Day: September 3, 2003

Patrick O’Brian’s The Far Side of the World enjoys a great title. The author knows it, and various characters use the phrase several times. Where is the ‘far side of the world’ — it’s the South Pacific, off the coast of Chile, where Surprise, Aubrey’s ship, is sent to protect British whaling ships from an American frigate. Over halfway through the novel, Aubrey jumps into the ocean at night to save Maturin, who has fallen in, as is his wont. The ship sails on without them to their dismay. Fortunately, they are saved by a boatload of Poylnesian Amazons, who seem to threaten castration, but eventually just leave them on an island. The Surprise finds them, amazingly enough (well, these are our heroes). The book ends with the ship returning to quell imminent battle on land between the shipwrecked sailors from the American frigate and a skeleton crew from the British ship left on the island. Onec again, O’Brian has no qualms about leaving his readers intensely eager to get to the next book.

I don’t know why the movie-makers are taking the titles from the first and the tenth Aubrey-Maturin novels for a single movie. The movie won’t bridge 10 books… no one is that foolish. We’ll see. If the movie arrives in November, I don’t have much time to get to the next (and last) ten books before opening night. Oh well.

I’m glad to see that W.W. Norton did not Americanize the spelling of Treason’s Harbour, the ninth in the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian. Stuck ashore in Malta during a ship refit, Aubrey awkwardly makes a pass at a fellow officer’s wife (and fails), but accidentally befriends her massive dog, which leads the island to think he has succeeded. Maturin, meanwhile, is awash in spycraft, and — in an amusing turn — has to rebuff a Spanish-fly-supported, espionage-induced effort at seduction by the same officer’s wife.

Finally afloat, we follow our heroes across the Mediterranean, and across a sliver of the Egyptian desert (pre-Suez canal era) to the Red Sea. A traitor in the English Admiralty dooms their mission there, but I found two incidents memorable. First, the passenger who enjoys swimming from the boat is torn apart by sharks in the Red Sea. Since Aubrey often enjoys a swim, it’s useful for O’Brian to toss over another incidental character. Second, Maturin gets a diving bell, modeled after that used by Halley (the astronomer), and puts it to good use on the mission. Knowing O’Brian’s work, this is all probably historically accurate. Anyway, they return to Malta to report the failure of their mission, and the existence of a traitor. The reader knows who it is, but the characters are going to have to wait another book or two to find out. I guess O’Brian realized he was on a roll by this point (1983), and could leave loose ends as back-story for the future. I know I’m going to read the next eleven (!), so he wasn’t wrong.

I started Salt: A World History a while ago, even before I started and finished a few of the other books this summer. I finally finished this non-fiction scan of the centuries through a prism of salt while flying to New York a couple of weeks ago. It’s a fun idea for a history, and it certainly was an important “rock that you can eat” for ages, until it became easy/economic enough to produce to become less than a commodity. I will say I slowed down in it because Mark Kurlansky’s habit of throwing in historical recipes for color dragged me to a halt many times, even though I soon learned to glaze over them. Also — and I’ve found I feel the same way about in the past about Michener books, for instance — any historical scan of several centuries almost inevitably leaves me eager to get to the present-day, so see why this topic still matters… if it does still matter. Salt doesn’t matter much anymore, which leaves you disappointed in the end. I think there is a larger story in the 20th century transition for salt (and other edible necessities) from expensive commodities to run-of-the-mill items. And, perhaps, the transition of water and other items from run-of-the-mill items to ever more precious items.