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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Typical Patrick O'Brian: Outstanding,
This review is from: The Unknown Shore (Paperback)
In O'Brian's first novel of the sea, The Golden Ocean, which is factual in its essential details, Commodore Anson set out in 1740 to circumnavigate the globe. Of his small fleet, only Anson's flagship survives to return to England loaded with gold and silver taken from a Spanish galleon. (Spain has every right to take great pride in its role of financing the Royal Navy for the good part of a century.)One of the ships that began that fateful but historic voyage, the Wager, is driven by a fierce storm onto the rocky coast of Chile and wrecked. The Unknown Shore is the story of the travails of those who survived the disaster only to experience new tragedies, some of their own making, ashore. Only a few of those who made it ashore survive. Guided and otherwise given aid by natives, those few reach safety in Valparaiso, Chile. As in all of O'Brian's remarkably well-written stories, his narrative of The Unknown Shore is rich, delightful, flawless. His attention to detai! ! l is splendid, and splendidly set down. The central characters in this book are a midshipman named Jack Byron and a surgeon's mate named Tobias Barrow. Barrow is totally inept with any of the demands of survival in the rough, but Byron provides him with the inspiration to persevere. A fine story of depravation and wild adventure, told with O'Brian's top-notch craftsmanship. Jack Byron and Tobias Barrow are credible stand-ins for Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, yet to come in O'Brian's much more famous Aubrey/Maturin sagas, fans of which will be delighted with this precursor to that 18-book series.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not Quite,
This review is from: The Unknown Shore (Paperback)
I am a longtime reader of O'Brian's work and sought this out after I had exhausted the Aubrey-Maturin series for the second time. This story is often said to be a progenitor of the series, but I beg to differ. The main characters bear some resemblance to the two heroes, but are wholly unlike when closely examined.This is a rich, detailed story at first, far funnier than many other of his novels. Midway through, though, he loses his thread (he often talks about sailors ashore being fools, and this may be a case in point) and never fully regains it. The story wanders through detailed descriptions of suffering and death with a deus ex machina end seemingly borne of the mutual exhaustion of both author and reader. Tales of survival are well and good... inspiring, even, at times... but after a point it becimes an endurance test for even the most stalwart reader. In his later works, O'Brian learned that it was the characters and not the events that kept the reader enthralled. Sadly, this work wore on me: again and again the dismal tales of survival against all odds stacked up like cordwood until I was no longer interested. The language is lovely, but the clean, superb O'Brian style fades away in the late-middle. This is not unusual in novels; few carry their bold beginnings to the end. With O'Brian, though, I had hoped for more, even in his early work. There is some comfort that even such a master faltered at first, and that his later command of story, character and voice was learned (authors such as Saul Bellow are disturbing in their untiring published perfection, and I am cheered that one of my all-time favorites is capable of sometimes boring me.) I would say that this is a journeyman piece: beautifully researched, well-begun but ultimately not up to the standard that set you reading it in the first place.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Five stars ... plus.,
This review is from: The Unknown Shore (Hardcover)
Jack and Toby: Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in ye merrie olde England. Great! When you've finished this, go on to the follow-up Aubrey/Maturin series, without a doubt the best written seafaring tales in all of literature. Mr. O'Brian died in January at age 85, leaving behind a legacy unmatched by few contemporary writers in the English language.
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