and names, many of which will be unintentionally amusing. Don't worry about it, it's usually easy to figure out (O'Brian thankfully realised, for the most part, that his audience was probably not going to know all this stuff) and if not, I've never yet met anybody who minded being asked "OK, so, do they refer to the crew by the name of the ship, or what?" or whatever.
... wow, that was quite a long digression. OK, on to the most important bit: the characters.
Main Characters
There are basically only two main people the books (and the fanfiction) focus on. These are Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Stephen Maturin, and they are just so fabulous. The books start with their first meeting, where they're at the same concert and Stephen wants to strangle Jack for tapping along out of sync with the music. The very next day Jack, giddy from brand-new promotion, bumps into Stephen again and appologises. They bond over music, and Jack promptly offers Stephen a position on board ship. Stephen accepts, and they spend the next twenty years going round the world together, yay.
This is Jack. He is very tall, very English, and just about the most naval person you could ever meet: he's bluff, jocular, and likes food, wine, and women. A lot: to mis-quote Queer as Folk, saying Jack's a bit of a slut is like saying Hitler's a little bit naughty. He manages to get himself into a whole bunch of fairly terrible situations because of this; he's more than capable of making a fool of himself by getting drunk and hitting on somebody's wife. He is completely clueless about, frankly, quite a few things, and due to this makes some really awful gaffes and gets himself into terrible debt through awful financial decisions like 'handing power of attorney over to a mining prospector just before leaving on a long sea voyage'. (Oy.) He makes really awful puns at the slightest provocation and has some serious problems with dodgy metaphors. He is, if you don't mind me going back to my own kind of tortuous analogy, the Bertie Wooster of the two, reliant on his friend's superior wits to get him out of trouble.
But! Much like Bertie, there's a lot more to him than first meets the eye. It's only on land that Jack's so out of his depth. Jack is actually very intelligent indeed. He never thought so growing up, but he has discovered a love of maths (crucial for navigation), which he becomes good enough at to build his own telescope and write papers on various geometry-related things, and he is an excellent strategist in battle. He might not know all the names of the birds they see, but he knows his job all right, and it's truly a delight to get to see him learning his craft as the books progress, to the extent that you can't imagine him ever doing anything else. He fanboys Lord Nelson and wants to be as good a seaman as him. Seriously. In short, he loves the sea with everything he has, and he takes the Navy very seriously - he fights for England and he kicks ass doing it.
He's also a total, total sweetheart. He is just ridiculously nice, and this is often what gets him into trouble, because he has a hard time dealing with the fact that not everybody is so well-meaning. He doesn't think twice about doing nice things for people; being nice is just his nature, which only makes it more unfortunate when he accidentally says something stupid that makes somebody think otherwise. He's pretty much incapable of being mean; he's even got enough niceness in him to worry for people in the enemy ships he fights. He becomes kind-of friends with one of the French captains, enough to worry about whether one of the French Captain's relatives is in a ship that he just defeated. He's honestly glad when it turns out the relative is fine, too: because it's Jack, you know that gladness is completely genuine. Jack's one of the most honest people you can imagine. He'd be quite happy to go along never hiding anything about his life, and is saddened that as he advances along the Navy career path, he's forced to become more and more isolated from his crew. In his ideal world, he'd be bouncing around joking with everybody, with every bad thing just accepted and forgotten by the next good meal.Jack is, basically, just such a nice guy that you can't help but hope he stays that way.
The other thing you need to know about Jack is that he plays the violin beautifully. (This is relevant, I swear. :))
This is Stephen, who is pretty much Jack's opposite. He's short and dark and skinny where Jack is tall and blonde and bulky. He's the bitter and bitchy one to Jack's happy and relatively carefree cheeriness. He's half Irish and half Catalan - that is, from the Catalan region of Spain, and yeah, that distinction matters (especially since it is not the same thing, as I've just been informed, as being Castillian). That adds up to "all Catholic", which is another label Stephen takes very seriously, despite not appearing to be particularly religious by the standards of the time. He's a brilliant bastard: literally. His full proper name is Esteban Maturin y Domanova; he's related to some very rich people, but being born "on the wrong side of the blanket" can't use their name and such. He sucks at everything naval, so despite years of going round the world on a ship with Jack, he still doesn't know half the naval terms for things and has to be carried up the side to board. He balances Jack's ability to say really mortifying things with mis-haps of his own: he manages to insult the ship he's on while trying to be nice, and falls over the side to be rescued by Jack enough that at one point the crew, finding both Jack and Stephen gone, go "oh, it must be the Doctor" and turn the ship around to look for them. He persists in attempting to explain the intricacies of Naval life to the even less informed, however.
