SPOILERS for The Commodore; here’s the non-spoiler post if you got here by mistake.
I thought the eventual battle with the French was given too little page space—both the battle itself and the happenings on the two troubled ships. I also wondered if the resolution of the Diana subplot was a little abrupt or easy. On the other hand, “you must never go to sea any more” holds out some promise for future conflict.
(The question of Brigid’s possible developmental disorder only gave me a few twinges, as thankfully I was listening to this after the amnio ruled out Down Syndrome in FutureBaby (the previously-mentioned difficult time). Weirdly, instead my reaction was that it was dramatically ineffective because such a short time passes between Brigid’s introduction and her speaking to Padeen—just ten pages.)
Is this finally, finally the end of the treason arc? Even if not (and don’t tell me!), it was fun here, especially the biscuit-toss.
In Stirling’s _Island in the Sea of Time_, one of the characters is an O’Brian reader and had got to the end of _The Commodore_ when the island gets sent back in time. She decides to regard it as a natural end point of the series, for which I think is a reasonable position to take. (Certainly I am regarding _Blue at the Mizzen_ as a natural end point of the series in very much the same way.)
I agree about the Brigid autism thing being done too quickly. Also, how old is she?
Jo, I wondered how old Brigid is too, but I never have a good sense of how much time passes in the books and so have *no* idea how long they were gone for. Plus there’s the repeating 1813.
I’m glad to hear that _Blue_ is a natural end point, though I wonder if knowing of the existence of _21_ would disrupt that for me, whether or not I read it.
My impression from when I read this and the next books (several years ago now) was that there was no way to sort out the chronology – I vaguely recall trying to match up various indicators (including Brigid’s age) and coming out with very different answers for each.
Dan: It would not surprise me to learn that O’Brian was not interested in chronological consistency, given the problems with names that I’ve noticed.
Wow, I don’t even remember problems with names. I guess I need to re-read the books (and I never did read the last two).
I think O’Brian was OK with chronology until he realized that the War of 1812 did not last nearly long enough for his purposes, at which point, having stuffed about five extra years into it, there probably seemed little point in keeping anything else consistent. Which I can’t really argue with, although internal chronology in fiction is one of my bugaboos – I can’t help keeping a sort of running timeline in my head when I am reading, and cross-checking it. O’Brian’s gets so bad it actually stopped bothering me, since I was able to just ignore it, but in something like Axis (a good book, but one missing about twenty years somewhere), it bugs me far more than it should.
Name problems: The big ones are Fanny Wray calling Babbington “Charles”, which O’Brian apparently felt was glaring enough to make her give a very unconvincing explanation about having been at a masquerade. Also, Admiral Harte posthumously acquires a son named Dixon, despite never going by that name.