O'Brian enjoys a sparkling success while playing with distinctly
modern themes - in this 17th installment of the lives of Jack
Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, best friends and seafaring warriors of
the Napoleonic Wars. Following on the botched South American
adventures of The Wine-Dark Sea (1993), Aubrey and Maturin find
themselves battling the perils of domesticity in an England
recognizable from the pages of Jane Austen's Persuasion. In
episodes of Aubrey at home with his wife and children and a
mother-in-law-turned-bookie, the author expands Austen's portrait
of landlocked, rather female concerns - relations among in-laws,
etiquette and ambition among the gentry - to show how slavery, the
spoils of war, and financial trickery formed the underpinnings of
that romanticized and "genteel" society. Maturin's problems are
more dramatic: His previously unseen daughter Brigid is autistic,
his wife Diana has fled in despair, his addiction to coca leaves
has replaced his former appetite for liquid opium. Worse, a
homosexual lord is being blackmailed by French agents to denounce
Maturin for harboring two transported persons, the penalty for
which, given Maturin's French-Irish background, could be the
gallows. These themes mix powerfully when Aubrey is ordered to take
a squadron and suppress the slave trade on Africa's West Coast,
with secret orders to double back and intercept a French invasion
of Ireland. One of Aubrey's captains is homosexual, a capable man
flawed by his inability to keep his hands off his more comely
crewmen. Meanwhile, Maturin's enlightened 18th-century speculations
on love, sex, and politics endow the action with rich, often comic,
ironies, expressed as always in O'Brian's hyperbolic, nearly
Joycean flights of rhetoric. A mesmerizing performance on many
levels - as history, as story, as literature - this novel
transcends two genres in one stroke, the domestic romance and the
seafaring hero's tale. In doing so, O'Brian bids to be considered
the rightful heir not just of C.S. Forester, but of Jane Austen
herself. (Kirkus Reviews)
Jack Aubrey's long service is at last rewarded: he is promoted to the rank of Commodore and given a squadron of ships to command. His mission is twofold - to make a large dent in the slave trade off the coast of Africa and, on his return, to intercept a French fleet set for Bantry Bay with a cargo of weapons for the disaffected among the Irish. Invention and surprise follow at every turn in this tale of nineteenth-century seamanship, as rich, as compelling, as masterly as any of its predecessors.
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