Stephen is also possibly the best thing ever. He's on board as the ship's surgeon, and since ships then were lucky to have somebody who knew how to amputate, let alone a real doctor like Stephen, he is possibly even more loved by the crew than Jack is - in one book, he even has fanboys, and at another point amazes the crew by doing brain surgery on a guy who actually survives. This was obviously rare 200 years ago, and you should be prepared for a whole load of potentially squick-inducing old-time medicine. It's fascinating, but some of it was really kind of gross. He's an ardent naturalist; he is the guy who climbs up trees to look in their nests, runs around finding specimens and drawing diagrams and squeeing over different kinds of eggs. Basically, he's a big geek who's endlessly fascinated by random facts, but especially birds, with people coming a distinct second. He's also, although this sadly didn't make it into the film at all, a super-spy.
No, really. It's awesome.
He goes around finding secret documents and kicking ass in the the hope of helping defeat Napoleon. He's very, very good at it - the man writes his own journals, to himself, not just in secret code, but in different languages in a secret code. (I pretty much swooned and was lost forever to Stephen-love at that point, I will admit.) He is a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a whole load of bitchiness; if you wondered whether that secret-keeping might be part of an inability to be carefree and open, you would be right. Stephen analyzes everything to the bitter end and keeps everything, including himself, under very strict control. This is probably at least partly a good thing, in that Stephen losing his temper tends to result in a duel, which Stephen always wins. Stephen is not a happy bunny: his dark depths are really quite deep and dark indeed. He's the one with the Tragic Past; he was involved in the Irish rebellion which went horribly wrong, although he still dreams of a day when Ireland will be free, has his heart broken multiple times, gets tortured, has various people he cares about die, and it's just all very sad. This is part of the reason why he's a drug addict (he gets himself addicted to laudanum, and then weans himself off it... only to start on cocaine). He's like Sherlock Holmes, if Holmes was a whole lot more bitter and Irish, and just as much the hero of the series as Jack is. I love him to little itty pieces, and not just because he speaks multiple languages and is canonically fabulous in bed. He plays the cello - although not as well as Jack plays the violin, a fact Jack's hidden from him, and the scene where he finds this out is just, oh, so gorgeous and achey. Stephen is bitter and broody, yeah, but he cares, a lot, and works incredibly hard because of it. He's fantastic.
Other People, The Wives, Etc.
Oh yes, Jack and Stephen are married! Additionally, because Jack is such an awesome captain, quite a lot of his crew tends to try to follow him to his new ship when he gets promoted, so over the roughly twenty-year timespan covered by the books, we get to know some of them pretty well. The other people you might meet in fic are:
Sophie Williams is a very normal, sweet and boring kind of girl who marries Jack. This was probably a bad idea, given that she is very much a homebody kind of person who would like a husband to serve hot meals to at the end of every day and to help her in the fight against her manipulative harridan of a mother, and Jack is very much not that person. (He tries, since he loves her, but with being too nice for his own good and also out of the country nine months of every twelve, it was never going to happen.) She'd be scandalized if she really got how very much a hearty Naval man her husband is, but somehow manages to have a few kids with him anyway. She and Jack are really quite sweet, and manage to be reasonably happy despite not really understanding each other. She gets mentioned in the film only as the person Jack's writing a letter to, which is very representative of her role generally.
Diana Villiers, Sophie's cousin, ends up married to Stephen. Whether or not this is a good thing depends on whether you can forgive her really terrible treatment of Stephen as being a result of the restrictive and oppressive society she's in and how fucked up that's made her. She breaks his heart multiple times, at one point accepting his marriage proposal only to imminently run off with somebody else. There are plausible reasons for this; she's been married before and so she's looked on as 'used goods' and she has all this intelligence and talent and beauty but isn't allowed to use it, and so on and so on, but it does mean that the fandom is pretty much divided between those who love her, and those who want to tear her guts out with a spork. This is not helped by the fact that she made Jack and Stephen nearly fight a duel over her. Had she been born at a time when contraception was any good, she'd never have had any kids, but as it is, she and Stephen have a daughter, Bridget. My favourite things about her are the fact that once they're married, she and Stephen get separate houses and find this arrangement works just fine, and the time when she explains to Sophie why sex is fun. Heh. Oh, and: she dies.
General Aubrey is Jack's dad. He's a total embarrassment; he's an MP, and the only definite thing about his politics is that they will be 1. extreme and 2. in opposition to the government. He's basically only ever mentioned when he's causing some kind of PR problem for Jack (as people tend to think his dad reflects on him).
