Rating: 
Summary: From Brazil to Boston to the Baltic!
Review: This volume is the third in a mini-trilogy within the larger Aubrey-Maturin series, and it's rather more given to personal and political rather than purely naval affairs. Again, it opens where the previous volume closed, with the victory of Shannon over the Chesapeake and the arrival of both at Halifax. While they're being feted by local society for the victory, Jack, in a peke over his lack of mail from home, gets carried away in an indiscretion with a local fortune-hunter, which haunts him for the rest of the book. Diana Villiers, meanwhile, has a parallel problem as a result of her liaison with Johnson in the previous volume. The three finally leave Canada for England on the packet carrying the great news, but are hotly pursued by a couple of American privateers apparently in Johnson's employ; he wants both his papers and his woman back. When they reach England, Steven's own intelligence coup leads to his being sent on a mission to the Baltic, where he must convince a Catalan contingent to desert the Napoleonic cause, and this whole episode is one of the most interesting I've read yet. In the latter stages of the mission, however, Jack and Steven find themselves in the clutches of the French, and then in prison in Paris, and Steven's talents are called for again. This one is more a spy adventure than a sea story, but it's very enjoyable for all that. (It took me an embarrassingly long time to catch on to the title, though.)
Rating:
Summary: Solid genre work
Review: When I purchased a few more of the Aubrey-Maturin series, the clerks behind the counter tried to recall upon which cable network the series was being televised. Their memories did not serve them well, because they had the Aubrey-Maturin series mixed up with the A & E channel's Horatio Hornblower series. The mistake was understandable,though, because O'Brian's series clearly shows the author's awareness that he is plowing a field that a series of naval novels has already furrowed. Yet, the Aubrey/Maturin novels do not seem like "knock-offs" of the Horatio Hornblowers; instead, they are quite interesting in their own right. Aubrey, the sea captain, and Maturin, his ship's surgeon and an intelligence agent, are both interesting, larger than life, and yet human, characters. The technique of telling real-life sea battles and portraying real historical personages as minor characters is as old as naval historical fiction, but O'Brian does it so well it never seems forced or pedantic. The recurring themes of the novel--the consummate sea captain who is all asea on land, the consummate intelligence agent who is anything but intelligent in matters of the heart, do not seem too clicheed,though the author and the reader use them as touchstones, decorative fill-in between the exciting naval stuff. The Surgeon's Mate manages to make both its naval scenes and its "other story" quite interesting, which is not always as true as the other O'Brian books, in which the naval battles are so fascinating, one longs to be done with the romantic and personal troubles of the protagonists and move on to another sea engagement. The social commentary--people of the very early 19th C. were human like us, but the social structure was quite different--is, as always in this series, effective because it is not a centerpiece. We see over and over in these books how cultured and yet how barbaric the practice of this time could be.This is a really good read. This is a really good series. If you haven't given Maturin and Aubrey a go, you should!
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