Now, in addition to the pile of books upstairs waiting to be read, I have a (smaller) stack of books next to the computer waiting to be blogged. Time to knock the pile down by one volume, with number 18 in the Aubrey-Maturin series, The Yellow Admiral.
As it’s been a few weeks, I will only call out two elements of the story, very little of which takes place at sea.
The first is the remarkable description — without dropping into a lecture — of the battle over enclosures. This practice of combining smaller parcels of land, and removing the commons (yes, see “tragedy of the…”) from, well, common usage was both a political and financial tool for the powerful, concentrating wealth and power — usually in that order — and pushing more and more of the populace from agricultural work to industrial efforts. Enclosures helped changed the face of England in the 19th century. I’ve studied English history, but never found that the boring, yet vital, details of this shift in land-ownership and usage stuck with me. But O’Brian helped enormously, and makes Aubrey an opponent, successful in this single instance in stemming the tide of concentration. Aubrey is, while ashore, a landed MP, though quite cash poor in the period this book covers, so his vote still matters more than his pocketbook. Maybe the dialogue wouldn’t have filled in all the gaps if I hadn’t somewhere remembered pieces of the historical puzzle — but I bet I would have learned the import of the facts much faster if I’d had started with fiction like this back in the day when knowing these things actually mattered, or seemed to. Ahhhh… college.
The second part of the story I recall most vividly is that Jack Aubrey’s mother-in-law finds an old stack of love letters from his dalliance in Canada early in his marriage. Sophie kicks him out of the house, and it’s only late in the book that tempers and the marriage are returned to an even keel. Combination of a shrewish, curious mother-in-law with documented evidence of infidelity makes Jack a dull (as in thick) boy. Whoops.