Thomas Pullings, a long-serving officer of Jack's who kind of gets screwed over by the system, was in the film, played by James D'Arcy, who is really very pretty. Pullings isn't, at least he doesn't think so since he got a huge-ass scar on his face. We still love him, though, because he's a bit shy and bashful in a sweet kind of way, likes Jack, and pulls his weight without being an arse about it. Because he's such a good guy in the face of some really bad luck, you end up really feeling for him and being thrilled when it looks like things are going his way. He's cool: it's difficult not to like Pullings.
Queenie was Jack's nursemaid as a child, and taught him maths. She's kind of awesome and marries Lord Keith. She was also a real person, although as far as I'm aware never actually looked after anybody called Jack Aubrey. Heh.
Preserved Killick is Jack's steward. This basically means he follows Jack from ship to ship, setting out his uniforms and bitching at Stephen for being such a slob. (He is: Stephen wore carpet slippers in public, once. Scandal!) He's grouchy and rude, and both Stephen and Jack would have a lot more trouble interacting with the world without him. Luckily, they know this and therefore haven't smacked him yet, not even for his weirdly obsessive love of the silverware. His 'catchphrase' thing is "which is", as in "which it's waiting for you this minute, sir". This is, I'm assured, kind of weird even for the time.
Padeen is a very tall, burly Irishman who was Stephen's loblolly boy. While he gets a bit of English, mostly he can only speak Irish, so he and Stephen have a special bond. He gets arrested, Stephen and Jack save him from spending the rest of his days in prison in Australia, and he ends up being Stephen's devoted servant. He's very gentle and quiet and really very sweet and devoted.
Nathaniel Martin is a naturalist friend of Maturin's who joins him in geeking expeditions and stuff sometimes. He's also an Anglican minister, but sadly not a super-spy.
Sir Joseph Blaine is Stephen's boss at British Naval Intelligence. He thinks Stephen is the best thing ever, and Stephen kind of likes him, too, especially as they can bond over a shared love of bugs and hatred of Napoleon.
Samuel Mputa is Jack's illegitimate son. Jack had smuggled a girl onto a ship, back in the day when he was a midshipman. He got caught and 'turned before the mast', that is, demoted, and never knew that the girl he'd smuggled in had got pregnant until he found Sam, who looks just like a black version of Jack. Sam ends up becoming a priest.
William Mowett was on Jack's very first command, and becomes one of his lieutenants later. He's a poet, which leads us to some rather unfortunate rhyming. (If you think "Mowett's a poet and doesn't know it" is bad, you wait and see some of the howlers he comes up with.) He has an ongoing poetry competition with another lieutenant, Rowan. Basically they try to outdo each other with random epics about tragic sinkings and "th'impervious horror of a lee shore" and suchlike.
Barrett Bonden is one of the longest-serving of Jack's crew. He's awesome: he's Jack's coxswain and a very skilled sailor, but when Jack offers him a position as midshipman, which is effectively a promotion, he cheerfully turns it down. Without even a blink of awkwardness, he says that he can't read and points out somebody he considers a better candidate. Stephen then teaches him how to read, in what's one of my very favourite sections of the whole series. He often does duty as Stephen's bodyguard (and does it well - Bonden is a big dude and a hardcore amateur boxer). Bonden is also one of the relatively few major characters who dies, and it's really sad. Poor Bonden.
Clarissa Oakes (previously Harvill) is a female convict who was smuggled on board ship, then discovered. Jack, since he has marriage rights as Captain, presides over her marriage to Midshipman Oakes. She turns out to be quite cool and have all sorts of secret spy information that helps Stephen. Especially after her husband dies, she becomes more or less adopted into the Aubrey-Maturin family, despite being a Woman Of Ill Repute, looking after Bridget Maturin when Diana freaks out and runs away.
Villains and Scoundrels
The main bad guy throughout the series is Napoleon, who Jack and Stephen hate with a passion. He doesn't actually appear, though, so here are some of the others that might get mentioned.
Captain (then Admiral) Harte is Jack's superior for most of the series and his greatest personal nemesis. Harte hates Jack, mostly cause Jack keeps shagging his wife, Molly. He also kind of has a Napoleon complex, which is what we call ironic.
