{"id":398,"date":"2006-03-05T16:04:24","date_gmt":"2006-03-05T21:04:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=398"},"modified":"2024-04-14T17:41:14","modified_gmt":"2024-04-14T21:41:14","slug":"obrian_05","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2006\/03\/obrian_05\/","title":{"rendered":"O’Brian, Patrick: (05) Desolation Island<\/cite> (audio)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Desolation Island<\/cite> is the fifth of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels<\/strong>. It starts with a brief domestic interlude: Jack and Sophie are doing pretty well for the moment, but trouble looms on the horizon; and Stephen is not doing very well at all, poor thing. (One of the glimpses of the Aubreys’ domestic life establishes that their twin daughters have a former bosun’s mate as a nursemaid; I do wonder what growing up with sailors as staff would be like.) Then Jack and Stephen are off in the “horrible old Leopard<\/cite>” to rescue William Bligh, who some years after the Bounty<\/cite> mutiny has been made Governor of New South Wales (Australia) and now faces yet another mutiny. (O’Brian has moved the dates of this a bit, but apparently he also has 1813 happen about five times over, so in the grand scheme of things, not that big a deal.)<\/p>\n

This book is something of a change of pace for the series. Before this one, I would say that the highs and lows of each book were of about equal magnitude; but in this book, the highs don’t seem as high to me: not so much victories as just getting by. This is not a bad thing—I think in the long run I will find it a welcome and realistic development—but since I get very emotionally involved with characters, it made for kind of a long listen.<\/p>\n

A note on the text: Amazon sent me one of the line of new trade paperbacks of the series, slightly larger and less pastel. Unfortunately the text seems to contain a fair number of OCR errors, turning “I yearn for fur, a deep, deep bed of fur, and a fur nightgown too!” (chapter 9) into “tool<\/em>!” and so forth. This is a real shame.<\/p>\n

A note on the reading: Patrick Tull doesn’t give the American characters anything I would call a contemporary American accent, but since I don’t know what an American accent would sound like in 1811 or 1812, I can put up with this just fine.<\/p>\n

As always, a spoiler post follows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Desolation Island is the fifth of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels. It starts with a brief domestic interlude: Jack and Sophie are doing pretty well for the moment, but trouble looms on the horizon; and Stephen is not doing very well at all, poor thing. (One of the glimpses of the Aubreys’ domestic life establishes that … <\/p>\n

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