solitary_summer | (no subject) (Reply)

# Crawling out of bed at about 10:45, and realising, upon turning on the computer, that it's not even 9 am. Very nice.

# Wanted to mention this yesterday, but forgot... Mandarin ducks. They look absurdly glamorous among the more prosaic local ducks, sculpted and painted pieces of art floating in an also rather prosaic local fountain, surrounded by typical Austrian autumn scenery. I've only noticed them once or twice before... are they from the zoo? migrating?

# My four free days in a row are no more, no thanks to co-worker's gyn appointment, but I get Friday off instead, so it's ok really. Only two work days this week.

# Finished Desolation Island, and... wow.

I rather admire (among other things) O'Brian's ability to keep surprising the reader. After the - even in war - comparatively ordered world of MC with its rigid military command structure, orders and political intrigue, DI is set almost entirely on sea, not only pitching the Leopard and her crew against the elements at their worst, but also exploring the potentially fragile balance of human relationships in the self-contained world of a ship under stain. Stephen's work as intelligence agent, his concern with the success of his mission even during the worst of the crisis, not only serves as a juxtaposition too important to be called a subplot, but is almost the only tie to the larger world and its happenings.

For a good third of the book nothing much in the way of actual plot happens; only the subtlest shifts of character, tension building slowly, almost imperceptibly, through various seemingly negligible occurrences that appear unconnected at first glance, small conflicts and tensions between characters, the setting of a certain mood; subtle touches you only later realise have in fact been hints and warnings of how things could (and would) go awry. Then there's the first crisis with the fever epidemic diminishing the crew, and you think you've seen the worst of it, the tension deceptively slackens again until it all builds up to a terrific dramatic and emotional climax with both the ship and her crew driven to, and beyond, their breaking point, both literally and figuratively. Impossible to put down the book; somehow, even with fifteen further volumes to testify to the continued survival of the protagonists, the possibility of both Jack and Stephen dying in the antarctic sea with the sinking Leopard was very, very real...

I've no idea how much of it is conscious plotting, how much pure instinct... I'm not sure, this may be a wrong impression, but I've never seen novels to all appearances so exclusively driven by the characters; by truth, perhaps not to life exactly, this being, after all, a novel, but to their needs, psychology and development, with apparently little regard to conventional structure, plots or other abstract considerations. With most novels there is, after all, if not an agenda, a way of putting things into some kind of artistically/literary satisfactory order, the author to a greater or lesser extent trying to convey his ideas through his creations. With O'Brian the only premises, as it appears to me, are those two characters and their unlikely friendship, and while there are certain... moral, philosophical themes, leitmotifs winding through the books as a result of two such widely different personalities thrown together, one never has the feeling that they take they take precedence over the telling of the story itself.

In any case the unconventional plots & pacing make for an interesting reading..

I have to say, though, that the further I read into the series, the more I'm beginning to dislike the movie, as it becomes increasingly clear how patched together it is, and how much more subtle, and at the same time, more dramatic the original material. The somewhat forced, hollywoodesque climax of the storm around Cape Horn, with the Surprise chasing the Archeron, quite pales in comparison to Jack's Leopard being hunted by the Waakzaamheid in DI, from where it (as well as the Jonah theme) apparently had been lifted.

Granted, a movie (one aiming at blockbuster status, at that) follows different laws than a book, widely different laws than a twenty volume series of books, with all the time in the world to develop the character's at the author's leisure, but still... ::sigh:: It could have been better, truer, I can't help thinking, and I hate it when something doesn't live up to its potential.

... it's absurd (not to mention shallow) to complain about what sets O'Brian's books apart from any other series of this length, or from your average swashbuckling historical adventure novel - the subtle shading of the characters and their development -, but especially during the first half of DI with everyone older, more disillusioned and bitter, and, at least before they return to sea, somehow at odds with themselves and their lives, I felt a certain nostalgic longing for the youthful enthusiasm & exuberance and greater carelessness of the first two (perhaps three) volumes, wishing he'd lingered there a little longer instead of rushing on so fast...