Patrick O'Brian : A Life Revealed [Hardcover]

Dean King (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 15, 2000

The untold life story of a novelist whose greatest fictional creation was his own identity.

In a 1998 article in New York magazine, Dean King offered readers a small sampling of the secret history of Patrick O'Brian, the creator of the bestselling series of Aubrey-Maturin novels. O'Brian has always guarded the secrets of his personal history with a zealousness that has bordered on the obsessive. And for years his fanatical readers have speculated on the true story and spun myths about his past based on the lives of his characters.

Dean King at last unveils the story of Richard Patrick Russ, a writer and intellectual who emerged from the Second World War as Patrick O'Brian, a persona created in his own imagination and later refined by decades of rumor and speculation. What motivated this radical change of identity? Was it connected to O'Brian's service during the war, or the messy divorce from his first wife? Or was it the inexplicable act of an eccentric genius?King has crisscrossed Europe to speak to long-lost relatives, friends, and colleagues of his famously reclusive subject and has fashioned this wealth of information into a dramatic narrative that will appeal to an audience far wider than O'Brian's already dedicated fans.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Hailed as the Irish author of "the greatest historical novels ever written"--the 20 swashbuckling Napoleonic-era adventures starring Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin--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 semiliterate Welsh wife and dying, spina bifida-plagued child in 1940 and reinvented himself as a writer and as a human being. He did well as a writer, winning kudos as a biographer (Picasso), translator (Papillon), and old literary sea lion. But he was less than humane, as Dean King's A Life Revealed reveals. The son of a rotten father, Russ/O'Brian became a rotten father himself, cutting off all contact with his son, granddaughters, and even siblings. As he chillingly wrote in his biography, "Parents are supposed to love their children, yet surely there is the implied condition that the children should be reasonably lovable?" Though he was kinder to his second wife, the Countess Mary Tolstoy, whose reckless driving injured both of them, he once wrote that Picasso was "sucked dry and rendered sterile by women, children, routine." For his part, O'Brian preferred poverty and exile in Southern France with Mary--remote from his family origins, penning masterpieces in a house with books but no electricity or running water. Only in his 70s did he become rich and famous.

You can't deny the many striking parallels between O'Brian's life and his work--even though he did. Rotten fathers permeate his fiction, as the fathomless woe must have permeated him upon his mother's death from tuberculosis in 1918, when he was 4. It's great fun to read about his mad-inventor father's machine to cure VD by electrocuting the bladder and compare it to Maturin's practice and devices--and to hear about the future author's salty Uncle Morse telling the lad about encounters with pirates. Captain Aubrey clearly derives partly from Patrick's sociable man-of-action brother Mike (who changed his surname to O'Brien, another family defector). And of course Maturin proves to be in large part a self-portrait.

Fans of Aubrey and Maturin may find King's A Sea of Words (a lexicon of arcane terms that O'Brian uses) more delightful than his exposé of O'Brian's impressive yet appalling life, but it is one thorough and convincing exposé. --Tim Appelo

From Publishers Weekly

After navigating the bestselling Aubrey-Maturin novels' far-flung geography and obscure terminology (in Harbors and High Seas, etc.), King discovered in 1997 that the reclusive O'Brian had invented his own life story as well as his characters'--beginning with changing his name from Richard Patrick Russ and concocting a patrician Irish-Catholic lineage. King's biography, though sometimes patchy, portrays a complex, unhappy family history, a multifarious artistic career and a flawed, indomitable personality. Born in England into the large family of a bankrupt doctor of German origin, the sickly Richard (known as "Pat") began writing boys' adventure stories when only a boy himself. This early literary phase was halted by WWII, during which O'Brian worked in the Foreign Office's shadowy Political Intelligence Division, where he met Mary Wicksteed Tolstoy. After the war, they divorced their spouses and married, O'Brian legally changing his name from Russ. Although his subsequent serious fiction was well received, the O'Brians lived in obscurity, at times near poverty, in Wales and southern France, while O'Brian translated Simone de Beauvoir and lesser writers to get by. King's retelling of the origin of Master and Commander and the following 19 Aubrey-Maturin novels depicts how O'Brian transformed an editor's idea for a C. S. Forester replacement into a genre-busting sea-going roman-fleuve. The glimpses into O'Brian's personal life that King salvages from the author's secrecy include estrangement from his surviving siblings and his son from his first marriage. Steering just clear of judging O'Brian's shortcomings, King's charting of this stormy life makes it clear that O'Brian (who died earlier this year at 85) saved his best for his beloved Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 488 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (March 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805059768
• ISBN-13: 978-0805059762
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #160,538 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

