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In the last issue we talked about Patrick O'Brian's
compelling novels featuring Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin and their
adventures aboard and around the HMS 'Surprise'.
Patrick O'Brian passed away just as the new millennium,
began and within a remarkably short period of time, a biography
was on the shelves. Written by Dean King, one of the collaborators on 'A
Sea Of Words', the lexicon that makes such a useful companion to the
Aubrey-Maturin novels, the biography was of interest, naturally, to any
fan of O'Brian's works. Don Simpson of the ketch 'Madrigal II' wrote:
"...thinking to acquire a copy, I went to the
Amazon.com site. This is what flew from my pen moments after I had
left the site behind:
Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed by Dean King, offered by Amazon.com at
US$22.00
Patrick O'Brian was, by all accounts, a man who made some fairly drastic choices in his younger
years. His corpse was barely cold when the literary long-knives came out, dissecting his private life and pronouncing him fairly unfit for human consumption
in spite of his literary achievements.
Frankly, I am a great believer in private lives. There is no reason that I can
fathom, why a man or woman should be considered to be public property just because he or she has created something for the public to
enjoy. Nonetheless, if a person has freely volunteered the information to enable a biographer to create a definitive work it is fascinating to be privileged to peep behind the
scenes.
Whether this biography was the result of collaboration or of snooping I would never have
known, were it not for a review lower down the page, by Bruce Trinque, since the
in-house critic, Tony Appelo's critique of the book was quite enough to put me off spending my money with his
employer.
I didn't want to hear about Patrick O'Brian's life in the subjective terms that most critics feel entirely free to
employ, making the arrogant assumption that their interpretations are the only possible
ones.
I quote from Tim Appelo's critique of the Patrick O'Brian
biography, by Dean King:
"Patrick O'Brian was not such a great guy. In fact, he wasn't really Patrick
O'Brian: he was actually the Englishman Richard Patrick Russ, who abandoned his
semi-literate Welsh wife and dying, spina bifida-plagued child in 1940 and reinvented himself as a writer and as a human
being."
That was, in my opinion, a base and snide attack on the man's character
and, I fancy, based on a very unimaginative interpretation of the facts
Appelo had found in the book he was reviewing.
Are we to take it that Patrick was driven away by his wife's incapacity to read or write particularly
well, although she had, presumably, been semi-literate since before he
met and married her? Is it not possible that he discovered in himself a talent for writing rather than
're-inventing' himself?
Is a change of name necessarily a re-invention of the
self? Could it not be that he felt his new name more accurately reflected the true
him? Is it not possible that he simply discovered that he was not capable of dealing with the helplessness of watching his child
die, knowing that nothing he might do would change anything? Is
spina-bifida classified as a plague now, as opposed to a genetic
malformation? Could it not have been that his semi-literate wife was also
semi-spiteful, semi-loyal or semi-interested in her husband?
Not for one moment am I saying that any of those possibilities is more correct than any of Tony Appelo's
suggestions but that is precisely my point. How much does Tony Appelo know of the reasons for all that Patrick O'Brian did in
life? How much of that interpretation was a projection of his
own skeletons?"
Don makes a good point there!
My ex-husband - who abandoned me, perhaps for being semi-human, (what would I know about men's motives?) used to say "Those that can, do. Those that
can't, teach. Those that cannot even teach become
critics." We may have agreed on very few things but that
was definitely one of them and this review sounds like a classic example of the
veracity of his remark. Continuing, Don told us:
"Further down the page, in another review of the same book, Bruce Trinque revealed the fact that O'Brian had never wanted to share any of the details of his private
life so Dean King has just lost a fan too. I adored A Sea Of Words and admired Dean King for his part in its creation but suddenly he has become, in my eyes, a parasite living off Patrick O'Brian's popularity and an ungrateful parasite at that.
But wait! Further down the page again, one J.M. Comstock reveals that King may have been a bit nosey and gone prying where he wasn't invited but he had at least shown respect for his victim, and I quote:
"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."
So! 'Twould seem that this Tony Appelo created the bogey man all by himself. Well, what does
anyone care whether I buy one lousy book or not? Or even one excellent book, come to that." Well,
it's nice to know that we're not the only ones who like a good rant from
time to time and we thank Don Simpson for sharing this one with our
readers. Feel free to tell us about a book you think we shouldn't miss
or about one you'd like to spare us from...
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