Richard Temple: A Novel

By Patrick O'Brian

Book Overview

Available for the first time in the United States?a tale of art and espionage during World War II by the best-selling author of the Aubrey-Maturin series. The eponymous protagonist of this novel is a prisoner of the German army in France; but as we soon discover, he is nobody's idea of a hero. In order to keep himself sane while denying the charges and absorbing the beatings of his captors, Richard Temple conducts a minute examination?one might almost call it a prosecution?of his own life. Temple escapes from a blighted childhood and his widowed, alcoholic mother thanks to an artistic gift, which is the one thing of value he has to his name. His life as a painter in London of the 1930s is cruelly deprived. In order to eat, he squanders his one asset by becoming a forger of art, specializing in minor works by Utrillo. He is rescued by the love of a beautiful and wealthy woman, and it is the failure of this relationship, coupled with the outbreak of war, that propels him into the world of espionage.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393061876
• ISBN13: 9780393061871
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: W. W. Norton
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 1.3" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

If you have never faced failure...don't bother reading this novel.

Richard Temple is not an adventure novel, and if you read it with the expectation that Captain Jack is going to come bounding over the waves to the rescue you will be disappointed. On the other hand, if you have ever felt a connection with Dr. Maturin at his darker moments you will appreciate this novel. It paints a bleak self-portrait of a man who can't reach the brass ring. A portrait that casts in sharp relief the risks faced by a man living on the edge of spiritual and temporal poverty, not so much because he wants to, but because it is the way his life stubbornly insists on unfolding. It is not uplifting, but it plays on fears rarely discussed by "successful" people and it is, for that reason, compelling and vaguely terrifying, especially if the reader can connect emotionally with the main character. I could... and for what its worth I enjoyed this book. It was like watching a horror movie in which the cinematography makes the viewer feel as if he or she is running down a dark and forbidding hallway in slow motion with some implacable and unfriendly presence moving in the shadows just behind. I kept hoping that the mirror on the hallway wall would not reveal my own image.