21: The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey
Satirica rating:	Four stars: Not bad at all; good points, well written. Recommended.
Author:	Patrick O\’Brian
ASIN:	039306025X
Label:	W. W. Norton & Company
Publisher:	W.W. Norton & Company
Date added:	2007-04-26 10:42:11

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In my CD collection, I have several performances in various media of the Contrapunctus XIV of Johann Sebastian Bach–that great final fugue left uncompleted. At the end of the manuscript, there is, written by Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach, “Ãœber dieser Fuge, wo der Nahme B A C H im Contrasubject angebracht worden, ist der Verfasser gestorben.” (”At the point where the composer introduces the name BACH in the countersubject to this fugue, the composer died.”)

No more jarringly painful notes nor words exist in Western music.

I am struck by the same sense of loss and despair in reading the manuscript of Patrick O’Brian’s final work, titled simply 21.

For those of you who don’t know, O’Brian is the Anglo-Irish author who wrote the Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin series of novels based on the British navy of the early 19th century. The first of the central characters are Jack Aubrey, a lieutenant in the navy and about to receive his first command in book one of the canon, Master and Commander, and progressing through his receiving his pennant as an admiral of the Blue at the conclusion book 20, Blue at the Mizzen. The second character is Stephen Maturin, a physician and natural philosopher, who, in the course of the books, also becomes an intelligence agent for the British. The movie Master and Commander, with Russell Crowe as Jack and Paul Bettany as Doctor Maturn, was based both on the book Master and Commander (#1 in the series, written in 1970) and The Far Side of the World (#10, 1984).

Of especial note is the fact that Jack plays passable violin, and Stephen plays the violoncello–many evenings shipboard in the stories, they retire to the ship’s (usually the HMS Surprise) great cabin and perform “current” works together–Luigi Boccherini, Beethoven, Mozart, etc.

“21″ simply…stops halfway through chapter 3; I purchased the manuscript edition which has the typeset on the left pages and O’Brian’s handwritten manuscript on the right. Oddly, I have a printed version of The Art of Fugue that is published in the same manner.

The writing is absolutely wonderful; arid, sarcastic humor; languid, thoughtful phrases; and enough detail to satisfy even a Thomas Hardy aficionado. If your fiction intake usually consists of Stephen King, Tom Clancy, etc., (good authors, both) then be aware you’ll need to alter your reading habits. O’Brian’s books are not volumes that can be skim-read, but rather require concentration; they are true literature.

If you haven’t read these wonderful gems of English literature, I enthusiastically recommend that you do–but be prepared for a kick to the solar plexus when you get to page 112 in 21, just like that last episode in Contrapunctus XIV.