Patrick O'Brian : A Life

Rating:
Summary: Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed
Review: Author of the novels that bring the golden age of sail to life, Patrick O'Brian remained for all of his devotees a mystery wrapped in an enigma. This book by Dean King does much to roll back that veil of obfuscation, however, as it is the first biography on O'Brian it may be too early to fully judge its merits. Taken as a whole, I think King did an admirable job of finding out the Man behind the Mast. O'Brian's family history, as well as his own history, is detailed and documented.

When I first came to read the celebrated Aubrey-Maturin Series I had no appreciation of the struggle that was involved in bringing the books across the Atlantic to the new world. King's biography will make the Aubrey-Maturin aficiando much more appreciative of the publishers who took a risk on the "Irish" novelist living in France. It is no coincidence that this is also a biography of the series itself- a collection of novels that have taken on a life of their own in more ways than one.

As any reader will come to appreciate, O'Brian was an intensely private man and I believe that Dean King's book maintains both revelation and reverence for the great man.

Rating:
Summary: An Intrusive Tribute
Review: Dean King has published two companions to O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series (Harbours and High Seas, and A Sea of Words) and this is his companion to the life of the author. He has uncovered many of the secrets that O'Brian would have preferred to remain hidden, and he has given an insight into the literary background and writing style of O'Brian that will delight anybody interested in his works, especially the twenty volume epic canon of Captain Jack Aubrey RN and Surgeon Stephen Maturin FRS.

King has dug deep into O'Brian's family, discovering spies, crank doctors, salty seadogs, bad fathers and errant husbands enough for a whole shelf full of fiction. He has chronicled O'Brian's life through its several changes, especially the golden afternoon of his writing career, when he was discovered by the world's readers and became a heroic figure, writing best-seller after best-seller from his vineyard home in the South of France.

While in many ways it is an intrusion that Patrick O'Brian would have been apalled to see published, it is also a tribute by one of his foremost fans. Make up your own mind when you read this.

Rating:
Summary: Only the books matter
Review: Dean King has written an honest, thorough and revealing portrait of the author of the greatest extended novel series of the 20th century. King has clearly gone to considerable lengths in uncovering the unpleasant past of O'Brian, his unhappy childhood, early years as a writer, failed first marriage (which culminated in O'Brian abandoning his wife and two young children), his poverty and struggles as a writer in Wales and then in the south of France, and the unrecognized genius of the first few books in his Aubrey/Maturin series. King is nearly adulatory (and rightly so) in describing the Aubrey/Maturin books of O'Brian; but he makes no excuses for O'Brian the man. O'Brian was vindictive, mean-spirited and unforgiving. He had not the slightest compunction about irretrievably cutting off any family member or "friend" who made the slightest criticism of him or his work. He was irrationally sensitive about his past and the cricumstances in which he changed his name (and identity) after WW II, and he ruthlessly cut off all enquiries into his past. Although he vehemently denied it, O'Brian was a snob of the first water, a self-absorbed dilletante, who had patience for only those who admired his work. Yet, in the final analysis (and perhpas this is all that matters, since O'Brian died in early 2000), O'Brian was a very great writer. His Aubrey/Maturin books so far transcend the genre of historical fiction that even identifying them with such is an injustice. As a connected narrative, the twenty books which comprise the Aubrey/Maturin series have no equal -- not even close -- in the 20th century. That the stories are set in the past, in the late years of Napoleonic Europe, is incidental. King recognizes this fact in describing O'Brian the novelist and provides much new information about how O'Brian began and developed this wonderful series of stories. Perhaps King realizes, as we all should, that, at the end of the day, only the books matter.

Rating:
Summary: Cloistral Life
Review: Dean King succeeds with his biography of Patrick O'Brian. Overall, Mr. King let the evidence of O'Brian's life speak for itself. Devotee's of the Aubrey-Maturin novels will find this book fascinating.

Rating:
Summary: A partial revelation of a secret man
Review: Dean King's "Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed" cannot wholly live up to its subtitle because its subject, the author of some of the best fiction of the 20th Century, withheld any cooperation and evidently instructed his friends to do likewise. King had to construct his biography using none-too-plentiful public sources and the views of estranged relatives, some quite embittered. Fortunately, King avoids becoming merely the advocate of those hostile to Patrick O'Brian, generally maintaining a conspicuous neutrality about the rights and wrongs of the author's personal life, and instead devotes much of the book to a survey of O'Brian's work, examining sources, the struggles to publish, critical reaction, and -- in some cases -- the relationship of particular incidents in the fiction to O'Brian's own life. O'Brian, it is now known, constructed a wholly fictional persona for himself (including his name and nationality) after breaking with his family over 50 years ago. Under those circumstances, and perhaps because of the pain of his own memories, it is not surprising that O'Brian made privacy a fetish. Still, Dean King has been able to assemble a reasonably detailed literary biography. I doubt that someone who is not familiar with O'Brian's marvelous novels would find a great deal of interest in this book, but for fans of his fiction, this biography provides hints and insights into the wellspring of his tales.

Rating:
Summary: Biography at its best, by fermed
Review: This is a book about the life of a writer: about his formative years, about his tumultuous family, about his persistence as a writer, and about his very late and final success and recognition for having authored the Aubrey-Matutin series. It is a well researched work, with author Dean King obviously taking delight in the thoroughness and lavishness he invested in this work (Patrick's brother Mike, if you must know, was the navigator of a Lancaster bomber that was shot down over Germany in WW II. He is buried in the Reichwald Forest Cemetery, Plot 3, row A, grave 6).

Patrick O'Brian was the son of a physician and a gentle and beautiful woman who died when he was six. By age 15 he had written and published his first novel. Thereafter he devoted himself to writing, generally with good critical success. In 1945, for reasons unknown, he changed his legal name from Russ to O'Brien and started to allow new acquaintances to think of him as being from Ireland.In his 30's at that time, he had been married and divorced and was the father of a boy and a girl with spina bifida, who died at age three. One of the dark and disturbing spots in his life was the abandonment of that family. He eventually settled in the south of France, where his wrote the Aubrey-Maturin series.

O'Brian's success did not rush at him; on the contrary, for years he eked out a living by doing French translations (such as the works of Simone de Beauvoir and the novel Papillon) and by taking on literary assignments of one sort or another. It was one of these assignments ("try your hand at another sea novel") that led to the publication of the first of the Aubrey-Maturin novels ("Master and Commander") in 1967. The book and those that followed were well received but read only by a relatively small group of aficionados. In 23 years he had written 13 novels of the series series, all of superb quality, when at last in 1990, at age 75, he became famous practically overnight. A British critic called the intelligentsia's failure to recognize his talents any sooner "as baffling as the Inca inability to invent the wheeel."

I could not put the book down. It is a rich, complex, detailed, balanced, and above all, fair biography. Its subject was a secretive and private individual who was entirely non-cooperative on the theme of his own biography. He obviusly abhorred the idea of the violations of privacy inherent in such a work. Ironically, O'Brian had unflinchingly done to Pablo Picasso (another non-cooperating, private subject) precisely what Don King has done to him: written about his life ("Pablo Ruiz Picasso: A Biography).

Patrick O'Brian died a couple of months ago (January 2000), and therefore is not around to be aggravated by this work. I am glad about that part, for now one can read his biography with pleasure, umarred by mental images of an angry and resentful Mr. O'Brian fuming about the book in the south of France.