From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Patrick O'Brien vs Horatio Hornblower...
Date: 4 Sep 92 17:28:30 GMT
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

In article <1992Sep02.134904.24630@brtph560.bnr.ca> Paul Schroeder writes:
>In article <7419@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>>
>>In article <1992Aug28.210852.21507@brtph560.bnr.ca> Paul Schroeder writes:

>>>In article <25322@castle.ed.ac.uk> pws@castle.ed.ac.uk (P W Stephenson)
>writes:
>>>>           Forester wrote more from a
>>>>present-day point of view while O'Brian writes as if he was a
>>>>contemporary of his characters.  (Insert `in a sense' into the last
>>>>sentence as many times as necessary.)  This perhaps explains why some
>>>>people find his prose strange.

>>>I agree that O'Brian is more of an historical novelist, and he uses a style
>>>that borders on arcane.

>>Now wait just a minute.  [...] I think this is very misleading.

>Perhaps "bordering on arcane" wasn't the appropriate description for
>O'Brian's style but I feel it is appropriate for some of the vocabulary
>he uses. 

For vocabulary maybe.  But not for larger issues of style, IMHO.

>Essentially, the point that I and the poster to whom I responded were
>trying to make was that O'Brian's style (in both a literary sense as
>well as in the approach to the genre) is considerably different than
>Forester's.  Forester wrote in a relatively plain straight-forward
>style that moved the narrative along in a conventional manner.
>O'Brian uses speech patterns of the period and narrative shifts that
>can be confusing; at times the reader is not quite sure what has taken
>place (and may or may not find out later in the book).
>An example of this was highlighted in a recent _Washington Post_
>article on O'Brian where it remains unclear as to the exact sexual
>relationship between Aubrey and Diana Villiers.

Well, again I think this is very misleading.

There's something to what you say, but you make the differences
sound much more extreme that I think they are.  For instance, most
of the time O'Brian's narrative moves along in a pretty conventional
manner.  I don't think you can find many cases of a confusing 
narrative shift.  There _are_ a number of times in _Post Captain_
where (as I mentioned before) a complete change of location could
occur between one paragraph and the next without any transition,
but this hardly ever occurred in the other novels (or at least
not in a way that forced me to notice).  There are times when you
find yourself reading Maturin's journal.  Maybe some of those
changes are too abrupt, but that sort of change is not very unusual
in fiction and not, I would say, very confusing.

I also think you will be hard pressed to find many inportant things
we never find out.  (There are all sorts of little things we're
not told, of course, as in all fiction.)

The particular example you give (Aubrey and Villiers) is not due to
confusing narrative shifts or any other difficulty of style but simply
because O'Brian (like many authors) doesn't feel it necessary to tell
all.  Moreover, the relevant stuff is in _Post Captain_, which I
think is the one with the most stylistic oddities by a long way.

In short, I think you're making O'Brian sound much more difficult than
he is.

-- jd
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