Master and Commander: Patrick O’Brian: Book 1 (Aubrey-Maturin)

Product Information

This innocent decision ensnares him in the London criminal underground and in government espionage the province of his friend Stephen Maturin, now tasked with rescuing his imperilled friend as he also attempts to locate his wayward wife, Diana Villiers. Britain’s Sunak cancels meeting with Greek PM in row over Parthenon sculptures November 29, 2023 | 12:06 am Other pleasures involve the exciting scenes of naval action that suddenly pop up, from inconclusive minor skirmishes between pairs of ships to major battles involving multiple ships and shore batteries (for in the year 1800 when the novel takes place England is at war with Spain and France), as well as the occasional brief, vivid, and lyrical descriptions of the world viewed with relish from a ship at sea: The portrayals of these two men and their friendship — their abiding love for each other overcoming differences of politics and personality — carry the film. At times, Weir’s film seems to be a pure character study; the Acheron’s chase and capture matter much less than the development of this key male friendship.

Its depiction of life at sea is gritty and brutal: intense battle scenes; Maturin performing surgery on himself; Hollom’s suicide. And yet Master and Commander delivers a nostalgic, idealized lifestyle that still has many men dreaming of ditching their office jobs and sailing the high seas.Online, 20 years after the film’s release, many men are finding comfort and inspiration in this contrasting picture of what masculinity can look like. Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo, and the ensuing peace brings with it both the desertion of nearly half of Captain Aubrey’s crew and the sudden dimming of Aubrey’s career prospects in a peacetime navy. When the Surpriseis nearly sunk on her way to South America―where Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are to help Chile assert her independence from Spain―the delay occasioned by repairs reaps a harvest of strange consequences. On his return to his lodgings, Aubrey finds that he has been given a command and promoted to the rank of commander. His joy overcomes his animosity towards Maturin and after coffee at 'Joselito's Coffee House' they become fast friends. As 'Master and Commander', and in charge of the tiny sloop-of-war HMS Sophie, Aubrey has to fill out his crew, including the post of ship's surgeon. He persuades Maturin to serve, at least on a temporary basis, although as a physician, he is overqualified for the job. But Maturin is a marked man for the havoc he has wrought in the French intelligence network in the New World and the attention of two privateers soon becomes menacing. This admiration of the Surprise’s masculine community, where different kinds of men are celebrated, serves as a positive counter model to the angst and toxicity of the manosphere.

But, appropriate to the film’s rapid meme-ification – the lesser of two weevils for grumpy old guys like me, if it means new generations come to the film – something that spread rapidly on the internet offers some sort of hope. The sea itself already had a nacreous light that belonged more to the day than the darkness, and this light was reflected in the great convexities of the topsails, giving them the lustre of grey pearls.” AT 20, Peter Weir’s 2003 masterpiece Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World remains a captivating historical drama — and an emblem of wholesome masculinity.They open a window into a world two hundred years gone - the world of the Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. This was a time of blood and thunder, of maritime siege, a war of long, patient endurance against a tenacious and powerful enemy. Aubrey, now a considerable though impoverished landowner, has dimmed his prospects at the Admiralty by his erratic voting as a Member of Parliament; he is feuding with his neighbour, a man with strong Navy connections who wants to enclose the common land between their estates; he is on even worse terms with his wife, Sophie, whose mother has ferreted out a most damaging trove of old personal letters.

But stowed away in the cable-tier is an escaped female convict. To the officers, Clarissa Harvill is an object of awkward courtliness and dangerous jealousies. Aubrey himself is won over and indeed strongly attracted to this woman who will not speak of her past. But only Aubrey’s friend, Dr. Stephen Maturin, can fathom Harvill’s secrets: her crime, her personality, and a clue identifying a highly-placed English spy in the pay of Napoleon’s intelligence service. Master and Commander Books #16: The Wine-Dark Sea (1993) The performances of the protagonists are gentle, subtle and lifelike. Crowe gives a rugged and charismatic performance as the tradition-loving Aubrey. Bettany as the charmingly lubberly Maturin is the perfect complement to Aubrey, even as he differs from his book counterpart, his role as an intelligence agent being conspicuously absent from the script. With a Dutch man-of-war to windward, the undermanned, outgunned Leopardsails for her life into the freezing waters of the Antarctic, where, in mountain seas, the Dutchman closes. Master and Commander Books #6: The Fortune of War (1979)Some may say Master and Commander is just too male, and too white, to be called a true classic. I may say, if so, that some should have a word with my mum, a teacher of English literature, a lover of Eliot and Austen who treats O’Brian’s novels as holy writ and loves the film as much as me. Arising from which, a confession: I haven’t read O’Brian’s books. I got about a chapter into the first novel, Master and Commander itself, before deciding I’d rather read Flashman. In my defense, I was 16 and an idiot. A tweet announces the “hot new bachelor party activity” is historic gunnery exercises, with the “boys hooting and hollering as they drink grog firing three broadsides in two minutes.” The Aubrey/Maturin series are classics. They are quite simply the best historical novels ever written. This instalment takes Aubrey and Maturin sailing on the pirate-plagued waters of the Red Sea, trudging over the Sinai Peninsula and even the depths of the sea floor in their efforts to stay one step ahead of the treachery afoot. Master and Commander Books #10: The Far Side of the World (1984)