“God be with you, ape”

The Thirteen-Gun Salute (1989), the thirteenth volume in Patrick O’Brian’s fine age of sail series, finds the odd couple best friends Captain Jack Aubrey and Doctor Stephen Maturin aboard the frigate the Diane enroute to the China Sea to ally England with the Sultan of Pulo Prabang, a piratical Malay state, before the enemy French can do so. To accomplish this, Jack is finally reinstated to the navy, after having been exiled from it a couple novels ago when framed for cheating on the stock market (Lucky Jack Aubrey at sea, on land he’s extraordinarily unfortunate).

Adding zest to the plot is the fact that Jack and Stephen’s traitor nemeses Ledward of the Treasury and Wray of the Admiralty will be involved in the negotiations on the French side. Adding an unpredictable element is the fact that the British envoy Mr. Fox being escorted aboard the Diane believes too proudly in the grandeur of his rank and too fervently in the importance of his mission, bears a sexual guilt and a strange hatred, and, most ominously, is no aficionado of music (violinist Jack and cellist Stephen having bonded over their shared love of classical music). Mr. Fox is an example of “A man who realizes he is unpopular deciding to make himself loathed.”

As is often the case in the series, both Jack and Stephen have left behind some uncomfortable situations at home: Jack’s life may be threatened by a “worm” among the British powers that be, while Stephen’s wife Diana is pregnant and argumentative (which is really down to Stephen’s finally abandoning his laudanum).

Interestingly, O’Brian is less interested in the espionage/political side of his story (the competitive negotiations for the treaty with the Sultan) than in the naval sides (e.g., sails, storms, currents, provisions, morale, gun practice, health care, working, singing, disciplining, and dining involved in a frigate) and natural sides (e.g., flora and fauna of the islands of the China Sea, from durians and orchids to tarsiers and rhinoceroses). O’Brian briefly sets up the situation, shows how Stephen gets intel via Chinese bankers, relates the Sultan’s doting on his “gazelle-eyed Ganymede” Abdul, and then cursorily--after the fact--resolves that part of his novel. He’s much more interested in depicting Jack dealing with callow midshipmen, a difficult rendezvous at sea, a typhoon, or a grounded ship or in depicting Stephen (“After medicine, my greatest interest is living things and their way of life)” climbing the Thousand Steps up the side of a volcano to stay in the sacred crater in a Buddhist temple in an Edenic setting full of wildlife that’s never learned to fear human beings and commune with orangutangs there.

Readers who need suspenseful, realtime, violent action scenes in their historical fiction--battles, skirmishes, combats, at sea and or on land--may be bored, as the only such action in the novel happens offstage. I don’t mind the lack of war scenes so much because the other parts of the book are prime and because I enjoy spending time with the contrasting and complementary friends Jack (a big, bluff British Anglican natural seaman) and Stephen (a compact, circumspect Irish-Catalan Catholic landlubber Naturalist/Surgeon/Intelligencer). I feel good when they say things to each other like “Now surely you’ll turn in, brother. You look destroyed.”

As ever, O’Brian writes vivid descriptions conveying what it was like to be at sea on a sailing ship of the line, like “In this clear weather, they could survey 700 square miles of sea... A pale cobalt dome of sky, darkening imperceptibly as it came down to the sharp horizon and the true azure of the great disc of ocean, two pure ideal forms and the ship between them, minute, real and incongruous.”

And plenty of vivid descriptions of flora and fauna, like “The creature, quite unharmed, stood there gently swaying on its long legs. It was a very large insect indeed, greenish, with immense antennae and a disproportionately small, meek, and indeed rather stupid face.”

Also as usual, he writes plenty of cool lines and ideas about human nature, political conflict, and natural history, like “Politics and delicacy can seldom go together,” "Stephen had never known a judge he liked," “Good and evil are so close at times... that there is scarcely the breadth of a hair between them,” and—

“Once again his mind turned to the question of integrity, a virtue that he prized very highly in others, although there were times when he had painful doubts about his own... Jack was a fair example... as devoid of self-consciousness as a man could well be... Steven had never seen him act a part.”

Audiobook reader Ric Jerrom remains the only reader I can imagine for the series, having become for me the big British voice of Jack and the lean Irish voice of Stephen. And I love his nasal, raspy, “shrewish” Killick, too.

Alas, this novel begins one of O’Brian’s story arcs within the overall careers of Jack and Stephen that may span a few books, so that this one ends with a fairly large cliffhanger. I also found the spy portion of the novel a little too sketchy and hinging on an unpleasant depiction of homosexuality (“pederasty”). But as it is a compact novel and as I continue to really enjoy spending time with Jack and Steven, I will happily (eventually) go onto book fourteen.

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