Gory Details, please!
The Thirteen Gun Salute ended with a cliffhanger of almighty proportions. Will Jack Aubrey rally his troops and recover from shipwreck or will he and several hundred souls be stranded for the rest of their days on an uncharted island in the South China Sea (which, fortunately, has both fresh water and some food available)??? I won't find out until I read the sequel, which I can't do until tonight.
I couldn't get to sleep after reading that final chapter, so I did what I've never done before: read the little essay included in the back of each book in this edition.
This was a brief autobiographical note by the authot, Patrick O'Brian. He came across very much as a man of his Brideshead Revisited generation as in a raging queen concealing more than he's explaining by describing his personal circumstances with EXTREME delicacy. (I could be misconstruing this entirely.)
But I was most struck by his description of an un-named illness that kept him confined to bed for great stretches of his childhood and out of active service in WWII but didn't prevent him from working in intelligence or messing about on boats. Maybe it's because I'm from Queensland, or maybe it's because I've read too many Who magazines or maybe just because we talk about this stuff these days, but I've been distracted all afternoon wondering if he had polio, TB, leukaemia, WHAT???
At a pinch I could argue that this might have affected his books but really it's just nosiness, isn't it?
I couldn't get to sleep after reading that final chapter, so I did what I've never done before: read the little essay included in the back of each book in this edition.
This was a brief autobiographical note by the authot, Patrick O'Brian. He came across very much as a man of his Brideshead Revisited generation as in a raging queen concealing more than he's explaining by describing his personal circumstances with EXTREME delicacy. (I could be misconstruing this entirely.)
But I was most struck by his description of an un-named illness that kept him confined to bed for great stretches of his childhood and out of active service in WWII but didn't prevent him from working in intelligence or messing about on boats. Maybe it's because I'm from Queensland, or maybe it's because I've read too many Who magazines or maybe just because we talk about this stuff these days, but I've been distracted all afternoon wondering if he had polio, TB, leukaemia, WHAT???
At a pinch I could argue that this might have affected his books but really it's just nosiness, isn't it?
posted by Mary Bennet | 5:12 pm
1 Comments:
Sadly, all we know for sure is that he made up his life story as well as his fiction. There are a couple of biographies now, but they're a bit depressing.
Keep on reading the Aubreys, but don't bother with the posthumously published "recently discovered manuscript".
You get a medal when you finish the whole series. Or a 100-guinea sword.
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