H.M.S. Surprise

by Patrick O'Brian

Book Overview

Third in the series of Aubrey-Maturin adventures, this book is set among the strange sights and smells of the Indian subcontinent, and in the distant waters ploughed by the ships of the East India Company. Aubrey is on the defensive, pitting wits and seamanship against an enemy enjoying overwhelming local superiority. But somewhere in the Indian Ocean lies the prize that could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams: the ships sent by Napoleon...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393307611
• ISBN13: 9780393307610
• Release Date: May 1991
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Great so far if you liked the 1st one.

About 1/2 way through and allot different than the 1st one but that makes it better, not more of the same!

Extremely Satisfying

I, like many others I suspect, was sucked into reading the Aubrey/Maturin series by the Peter Weir film. Little did I know that the books would be so much deeper than the film or topic would lead one to believe. Stephen Maturin: physician, scientist, naturalist, spy (and Patrick O'Brian alter ego) studies people (including his great friend Jack Aubrey - and himself) dispassionately, and we are the beneficiaries of his study. Jack Aubrey: ship's captain, sentimentalist, musician and astronomer is a man of the past - he is a hero with flaws but he holds honor and duty above himself (usually).H.M.S. Surprise is the best of the early series. We get adventure: a daring rescue of Stephen by Jack, a brilliant sea maneuver led by the Surprise on the Indian Ocean. We get a novel of manners: Maturin's and Aubrey's continued wooing of Diana Villiers and Sophia Williams. We get a marvelous frigate and her crew - O'Brian's depiction of the Surprise is a microcosm of the world at the time of Napoleon. And my, the Surprise is yar! Some of my friends have expressed surprise (pun intended, and Aubrey would love it!) that a feminist landlubber would admire the same series that Charlton Heston and other manly men have loved before me. My response is that great writing is enough. There are few female characters in Aubrey/Maturin, and those that O'Brian includes are not particularly sympathetic (although I can imagine every actress alive wanting to play Diana Villiers), but it doesn't matter when I feel as much a part of the crew as Pullings or Bonden.When you get down to it, Patrick O'Brian is just a great writer. At moments I have been reminded of Melville, Austen, and Robertson Davies. His grasp of the technical is thorough. His ability to share the historical feeling of the period is amazing. On top of all this, these books are just page-turners! I was gripped from the moment I opened the novel.A previous reviewer mentioned that if you read the first three books in the series, you'll read all twenty. If the next seventeen are half as good as H.M.S. Surprise, I'll be singing Patrick O'Brian's praises for a long time.

Extremely satisfying installment of the Aubrey-Maturin saga

The third of the Aubrey-Maturin books primarily focuses on a long voyage Aubrey and Maturin undertake to deliver a British envoy to India, but along the way they undergo trials and tribulations far darker than anything that happened in the first two books. Maturin alone undergoes extensive physical torture, has his heart broken yet again, fights a duel that he wins but in which he is seriously wounded, and meets a young girl in India who he wants to help but discovers her murdered by those who want to steal the bracelets he bought for her. Jack, on the other hand, is merely imprisoned for debt and then has his engagement with Sophie tested. Comparatively speaking, he gets off rather lightly.There is not a great deal of plot in the book, very much like the first two books. O'Brian isn't so much not very good with plot as unconcerned. In this regard his books are far more true-to-life that tell a well-contained story. O'Brian is more concerned with successive events that may have some connection with one another, though if one pushed hard enough one might contend the novel is concerned with the question of whether Jack and Stephen will get married. But if that were the "story" the novel was trying to tell, too many extraneous are involved. But for O'Brian the main point of the books are those extraneous details. He is far more interested in the texture and the historical veracity of the period than he is in "plot." What I really enjoy about these books is the way he is constantly making Jack and Stephen more interesting characters. They are far from perfect. By contemporary standards, Jack is a throwback, having a host of biases and opinions about human beings that we would consider most unenlightened. Stephen, on the other hand, is a product of the 18th century Enlightenment, not merely interested in the scientific issues of the day, but clearly holding many of the leftist political positions of the time. Yet, Stephen is a mass of beautiful contradictions, being liberal and enlightened in most ways, yet working for the British government as a spy. It is this complexity in Stephen's character that makes him by far the more interesting character of the two. Jack, on the other hand, only really comes to life when there is a battle.As far as battles go, O'Brian clearly has embraced the theory that less is more. There is a rousing rescue near the beginning of the novel, but apart from that the only battle scene in the novel comes near the end, where Jack is challenged to product a merchant fleet from a packet of powerful French ships that vastly overpower them. It is probably my favorite battle scene of any of the books so far.Like the first two books, I heartily recommend this novel to anyone who wants to enjoy some terrific historical novels. O'Brian tries hard to be an objective observer, trying hard not to impose 20th century values on all the attitudes, though Maturin has many of the same sympathies and attitudes that we do (tho

