The Unknown Shore – Patrick O’Brian

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.