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Like Holmes and Watson and Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, the friendship of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin in Patrick O'Brian's sea novels has become an international literary cult. Now it's to be tested in a Hollywood movie directed by Peter Weir and starring Russell Crowe. Will it survive the crossing? By James Hall
The music-room in the Governor's House at Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon, was filled with the triumphant first movement of Locatelli's C major quartet. The players, Italians pinned against the far wall by rows and rows of little round gilt chairs, were playing with passionate conviction as they mounted towards the penultimate crescendo, towards the tremendous pause and the deep, liberating final chord. And on the little gilt chairs at least some of the audience were following the rise with an equal intensity: there were two in the third row, on the left-hand side; and they happened to be sitting next to one another. The listener farther to the left was a man of between twenty and thirty whose big form overflowed his seat, leaving only a streak of gilt wood to be seen here and there. He was wearing his best uniform -- the white- lapelled blue coat, white waistcoat, breeches and stockings of a lieutenant in the Royal Navy...
-- From Master & Commander
ENTER Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, meeting for the first time and enjoying music, perhaps the one thing they have in common. This is the opening passage in Patrick O'Brian's first novel, Master & Commander, in his epic series about life in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. When it was published in l970 the public, as he liked to say, "turned a deaf ear, a blind eye".
Not everyone reacted this way, of course. And some astute critics recognised that here was something exceptional. But no one, least of all O'Brian, realised that this was the birth of what has become a legendary friendship in English fiction that occupied him for 30 years and produced 20 volumes. Remarkable for two characters who loved and needed each other but who, as O'Brian wrote, were almost as unlike as men could be -- unlike in nationality, religion, education, size, shape, profession, habit of mind.