Andrew Wray is Harte's son. He's in the Admiralty and hates Jack too. (Jack found out he was cheating at cards, and dude, if Jack notices you're skeevy, you're seriously screwed up.) He basically tries to make things as difficult as he can, and turns out to be a French spy. He's also shagging a dude who works at the Treasury, Edward Ledward, and they both do evil French spy things together, Wray mostly using the money he makes to pay off his gambling debts. They are both also shagging the Duke of Habachtsthal, who is yet another evil gay spy***. All of them end up dead, thank goodness. Stephen even does, like, autopsies. It's pretty awesome, in a very badass way.
Admiral Linois is one of the French commanders who Jack has most respect for - he's an excellent sailor and knows enough about the sea and sailing to be a formidable opponent to Jack.
Capitan de Vaisseau Christy-Palliere is also in the French navy. Jack ends up quite liking him, and it's rather cute; at one point, Christy-Palliere has defeated Jack, and where usually the winning captain relieves the other of his sword as a ceremonial illustration of victory, he refuses to humiliate Jack like that and lets Jack keep his. They're sort-of friends.
First I should appologise to those people who will want to kill me for referring to them as 'boats'. Heh. This overview properly requires some discussion of the ships where Jack and Stephen spend so much of their time: the ships are part of the soul of the series, they make up most of the world that Jack and Stephen live in, and are really pretty cool in and of themselves. Sadly, I don't know anything like enough to do them justice, so I'm just going to kind of skim over this. The two main ships you'll need to know about are:
HMS Sophie: Jack's first command, a small, old brig-rigged sloop. She's not the best of ships, but Jack thinks fondly of her, and a lot of Jack's oldest-serving crew were first on the Sophie.
HMS Surprise: Jack's favourite ship, later bought by Stephen. Surprise is an old frigate, but runs beautifully, and Jack has often kicked ass with her, despite her only having 28 guns. She is the ship they spend by far the most time in, to the extent that we know an awful lot about her. Jack spent some time on her as a Midshipman; she's the ship where Jack was caught hiding a woman, and he shows Stephen the place where he carved his initials into the wood, way back when.
If you are particularly interested in the ships, then you might want to try out
tallshipgeeks.Despite being canon, the wives have relatively little fanfic. There's often an assumption of it, given they're married, but it's rarely the focus. When it's there, Jack/Sophie is rather sweet and clueless and domestic, and Stephen/Diana is fiery and angst-ridden.
Jack/Stephen is by far the biggest ship in this admittedly small fandom. This is because they are totally OTP: they go through thick and thin together, miss each other when the world gets between them, and everybody on board always knows that them having an argument is the worst thing ever, because Jack gets cranky and Stephen gets extra bitchy and starts dosing people with extra-icky medicine. They canonically make beautiful music together, and specially transcribe their favourites into violin/cello duet form in order to do so. They both judge people by their response to the other one: Stephen doesn't like people who don't appreciate Jack, and Jack loves anybody who is even vaguely positive to Stephen. I mean, god, Stephen even named a tortoise after Jack - testudo aubreii. That's love, people. It's adorable, whether they're shagging or not. :)
The perception that they might, however, is immensely aided by O'Brian kindly clarifying right at the beginning of the series that neither Jack nor Stephen look harshly on those who commit the sin of buggery, and that a whole load of people are already convinced Stephen's kind of gay. This happy level of canon slashiness only increases throughout the series, what with Stephen explicitly wanting to learn how to swim in order to save Jack's life one day, and ordering Jack to take his trousers off and bend over the locker, and so on. Basically, they are the OTP of most of the fandom, and I love it. Their relationship is far more complicatedly beautiful than I can do justice to here, so I shall just point you at the ship_manifesto article on them, and hope that my recs communicate rather better than I do.
Jack/Pullings is quite plausible, at least that Pullings has a huge crush. I've not seen much, but it wouldn't take much to get there, particularly from movie canon.
Stephen/Nathaniel Martin is very geeky and cute, and also, Jack canonically gets jealous of it. And if you're thinking I'm reaching a bit, here, well, you'd be right: Jack/Stephen is the main draw to the fandom, and is difficult to avoid.
The Harper-Colins official site has a reasonable description of the plot of all of the books, and you can buy them there and such. The Norton official site is also pretty good.
HMS Surprise.org is the biggest fansite around, and includes info on the life of the time and so on.
The Gunroom Guide To Patrick O'Brian Web Resources is huge. If you're looking for info, you can probably find it here somewhere.
If you are interested in learning more about the various medical emergencies Stephen deals with (why he makes the decisions he does, or what books he might have consulted, or whatever) you need to see Maturin's Medicine. This site is terrifying in a good way.
