{"id":369,"date":"2005-11-12T15:45:26","date_gmt":"2005-11-12T20:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=369"},"modified":"2005-11-12T15:45:26","modified_gmt":"2005-11-12T20:45:26","slug":"obrian_02","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2005\/11\/obrian_02\/","title":{"rendered":"O’Brian, Patrick: (02) Post Captain (audio)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I started listening to the second of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin books, Post Captain<\/cite><\/strong> (narrated by Patrick Tull) quite a while ago, and stalled out somewhere in the first couple of hours. I don’t precisely remember why now, but I suspect it had something to do with the opening:<\/p>\n

Post Captain<\/cite> very deliberately starts with the lack<\/em> of a battle between a French ship of the line and two English ships, on the nick-of-time news that peace has been reached. It then moves to land, to the Sussex Downs, where Aubrey and Maturin have taken a house on Jack’s prize-money. There they meet a number of civilians, including Sophie Williams and Diana Villiers, two unmarried young women. Jane Austen is occasionally mentioned when speaking of this series, and this section would be the most Austen-like part that I’ve encountered so far: courtships and finances and family pressures and so forth. I found it disorienting, and it must have rather been a shock when it was first published. (This book is also structured rather less like a standalone novel than the first, which may also have been a surprise to readers.)<\/p>\n

I love Jack and Stephen, and I like Sophie (my feelings about Diana are a bit complex to sum up with one verb), but I was glad to leave this opening section behind; the entanglements of land, where Jack is not at his best, had me wincing a lot in sympathy. The focus eventually widens to include non-domestic affairs. I was very surprised to learn, thanks to Dean King’s A Sea of Words<\/cite>, that one of the featured ships was fictional; I knew that some of the engagements in Master and Commander<\/cite> were based on historical event, and the ship in question is so weird that I expected it to be an example of “truth is stranger than fiction.”<\/p>\n

After listening to these, I’ve been flipping through the texts to see how scenes look in print. It’s interesting that the action sequences take up fewer pages than I expect; their intensity makes them loom larger in my mental impression of the story. This is, of course, as it should be, and it’s another point in favor of my listening to these first and reading after.<\/p>\n

Post Captain<\/cite> is slightly lumpy here and there, and doesn’t always manage its tone shifts with perfect deftness. It’s still vastly entertaining, and I dived right into the audiobook of the third, H.M.S. Surprise<\/cite>, after finishing it.<\/p>\n

(Note: I have a feeling that before too long, I’m going to be mixing up which event happened in which volume. As a result, I plan to make a spoiler-filled post after each regular booklog entry for this series; the posts will be labeled and the spoilers will be behind a “read more” link.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I started listening to the second of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin books, Post Captain (narrated by Patrick Tull) quite a while ago, and stalled out somewhere in the first couple of hours. I don’t precisely remember why now, but I suspect it had something to do with the opening: Post Captain very deliberately starts with the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “O’Brian, Patrick: (02) Post Captain (audio)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,4,118],"tags":[336],"class_list":["post-369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aubrey-maturin","category-historical","category-single-narrator-audio","tag-obrian-patrick"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}