During the hymns and psalms, which a certain rivalry between Surprises and Dromedaries rendered more vehement than musical, his attention wandered, returning to his anonymous letter and his thoughts of Diana – of her particular sort of faithfulness – of her extremely spirited resentment of any slight – and it occurred to him that she was not unlike a falcon he had known when he was a boy in his godfather’s house in Spain, a haggard, a wild-caught peregrine of extraordinary dash and courage, death to herons, ducks and even geese, very gentle with those she liked but wholly irreconcilable and indeed dangerous if she was offended. Once the young Stephen had fed a goshawk before the falcon, and she had never come to him again, only staring implacably with that great fierce dark eye. ‘I shall never offend Diana, however,’ he observed.
Treason’s Harbour, Patrick O’Brian
5 comments:
The most fun literature of my life. I'm on my 4th time through the series and am currently on Treason's Harbor. It's Jane Austen with explosions. Lots of explosions...
That series is one of my favorites, too.
I bought my first Aubrey/Maturin novel "The Mauritius Command" in a shop in the Casper, WY airport in 1983. It was in a Day Books mass market paperback edition, and there was nothing in the front or rear matter of the book to indicate it was part of a series.
I was therefore surprised and delighted when the Norton trade paperback editions started coming out in the early 90s. I have only read the 20 books through in sequence once as they came out in the 90s.
I re-read them often, but never in complete sequence for some reason. Sometimes I'll start on one somewhere near the middle and read two or three in a row until I have had enough. Some of them I might have read five or six times.
I was cruising through DirecTV last night and happened on to "Master and Commander" which I watched through. I enjoy the movie, but am always disapointed that the actors who play Stephen Maturin and Barrett Bonden don't look anything like they should.
I share your sentiments regarding the two actors. However, Russell Crowe is Jack Aubrey in my mind's eye when reading the books. Most public libraries have freen download destinations for books in mp3 or wma format. The complete series is available with Simon Vance as narrator. Patrick Tull was the original narrator for the series, but Vance has grown on me. I set my mp3 player to turn off after 20 minutes and usually after 10, I'm conked out. Great cure for late night insomnia.
I still re- read them just the way you do, to savor; also have pages of commonplace book quotes from my first reading-- but somehow missed this one!
Some lines have become part of our regular discourse-- like that one about question and answer not being "a liberal form of discourse". At least part of this one may make it to the header...
For fans of my writing: an obscure early O'Brian title will be one of the books discussed in my book of a hundred sporting books, coming next month...
On one of my re-reads, I stopped counting "coffee" references when I got over 300 and I discovered in a gift book, Lobscouse and Spotted Dog: Which It's a Gastronomic Companion to the Aubrey/Maturin Novels, that the authors had already done the same. One of my favorite exchanges between Maturin, Jack and Killick was in The Mauritius Command:
'... This coffee has a damned odd taste.'
'This I attribute to the excrement of rats. Rats have eaten our entire stock; and I take the present brew to be a mixture of the scrapings at the bottom of the sack.'
'I thought it had a familiar tang,' said Jack. 'Killick, you may tell Mr Seymour, with my compliments, that you are to have a boat. And if you don't find at least a stone of beans among the squadron, you need not come back...'
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