From: Paul Schroeder
Subject: Re: Patrick O'Brien vs Horatio Hornblower...
Organization: BNR
Date: Fri, 04 Sep 1992 20:51:40 GMT

In article <7460@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>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
>

I stand by the statements I made.  Is O'Brian difficult to read?  Not compared
to James Joyce, William Golding (beyond _Lord of the Flies_), or Joseph Conrad,
among others.  But compared to writers like Forester or even Graham Greene, I
think so.  Does being "difficult to read" correlate to literary merit?  By no
means.  What does "difficult to read" mean?  Elevated vocabulary, elaborate
sentence structure, complicated plots, complex philosophy, or just being
boring?  Maybe "difficult to read" means a book you don't want to take to the
beach.  Whatever, O'Brian's books require more of the reader than Forester's,
they are richer in character and thought, and he is worthy of literary merit
IMHO.
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