Click here to ediI take back what I said about O’Brian’s depiction of adversity and calamity in The Unknown Shore (though not his tiresome overdramatization of excess). The terror and the magnitude of the seas off Cape Horn and the atrocious hunger, exposure, sickness and despair that the castaway sailors of His Majesty’s Ship The Wager underwent were all too real.
 
Grann’s book is the historical account of the ill-fated expedition that left Portsmouth in 1740 and the personal stories of the very few men who, years later, made it back to England against all the odds. It’s one of those chronicles that is so meticulously and carefully researched that the author has all the events and elements totally clear in his mind and is able to lay them out in a lucid and immediately apprehensible story. “A tale of Shipwreck, Murder and Mutiny” reads the subtitle, and so it is! A true story, rather than a dry history, and far more compelling than O’Brian’s fiction, which overlooks much of the real drama.
 
Unless things have changed since I was a lad (I do hope so), when history is taught at school, the one thing that is never brought home to youngsters is the fact that these events actually happened and these people actually lived. If you had been there, you would have seen Napoleon, Cleopatra or Siddhartha Gautama. That’s what fascinates me about written history these days: and Grann does make the events and people feel real. It undoubtedly helped that he went by boat himself down the Patagonian coast to what is still called Wager Island and saw the environment of that forbidding place, where the sailors were marooned. The permanent absence of food, save for a little wild celery and seaweed. The sleet and lashing rains. The raging seas and the vast distances to human habitation on the remote shores of Chiloe Island or Brazil. Seeing rotten planks washed up from the 280-year-old wreck would certainly have focused his mind on the veracity of the tale.
 
The Wager is well-paced, nicely structured and exciting. If you have the slightest penchant for naval history or seafaring yarns, don’t miss out on this one.

O’Brian’s early voyage on the pages of seafaring drama shows a writer in the learning stages of crafting character, ambience and story. He was clearly his own best pupil, because from the lessons acquired, he went on to write the fabulous 18-novel Aubrey-Maturin series.
 
In Byron and Barrow, we have the prototypes of his twin protagonists, and the fictional recreation of an ill-fated 18th-century expedition will provide a template for the stories to come. In the making of it all, O’Brian falls into all kinds of error and excess. When you start out as a writer, you have to throw it all out there and learn what you can from your mistakes. 
 
It means we accompany the two friends on not just challenging ordeals of shipwreck, hunger and exposure, but on extremes of endurance that outdo each other ad infinitum. Just when you thought the sea could not get more monstrous, the exhaustion more consummate, the deprivation more abject, they get even worse. In the later novels, the extravagance will be managed—or else heroes and readers alike would not make it out alive—and in those books, also, the characters will be properly developed and deepened.
 
While it is only right for an author to be on the side of their lead characters, it starts to grate when Jack and Tobias, even under protracted, unspeakable duress, never display the slightest meanness or selfishness. These examples of nobility of soul, disasters at sea, and gruesome trials on the inhospitable unknown shore, make for something of a dated ripping yarn, not least when the native Patagonians are depicted as brutal savages, with the exception of the converted Chilotans, who consequently “knew how to live like human beings”. This attitude might well have been the one prevalent at the time of the tale in the 1740s, but O’Brian writing in 1959 might have know better and tempered his account accordingly.

The tale remains a very fair attempt, with evidence of skill, pace and wit. Nonetheless, I would recommend anyone interested in reading O’Brian—and I do wholeheartedly recommend him—to skip this book, and the unhappy Wager, and set sail in “Master and Commander”, with Aubrey and Maturin on the Sophie.

I was talking to a lawyer last week about how all the state needs to do these days to disempower a citizen and turn them into a nonentity is to take away their access to internet and banking. The precariousness of status and autonomy in an untrustworthy world was a theme that came to prominence in the 20th century; in the artifice of our present, all smoke and mirrors and alternative truths, it conditions all that a person might propose in their life.
 
Philip K. Dick, as ever, has a whole lot of serious fun with the idea of a powerful individual rendered an unknown. His existentialist sci fi carries the reader forward on a wave of rooting for the flawed Taverner, dropping in occasional absurdist treats during the ride.
 
I got the feeling that Jason Taverner secretly knows that he’s a fraud from the moment he wakes up, and then plays out the destructive script of his worst fear: “I don’t exist.” In this alternative reality, Dick presents us with a warning of a police state of forced labour camps, the slaughter of students, the sterilization of blacks and a cult of the leader. He throws up philosophical and theological arguments and introduces mescaline to make Taverner and us question and wonder — and fear the dangerous power of fundamentalist religion twisted into meaninglessness. An abusive policeman declares: “All flesh is like grass. Like low-grade roachweed most likely. Unto us a child is born, unto us a hit is given.”
 
I found pleasing gravitas in a certain cultural weight leant to the novel by references that start out with Dowland’s lament in the title, respect shown by characters for Rilke, Brecht and Sibelius, and respect shown by Dick to his teenage character, Kathy, who is reading Proust, and who continues Taverner’s quotation from Finnegan’s Wake with: “When the old washerwomen at dusk are merging into trees and rocks.” Together with Felix Buckman’s (the eponymous policeman) poetic reflections, they provide a kind of choral commentary.
 
At the same time, Phil Dick being Phil Dick, we have some priceless humour. The protagonist has set upon him a gelatine-like Callisto cuddle sponge, Kathy’s talking toy, Cheerful Charlie, brings strongly to mind Johnny Cab in “Total Recall”, and Buckman’s sister mentions a porn song called “Go down, Moses.”
 
Two other moments that jumped out at me were—in this 1974 novel—Taverner’s question: “Do you have an encyclopedia machine?”, and when Kathy asks in the Italian restaurant: “Are you responding to my warmth?” Really rather nice.