The Aubrey-Maturin Series

Patrick O'Brian's epic series of 20 novels chronicling the entire adult lives of Jack Aubrey and his dear friend Stephen Maturin is by far the most impressive and deepest work of fiction that I've ever read. The novels themselves are more like chapters in a larger overarching story, a story that happens to be over 2 million word long on the printed page. The story starts at the beginning of the men's friendship and the beginning of their professional careers, and continues on through their adult lives, through all kinds of tragedy and windfall, until they're experienced old men. The series took 35 years to write, and probably close to as many years transpire in fictional time within the series. Aubrey and Maturin are completely opposite characters, Aubrey would rather charge boldly headlong into battle whereas Maturin is a long term thinker who would coldly exploit a political situation to achieve similar aims. In a sense they're crudely combined literary elements, yin and yang, to give the author the chance to humanize the adventures they experience in a broader context. For example, the pair of protagonists have opposite views on British colonies fighting for their independence, and the dialogues that they have with each on the topic are a perfect mechanism to explore the inner feelings of each man with the readers. Maturin is given a special status in O'Brian's world, that of an equal to a ship's captain. This parity and friendship avoids a lot of the loneliness of command that would otherwise silence Aubrey, much to the reader's benefit. O'Brian also makes excellent use of each of the men's ignorance, Maturin for instance, spends his life at sea but needs to constantly be condescended to by the more knowledgeable sailors for explanations of the goings on of a ship. Without Maturin's persistent ignorance in naval matters, most readers would miss so much of the detail that makes O'Brian's world so rich. And O'Brian didn't skimp on details. Everything from which knots are used in each part of the rigging, to how cannon drills are practiced, to how pay gets dispersed, even to the petty politics of shipyard supplies of paint is in the books. O'Brian is widely lauded for his historical accuracy, and even includes numerous actual historical events. I've never come across another writer who could take something as dull as months in a library reading old ship's logs and turn it into such a compelling story.

The only thing that rivals the skill of O'Brian's writing, is the scale of it. The Aubrey-Maturin series is unique in it's scope, and that scope allowed it to be unique in the breadth of it's themes. Chronicling every single event that happens to these men makes the novels' through line more than just a character arc in a story, it makes it their life story. Sometimes they learn and grow into better people, then maybe a decade later they have bitter resentment, sometimes they're indifferent to a situation and sometimes they're irrationally caught up in a moment that doesn't mean anything. Aubrey and Maturin are the most thoroughly developed characters I've ever read or seen in any source of fiction of any kind. In a book like 'To Kill a Mockingbird', we follow Scout for a few years, and she learns a tremendous and valuable lesson, we feel we've gotten to know her a bit because we've seen her character develop a bit. By contrast, O'Brian's pair doesn't just learn and lesson, and become a little bit better men, that does admittedly happen here and there, but the totality of the novels is so huge that you can't really say that they're about the growth of their characters. Maybe it's easier to say that instead of the stories being about the characters' growth, the stories are about the characters themselves. O'Brian's magnum opus is genuinely unparalleled.