Joint Review of All Aubrey-Maturin Books

Some critics have referred to the Aubrey/Maturin books as one long novel united not only by their historical setting but also by the central plot element of the Aubrey/Maturin friendship. Having read these fine books over a period of several years, I decided to evaluate their cumulative integrity by reading them consecutively in order of publication over a period of a few weeks. This turned out to be a rewarding enterprise. For readers unfamiliar with these books, they describe the experiences of a Royal Navy officer and his close friend and traveling companion, a naval surgeon. The experiences cover a broad swath of the Napoleonic Wars and virtually the whole globe. Rereading all the books confirmed that O'Brian is a superb writer and that his ability to evoke the past is outstanding. O'Brian has numerous gifts as a writer. He is the master of the long, careful description, and the short, telling episode. His ability to construct ingenious but creditable plots is first-rate, probably because he based much of the action of his books on actual events. For example, some of the episodes of Jack Aubrey's career are based on the life of the famous frigate captain, Lord Cochrane. O'Brian excels also in his depiction of characters. His ability to develop psychologically creditable characters through a combination of dialogue, comments by other characters, and description is tremendous. O'Brien's interest in psychology went well beyond normal character development, some books contain excellent case studies of anxiety, depression, and mania. Reading O'Brien gives vivid view of the early 19th century. The historian Bernard Bailyn, writing of colonial America, stated once that the 18th century world was not only pre-industrial but also pre-humanitarian (paraphrase). This is true as well for the early 19th century depicted by O'Brien. The casual and invariable presence of violence, brutality, and death is a theme running through all the books. The constant threats to life are the product not only of natural forces beyond human control, particularly the weather and disease, but also of relative human indifference to suffering. There is nothing particularly romantic about the world O'Brien describes but it also a certain grim grandeur. O'Brien also shows the somewhat transitional nature of the early 19th century. The British Navy and its vessals were the apogee of what could be achieved by pre-industrial technology. This is true both of the technology itself and the social organization needed to produce and use the massive sailing vessals. Aubrey's navy is an organization reflecting its society; an order based on deference, rigid hierarchy, primitive notions of honor, favoritism, and very, very corrupt. At the same time, it was one of the largest and most effective bureaucracies in human history to that time. The nature of service exacted great penalities for failure in a particularly environment, and great success was rewarded greatl

One of the best books of perhaps the best naval series ever

In praising Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin books I am on well-trodden ground. In a sense, it is superfluous to do so: so many people, of such varied and excellent taste, have praised these books to the skies that further lauds from the modest likes of me are hardly necessary. Still, I'm glad to add my words. These stories concern Jack Aubrey, a ship captain in the English Navy at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, and his great friend Stephen Maturin, an Irish-Catalan doctor and spy who in the first book joins Jack's crew as ship doctor.As H. M. S. Surpries opens, political machinations cost Jack his prize money (earned in the previous book0, and Stephen's cover in Spain is blown. As a result, and also because Stephen is scheming to see his lover Diana again (who has been taken by her keeper Richard Canning to India), Jack takes command of the aged frigate H.M.S. Surprise, and is sent to Cambodia (stopping in India) to deliver the new British envoy to the Sultan of Kampong.Thus the setup for a long, wonderful, account of the voyage to the Orient and back. The pleasures of this book are remarkably varied: high comedy, such as the famous drunken sloth incident; high adventure, as the men of the Surprise battle not only the South Atlantic at its fiercest, but also the French; and bitter disappointment and even tragedy, in Stephen's seesaw relationship with Diana, as well as Stephen's involvement with a young Indian girl.The pleasures of this book, however, are not restricted to a fine plot. The ongoing development of the characters of Jack and Stephen, and of their complex and fully described friendship, is a major achievement. In addition, the many minor characters are fascinating: the envoy Mr. Stanhope, Stephen's Indian friend, the various ship's officers and men, other ship captains, and so on. And O'Brian's depiction of the building of an effective crew, the relationship of captain to officers to men, is another fascinating detail, and something he revisits from book to book, as Jack encounters different crews in different circumstances. Finally, O'Brian is a fine writer of prose, with a faintly old-fashioned style, well poised to evoke the atmosphere of the time of which he writes to readers of our time, and consistently quotable, in his dry fashion.Jack and Stephen are heroic in certain aspects of their characters, but they are both multi-faceted characters, with terrible flaws and endearing crotchets in addition to their accomplishments. And they truly come across to this reader as characters of their time, and not 20th Century people cast back into the past. Even Stephen's very contemporary racial and religious attitudes are well-motivated by his background, and expressed in language which reeks wonderfully of his time: "Stuff. I have the greatest esteem for Jews, if anyone can speak of a heterogeneous great body of men in such a meaningless, illiberal way."I recommend all these books highly. It was with great difficulty the first time thro

No better historical fiction has been written.

I read the first two in the Aubrey/Maturin series (Master and Commander and Post Captain) a few years ago and liked them. In an idle moment, I recently picked up HMS Surprise and glanced at the first page. Thirty minutes later I was still reading and within the week I had finished the book. Unfortunately my vocabulary cannot do justice to describing just how good this book is. The characterizations are sympathetic and acute, the descriptions of seafaring are hypnotic and the battle scenes are wonderful. These books are not pulp fiction, but finely wrought and accurate depictions of the world nearly two centuries ago. Some of O'Brian's observations are so good, I felt like applauding at times. These books require some patience and discipline, but the pay-off is immense. I'm only sorry that it looks like I'm on the slippery slope that will lead to reading the 17 or 18 other novels in the series. I'm just too busy to read them right now, but there may not be anything I can do about it. If you want books to truly transport you somewhere else, this is the series.