Every Version of Master and Commander

Peter Weir's film is one of the rare adaptations that matches the spirit of its source without slavishly following the plot. Russell Crowe plays Aubrey with physical authority and genuine warmth, Paul Bettany's Maturin is the best version of that character outside the page, and the film's recreation of life aboard a Napoleonic frigate remains the most convincing ever committed to celluloid. The score, built around period instruments and Boccherini, is exceptional. It won Oscars for cinematography and sound editing, and deserved both. That it failed at the box office and was never followed by a sequel is one of the sharper disappointments in recent cinema history.

The first novel, Master and Commander, is the right entry point and holds up as a complete story on its own terms. O'Brian introduces Aubrey and Maturin at a concert in Port Mahon, gets them aboard the sloop HMS Sophie, and takes them through the Mediterranean campaign of 1800 and 1801. The Napoleonic Wars are the backdrop but never the point: the point is this particular friendship, and O'Brian establishes it with complete confidence from the opening pages. Start here, and if the voice takes hold, you have nineteen more books waiting.

The Unknown Shore predates the Aubrey-Maturin series and exists in an ambiguous relationship to it. O'Brian based it on Commodore Anson's 1740 circumnavigation, and his two central characters, Jack Byron and Tobias Barrow, are unmistakably sketches for Aubrey and Maturin: same dynamic, same gap in temperament and class, same warmth. It is not as good as the mature series, but it is fascinating as a draft, and for anyone who has finished the twenty novels it reads as a kind of origin document. Come to it last rather than first.

By The Commodore (book seventeen), O'Brian's control of his material is complete. Aubrey has risen to flag rank, Maturin's intelligence work has grown darker and more morally tangled, and the friendship carries twenty years of accumulated weight. It is not the place to start, but as a demonstration of what literary series fiction can achieve across the long form, it is the volume that makes the case most forcefully. The prose is at its most assured and the emotional stakes are at their highest.