An award-winning and best-selling author of nine non-fiction books, Dean King has chased stories across Europe, Asia, and Africa. His goal is to draw you into a rich, nuanced, and accurate historical narrative that allows you to live with the characters, to feel their pain, suffering, striving, and joy, and to grow with them. He prefers that you decide what you think about the characters' decisions and actions, rather than telling you what to think. He rides the camels, climbs the 14,000 foot passes, walks the yardarms,and tracks down far flung sources to bring you the sounds, smells, sights and insights you need. Then he writes and edits until his knuckles have no skin, his elbows ache, and his family is looking for him, all to give you pleasure in lean, melodic, and meaningful prose. In the end if he makes you desperate to take his book and hit your favorite easy chair or crawl into bed and curl up with it, he's happy. If you learn something or feel changed, then it's all the better.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A partial revelation of a secret man, March 1, 2000

By 

Bruce Trinque (Amston, CT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Patrick O'Brian : A Life Revealed (Hardcover)

Dean King's "Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed" cannot wholly live up to its subtitle because its subject, the author of some of the best fiction of the 20th Century, withheld any cooperation and evidently instructed his friends to do likewise. King had to construct his biography using none-too-plentiful public sources and the views of estranged relatives, some quite embittered. Fortunately, King avoids becoming merely the advocate of those hostile to Patrick O'Brian, generally maintaining a conspicuous neutrality about the rights and wrongs of the author's personal life, and instead devotes much of the book to a survey of O'Brian's work, examining sources, the struggles to publish, critical reaction, and -- in some cases -- the relationship of particular incidents in the fiction to O'Brian's own life. O'Brian, it is now known, constructed a wholly fictional persona for himself (including his name and nationality) after breaking with his family over 50 years ago. Under those circumstances, and perhaps because of the pain of his own memories, it is not surprising that O'Brian made privacy a fetish. Still, Dean King has been able to assemble a reasonably detailed literary biography. I doubt that someone who is not familiar with O'Brian's marvelous novels would find a great deal of interest in this book, but for fans of his fiction, this biography provides hints and insights into the wellspring of his tales.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Most able seamanship, March 8, 2000

By 

Charles Slack (CT United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Patrick O'Brian : A Life Revealed (Hardcover)

This would have been an outstanding biography even had its subject, Patrick O'Brian, cooperated completely, opened a cache of diaries and papers, and welcomed Dean King to have a go. "A Life Revealed" is well-written, detailed, fast-moving and as entertaining as it is informative, positive in portraying O'Brian's great talent yet honest in confronting his shortcomings; in short, it is everything you could want in a biography. The fact that O'Brian not only did not cooperate, but lived a life veiled in layer after layer of secrecy, makes what Dean King has achieved here nothing short of astonishing. Every detail in this book, from the momentous events surrounding Russ/O'Brian's identity change to minor but telling details about his childhood and domestic life, is the result of dogged, painstaking legwork.

One certainly expects that Dean King will get his critical and popular due for having produced the first serious biography of a cherished writer. But the biggest winner to emerge here is O'Brian himself. O'Brian, who died recently, could not have hoped for a more just treatment of his life, nor a more thoughtful consideration of his work. For all of O'Brian's prickly insistence on keeping his life a secret, this biography can only add to the depth of understanding and enjoyment that O'Brian's millions of fans get from his novels.

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Only the books matter, November 10, 2002

By 

Timothy J. Paris (Scottsdale, AZ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Patrick O'Brian : A Life Revealed (Hardcover)

Dean King has written an honest, thorough and revealing portrait of the author of the greatest extended novel series of the 20th century. King has clearly gone to considerable lengths in uncovering the unpleasant past of O'Brian, his unhappy childhood, early years as a writer, failed first marriage (which culminated in O'Brian abandoning his wife and two young children), his poverty and struggles as a writer in Wales and then in the south of France, and the unrecognized genius of the first few books in his Aubrey/Maturin series. King is nearly adulatory (and rightly so) in describing the Aubrey/Maturin books of O'Brian; but he makes no excuses for O'Brian the man. O'Brian was vindictive, mean-spirited and unforgiving. He had not the slightest compunction about irretrievably cutting off any family member or "friend" who made the slightest criticism of him or his work. He was irrationally sensitive about his past and the cricumstances in which he changed his name (and identity) after WW II, and he ruthlessly cut off all enquiries into his past. Although he vehemently denied it, O'Brian was a snob of the first water, a self-absorbed dilletante, who had patience for only those who admired his work. Yet, in the final analysis (and perhpas this is all that matters, since O'Brian died in early 2000), O'Brian was a very great writer. His Aubrey/Maturin books so far transcend the genre of historical fiction that even identifying them with such is an injustice. As a connected narrative, the twenty books which comprise the Aubrey/Maturin series have no equal -- not even close -- in the 20th century. That the stories are set in the past, in the late years of Napoleonic Europe, is incidental. King recognizes this fact in describing O'Brian the novelist and provides much new information about how O'Brian began and developed this wonderful series of stories. Perhaps King realizes, as we all should, that, at the end of the day, only the books matter.