Testimonies [Paperback]

Patrick O'Brian (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 18, 1995

A novel first published in 1952 as THREE BEAR WITNESS which, set in Wales, tells a tale of love and death centred around an Oxford don who leaves for a Welsh farm and for the wife of a neighbouring farmer. From the author of the AUBREY/NATURIN novels.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Before the epic Aubrey-Maturin series, Patrick O'Brian wrote this sinister tale of love and death set in Wales, a dark and timeless story with echoes of Thomas Hardy and Mary Webb. Joseph Pugh, sick of Oxford and of teaching, decides to take some time off to live in a wild and beautiful Welsh farm valley. There he falls physically ill and is nursed back to health by Bronwen Vaughn, the wife of a neighboring farmer. Slowly, unwillingly, Bronwen and Pugh fall in love, and while that word is never spoken between them, their story is passionate and tragic. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

A former Oxford professor retreats to a small Welsh community only to become ill and fall in love with the farmer's wife who nurses him back to health.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Flamingo (May 18, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 000647652X
• ISBN-13: 978-0006476528
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,361,024 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

In addition to twenty volumes in the highly respected Aubrey/Maturin series, Patrick O'Brian's many books include "Testimonies," "The Golden Ocean," and "The Unknown Shore". O'Brian also wrote acclaimed biographies of Pablo Picasso and Sir Joseph Banks and translated many works from the French, among them the novels and memoirs of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Lacouture's biographies of Charles de Gaulle. He passed away in January 2000 at the age of 85.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars O'Brian's first novel is simply brilliant, March 1, 2002

By 

John Joss (Los Altos, CA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Testimonies: A Novel (Paperback)

Patrick O'Brian is more than a writer. He's a publishing phenomenon via his superb Aubrey-Maturin series.
But TESTIMONIES was his first novel, originally published in 1952. It tells of an English professor of Welsh origins, Joseph Pugh, who abandons teaching at Oxford and moves to a cottage in Wales. There he explores the primal mountain back country and tries to understand the farming culture of his ancestral land. A lonely, middle-aged bachelor, Pugh can hardly keep house, even to basics--cooking, cleaning, maintaining his clothes. He has never known intimacy, let alone close friendship, but he falls fatally in love with the wife of his sheep-farmer neighbor Emyr Vaughan, a violent man . . . He pines for months, keeping his love sickness to himself, but when he becomes gravely ill he is taken into the Vaughan house, where he and Bronwen discover each others' feelings, with tender reserve. The denouement is poignant, inevitable, yet O'Brian handles this difficult material deftly, without over-writing. For a beginning writer in his 20s this is masterful work at the pinnacle of writing.
An acute recorder of time and place, human behavior and motivation, action and reaction, O'Brian uses words persuasively, passionately, a craftsman to the core. He captures country, culture and character with Hardy's lyrical affection, idiosyncratic ethnicity, thoughtfully observed. His meticulous work is reminiscent of the great American writers Faulkner, Steinbeck and Capote, or O'Brian's fellow Brits John Fowles and William Golding.
Back in 1952 O'Brian anticipated with TESTIMONIES the struggle for relationships, understanding and love in an era--the last half of the 20th century--in which men and women judge and choose first from ethnic or cultural biases or appearances or political/social correctness and only later, maybe, start to understand each other and become acquainted. Or is xenophobia genetic, eternal?
Fast forward to Norton's republishing of TESTIMONIES in 1983. We see that beyond Aubrey-Maturin, O'Brian had the chops in 1952, though few knew and it took many years for many of us to find him. Doris Lessing in the '90s offered two books under assumed names to test the market for unknowns. Result: rejection (she couldn't even get the books read!). So how many others like O'Brian flower unknown, unappreciated? What is their 'testimony?'
Napoleon allegedly remarked that ability is useless without opportunity. O'Brian won his opportunity, finally, and made the most of it. We are the beneficiaries and TESTIMONIES is the proof--res ipsa loquitur.
This book is one of those few that is unforgettable and will remain in the mind and heart for the rest of the reader's life.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible, moving, passionate, August 26, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Testimonies: A Novel (Paperback)

I cannot describe how much I think of this book, even 4 years after reading it. How many books have that effect?! For me, it was one of the most vivid renderings of passion, loneliness, the relationship between men and women, and most importantly, the parallel of our emotional state to the land we occupy. The country of Wales was just as powerful as the relationship between the characters in the novel. What more can you ask for? Find a quiet spot and read this book!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Testimonies" is an unforgettable story, March 16, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Testimonies: A Novel (Paperback)

I can only describe the book's effect on me. I was unable to put the book down until finished, and then unable to forget the story. Don't expect a happy ending story in the vein of OBrian's Seafaring historical novels. This novel is very different.