Word: aubreys
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...Jack Aubrey is a fighting captain, brave and beefy, unsubtle except in naval matters and mathematics. Stephen Maturin, Irish and Catalan, sallow and scrawny, is a gifted surgeon who can whip off a shattered arm or leg and Bob's your uncle; he is also a naturalist, a rare linguist, and a shrewd intelligence agent for the British Admiralty...
...civilizing nicety in this most civilized of narrations is that the two are passable amateur musicians. Maturin plays the cello, and as Aubrey admits, "I scrape a little, sir. I torment a fiddle from time to time." As chapters end--chapters of blood, crashing seas and weevily sea biscuit--the two are likely to take solace together, tormenting Locatelli or Boccherini. Friendship, lifelong and ramified, between these two and with recurring minor characters, is the bedrock theme of the novels...
Author O'Brian, who has sailed on square-rigged ships, is a meticulous naval scholar and medical historian. The battles in which Aubrey distinguishes himself and Maturin repairs the wounded are real, borrowed from history (the two are passengers on H.M.S. Java when the U.S.S. Constitution, now a tourist attraction in Boston Harbor, defeats the British ship off Brazil in his sixth novel, The Fortune of War) and retold in language nearly understandable to a landsman ("A burton-tackle to the chesstree. Lead aft to a snatch block fast to the aftermost ringbolts and forward free. Look alive there...
...Brian is also a shameless wag, who early in the series has the hulking Aubrey escape overland from the French disguised as a dancing bear, led by Maturin as bear trainer, and who is not above calling a ferocious Spanish xebec-frigate defeated by Aubrey the Cacafuego, which means exactly what first-year Spanish students think it means (s___-fire...
...lives a life of ritualized civility in the South of France. Tea at four (or "I'm afraid I grow fractious"), whiskey at six. An interview remains politely impersonal. He has sailed; he studied medicine; he sees great value in the rigorous, hierarchical politeness of the Royal Navy in Aubrey's time. But he admits that he has forgotten some details of his novels 10 or 15 books ago and shares some uncertainties about those to come. Not long ago he was at work on Chapter 3 of the untitled 20th novel, and he remarked, rather direly, "I have...