Which it contains spoilers, don't it?

I am melancholy, for I have just finished--for maybe the fourth time--the 20th complete novel in the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. I think it is one of the great disappointments of American literature that O'Brian died before he could tell us whether Christine Wood is going to accept Stephen Maturin's proposal of marriage. (Though I admit that little note she sent him from Woolcombe right near the end of Blue at the Mizzen is very promising.)

And, no, I'm not going to read 21, the unfinished novel, again. It's too depressing.

I think that Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are among the literary characters who are the most real to me, and one reason I grieve O'Brian's untimely death is that Jack and Stephen died with him and never got to live the rest of their lives. I love so many things about them: the way their friendship develops over the years, their deep affection for one another, their tenderness, the affectionate jokes they perpetually make at each other's expense. This blogger posted a long quote from The Surgeon's Mate that shows what I'm talking about--the moment when Jack interrupts Stephen to say, "You are far too modest," is a joke, for not only has Stephen been at sea for a decade without learning the difference between latitude and longitude, he is astonished at another point that Jack can tell him when the dark of the moon will be, and gets stranded on an island when the outgoing tide beaches his boat. "The tide has gone out?" he says in astonishment, and Jack (who has swum over from the ship to fetch him) says, "I hear it happens twice a day in these parts."

But of course Stephen is what the hands call "a right learned cove" and he has his moments of quiet mirth at Jack's expense as well.

I also love O'Brian's patience. Characters have a conversation on page 12 that sets up a joke on page 30; the death of a major character is foreshadowed a whole book in advance; Stephen's courtship of Christine Wood takes so long that for an entire book its only progress is in letters Stephen writes to her, and one short note he gets in return.

On this reading, though, I found myself thinking a lot about O'Brian's women. These books are full of cheerfully competent women of whom anything can be asked: Mrs. Broad, Stephen's landlady at The Grapes, who is equally comfortable whether Stephen brings her two little girls to raise (rescued from an island where they were the only survivors of a smallpox outbreak), an orangutan, or the corpse of an orphaned child he means to dissect; assorted admiral's wives, including of course Jack's childhood friend Queenie; Poll Skeeping, Stephen's loblolly-boy after Padeen stays behind on land to care for Stephen's daughter Brigid. Even Sophie Aubrey, the books' most conventional woman and the one who leads the quietest life, rises to the occasion over and over as Jack and Stephen rescue various women from assorted scrapes and cheerfully send them off to live with Sophie with not so much as a by-your-leave (that Sophie believes one of these women--falsely, in this case--to have been Jack's mistress shows both her strength of character and how very much she had to put up with).

On the other hand, the women we spend the most time with are all broken in some way, most of them sexually. Sophie has a terror of both sex and childbearing, having been introduced to both only through the shock of having them happen to her (I love it when Diana and Clarissa finally sit her down to tell her the facts of life. Diana writes to Stephen, "I am only afraid she took me too literally when I said that what she needed was some experience with a gentler man than Captain Aubrey." Heh.) The abuse Clarissa Oakes suffered as a child left her unable to have normal sexual feelings or pleasure, and yet at the same time to see the sexual act as no more significant to her than a sneeze, so she causes all sorts of trouble by having sex with men because they seem to want it and it's no trouble for her at all. When Christine Wood and Stephen fall into the stinking mud in a mangrove swamp, she matter-of-factly strips naked so he can find and remove the dozens of leaches that have attached themselves to her, and she performs the same service for him. But when he first proposes to her, she rejects him because her first marriage to an impotent yet brutal man has left her with a horror of sex.

Diana Villiers, for many years Stephen's hopeless passion and eventually his wife, has a healthy sexual appetite; so healthy that monogamy is a perpetual challenge to her. But she is an unnatural mother, and one of the many times she deals with the challenges of her life by running away is after the birth of Brigid.