The Articles of War of 1749 are the laws for sailors of the time. Jack quotes them a lot, and he and Stephen regularly debate them. Article 29 is the one most often violated in fanfiction.
aos_resources has some useful and informative links too.perfect_duet is the Jack/Stephen shipping community.hms_surprise is a fic community, and has the main archive for the fandom.mandc100 is the drabble challenge community.If you want something other than Jack/Stephen,
hms_polychrest and mandc_rairpairs are the place to go.masters_mate is the Tom Pullings/James D'Arcy fan community.Talking of, both the main actors in the film also have communities dedicated to them:
paulbettany and russellcrowefan are just two of them.*Caveat: there are people who very strictly refer to the books as "The Aubrey/Maturin books". These tend to be the old-skool gen fans.
**And if you're wondering whether it's as gay as its name suggests, the answer is yes.
***I"d say O'Brian was trying to say something about gay people there, but there's a decent amount of nice gay people in the books, too. In fact, the subject of homosexuality comes up a lot, and only occasionally in relation to being evil. So all is good. :)
So, there we go. I hope you found it at least slightly interesting: I love these people and think their world is a fascinating one. Do feel free to ask questions or offer suggestions or whatever. It can be a bit daunting on first look, I know, but it's totally worth it. Also, if you see any typos or mistakes or anything, just say the word and I'll, y'know, edit or something, because obviously they were nothing to do with me. *cough*
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I *adored* the discussion in the first (second?) book when Jack discovers that one of his crew was buggering a goat and he has to - according to the Articles - put him to death. And Stephen can't understand this and says "Put them ashore - separate shores if you must, but don't kill them" (and I'm paraphrasing, but it's brilliant.) Yeah, O'Brian had some pretty strong thoughts on the whole topic. :)
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Can't wait for the recs to begin! Whee! :)
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and falls over the side to be rescued by Jack enough that at one point the crew, finding both Jack and Stephen gone, go "oh, it must be the Doctor" and turn the ship around to look for them.
Can't wait to see that! ;-)))
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And thankyou!
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(Also, Stephen? So bisexual. Bless.)
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Geeky correction: Actually, the Catalan region of Spain would mean that he's actually Catalan. Castillian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castilian) is the opposite--if you're Castillian, or speak Castillian, it means you're from the part of Spain that's *not* Catalonia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalonia). More detail here (http://spanish.about.com/library/questions/aa-q-castilian.htm).
This was a really great introduction, by the way. Thanks!
-J
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And yay, I'm glad. :D
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-J
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I think you might be confusing coming from a certain region with speaking a certain language here. People from AndalucÃa, Galicia and the Basque Country (and even Catalonia) might speak castellano as a first language (or not, depending on how the regional language has been taught to them), but you wouldn't call them Castillians.
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-J
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Castillian is the opposite--if you're Castillian, or speak Castillian, it means you're from the part of Spain that's *not* Catalonia.
that I took issue with, nothing more. It seemed to imply that either you're Catalan or you're Castilian, and if you speak Castilian, you're certainly not Catalan. Now that I think about it, I probably misunderstood you as you say. Sorry for the hassle.
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-J
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Ok, now back to reading your summary...
Oh, and HUZZAH for someone picking the O'Brien books!!
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*does the yay dance*
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Made me do the geeky dance of glee! I really need to get my hands on more M&C this summer.
xx
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*love*
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*re-reads*
*headdesks*
OH DEAR GOD I LEFT OUT THE 'IN-LAW'. I fail! And I am still unsure as to whether I spelt "Habachtsthal" right (I checked, but it always looks wrong). Thankyou for pointing that out, I will edit, as even three years late it will still bug me. :)
And thank you for the rest of your comment too, it's lovely to hear someone read and enjoyed!
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and the best squeeing over Stephen I`ve ever seen *<3*, leaving out one word is sort of a tiny, tiny mistake :P...all right, I am actually commenting b/c you said Stephen is canonically awesome in bed, and in spite of reading through the series twice, I have never found the place
and now I can`t get it out of my head. Um. Any memory of where?no subject
And OMG, I can't remember which book - it's after Stephen and Diana are married, and it's sometime when Diana and Sophie are talking. As I remember the conversation is basically Sophie going "omfg sex whut, amirite?" and Diana going "... okay, I am really appreciating Stephen right now!" I will do some research (how terrible ;)) and get back to you if I figure it out more specifically!
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Oh...*shamefaced* this place I actually remember very well, but I somehow missed the reference to Stephen. Will re-search
*insert embarrassing reference to cur-tailed*asap! Thanks!no subject