(Oh, that reminds me: I have seen fan pages where people pick apart continuity errors: Faster Doudle's name is spelled two different ways; a seaman dies in one book, only to show up dancing on the forepeak during the dog watches three books later, resurrected by O'Brian's faulty memory. I don't care too much about those things. But I wonder what the hell happened to Clarissa Oakes' avowed and long-standing hatred of children? She steps in as Brigid's surrogate mother without a murmur. This seems like a huge shift in character that should at least have been mentioned.)

Of course, everyone in O'Brian's books is broken in some way. Jack, a powerful leader at sea, is so hapless on land that his friends can often only stand by and watch helplessly while he brings himself to the brink of ruin by giving all his money to speculators or falling for an obvious con or making ruinous speeches in Parliament. Stephen is a drug addict, and a surgeon who often forgets to wash the blood off his hands before going in to dinner. It's one of O'Brian's gifts as a writer that so many of the characters in these books are complicated, flawed, and sympathetic. Overall, I appreciate the many women characters and how much of their stories we hear; there's hardly a more male environment than a ship at sea in 1812, and it would have been easy for O'Brian to center his stories there, as indeed C. S. Forester does in the Hornblower books.

I'm resisting the temptation to digress here and talk about Hornblower by way of contrast, because I can't imagine many people have stuck with me this far and I want to get to the thing that made me most thoughtful on this read-through: O'Brian's treatment of race.

The first time I read these books, I was surprised a few books in to realize that they were written from 1970 to 1999. They seemed older than that to me. Partly that is because of O'Brian's beautiful long, cadenced sentences: all those women trying to write Jane Austen knock-offs ought to study him closely. But partly it's because the way he writes about black people feels very dated (and maybe that's because he started in 1970--I didn't realize until I looked it up just now that he began that long ago. So I have been both surprised by how recent the books are, and by how long ago they were written--a neat trick).

For one thing, he likes to call black people "the black." As in, "the black walked to the capstan and took hold of the bar." He especially likes "the powerful black" and the "flash of white teeth in the dark face as the black smiled." *sigh*

OK, now that I know he started writing these books in the 60s, I can be a bit more forgiving. Next time I read them I'll have to pay attention to whether he gets over this by the 80s.

But I notice that he doesn't choose to bring black characters into the story the way he chooses to bring women in; his setting would have allowed him to reduce women to hands on the pier waving handkerchiefs as the ship draws out of the harbor, and it is to his credit that he didn't do that. Yet he populates the lower decks with a motley collection of men from all over the world, without making any of the black men the equivalent of a Joe Plaice or an Awkward Davies or a Faster Doudle, seamen who never get to be the center of the story but who are named and weave in and out of the action book after book.

Certainly, Jack never has to confront the possibility of promoting a black man, though several times he does promote someone from seaman to midshipman, and often one of his concerns is how to fit a working-class man into a midshipman's berth full of gentlemen's sons. One of the perpetual worries of Jack's life is how to help his protege Tom Pullings advance, Tom being a consummate seaman and good captain but not being able to "pass for a gentleman" as easily as he can "pass for lieutenant." It might have been interesting to have Jack, faced with needing to repopulate his officers after his quarterdeck is decimated by chain in a deadly action against the French, consider an able black man, even if he then would have had to regretfully decide that it can't be done.

The black character we see the most of is Sam Panda, Jack's son from a long-ago liaison. Sam is a priest, and it is interesting that the greatest obstacle to his full ordination and advancement is not his race but his illegitimacy. And we don't see Sam much; he causes much consternation and amusement by showing up, a grown black man who looks exactly like Jack, first at Sophie's doorstep (poor Sophie!), and then later on-board. He and Jack share a great affection for one another, but Sam dwindles away in the books, and once Stephen uses his influence to get Sam a dispensation so he can be fully ordained, we don't hear any more of him.

Goodness, I could write a book about these books. But this is what I have to say for now. I'll just leave you with this: Why are the two short watches in the afternoon called the dog-watches?

Say it with me, O'Brian fans: "Because they are cur-tailed!"