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Patrick O'Brian : A Life Revealed
by Dean King
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (2000-03-15)
ISBN: 0805059768
EAN: 9780805059762
Dewey Decimal #: 823.912
Binding/Media: Hardcover - 488 pages
Edition: 1st
SKU: 3AB6-002-7-0707
Condition: VG+
Comments: First Edition - Trade edition, full number line. Clean copy, no markings by previous owners; Dust jacket slightly rubbed/soiled; Corners and ends of spine lightly bumped; Minor edgewear; Tight copy. *International Buyers Welcome!* (except for prohibitively heavy items, as noted) - Satisfied customers in over 40 countries! We ship quickly and guarantee satisfaction. Your purchase helps support a U. Chicago student
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
"It is only in knowing the truth about O'Brian's life that we can fully grasp the magnitude and nature of his accomplishment.... His genius was largely that he had connected with his 'different self' to create from disappointing reality--quite magically--extraordinary fiction, fiction that, for so many of us, embodies the sheer joy of reading. --FROM THE INTRODUCTION In 1991, when The New York Times Book Review proclaimed Patrick O'Brian the writer of "the greatest historical novels ever written," making him an overnight sensation in the United States, O'Brian was already in his mid-seventies and had already had two distinct and remarkable writing careers. In less than a decade, O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, ultimately twenty novels strong, became an unprecedented literary juggernaut, with legions of devoted fans around America and around the world. With O'Brian's death in January 2000, curiosity about the carefully guarded secrets of his life has peaked. Here, Dean King tells the story of a man, an artist and an intellectual, born Richard Patrick Russ, who first achieves literary recognition as an adolescent, when he publishes a series of popular adventure stories. After the Second World War, he emerges as Patrick O'Brian, a writer of dark, sometimes tortured short stories and highly literary novels. He enjoys success as a translator, even as a biographer. Slowly, the O'Brian persona, forged in his own imagination and refined by years of rumor and speculation, takes form, until his ultimate triumphant arrival as a masterful historical novelist and chronicler of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars. O'Brian's past--both real and imagined--is linked directly to his writing, as he drew deeply on the painful events of his early life. It has long been assumed that he himself was the model for the polymathic naval surgeon and intelligence agent Stephen Maturin, who, along with rough-and-tumble Captain Jack Aubrey, forms the heart of O'Brian's monumental roman-fleuve. The truth is more complex: each of these indelible characters is wholly original, yet in each we can hear deep echoes of O'Brian's own history. King's biography, the first ever of this famously secretive man, is an extraordinary achievement, a vivid, searing portrait of an intense and complex human being, whose grudges were as fiercely held as his loyalties; who was as famous for orneriness as he was for brilliant artistic creation; and whose encyclopedic knowledge of everything from ornithology to Catalan history delighted hundreds of thousands of readers and will surely enthrall generations to come.
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Amazon.com Review
Hailed as the Irish author of "the greatest historical novels ever written"--the 20 swashbuckling Napoleonic-era adventures starring Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin--Patrick O'Brian was not such a great guy. In fact, he wasn't really Patrick O'Brian: he was actually the Englishman Richard Patrick Russ, who abandoned his semiliterate Welsh wife and dying, spina bifida-plagued child in 1940 and reinvented himself as a writer and as a human being. He did well as a writer, winning kudos as a biographer (Picasso), translator (Papillon), and old literary sea lion. But he was less than humane, as Dean King's A Life Revealed reveals. The son of a rotten father, Russ/O'Brian became a rotten father himself, cutting off all contact with his son, granddaughters, and even siblings. As he chillingly wrote in his biography, "Parents are supposed to love their children, yet surely there is the implied condition that the children should be reasonably lovable?" Though he was kinder to his second wife, the Countess Mary Tolstoy, whose reckless driving injured both of them, he once wrote that Picasso was "sucked dry and rendered sterile by women, children, routine." For his part, O'Brian preferred poverty and exile in Southern France with Mary--remote from his family origins, penning masterpieces in a house with books but no electricity or running water. Only in his 70s did he become rich and famous. You can't deny the many striking parallels between O'Brian's life and his work--even though he did. Rotten fathers permeate his fiction, as the fathomless woe must have permeated him upon his mother's death from tuberculosis in 1918, when he was 4. It's great fun to read about his mad-inventor father's machine to cure VD by electrocuting the bladder and compare it to Maturin's practice and devices--and to hear about the future author's salty Uncle Morse telling the lad about encounters with pirates. Captain Aubrey clearly derives partly from Patrick's sociable man-of-action brother Mike (who changed his surname to O'Brien, another family defector). And of course Maturin proves to be in large part a self-portrait. Fans of Aubrey and Maturin may find King's A Sea of Words (a lexicon of arcane terms that O'Brian uses) more delightful than his exposé of O'Brian's impressive yet appalling life, but it is one thorough and convincing exposé. --Tim Appelo
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Customer Reviews
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Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed
Rating  (4)
Date: 2010-04-02
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Good read if you are an Aubrey-Maturin Series fan. Author does the best he can with a man who was careful to guard the true facts about his life. Also, he provides a good synopsis of all of O'Brian's works (he could have provided a spolier alert in regard to some of the things he revealed about the Aubrey-Maturin Series so make sure you have completed the series before reading this book).
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Scratches the surface, but not quite there
Rating  (3)
Date: 2009-07-10
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
1 Star for thorough research
2 Stars for tying this together into a readable chronology of Parick O'Brian's life
3 Stars for adding value to my Patrick O'Brian reading experience
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Surprise! (but not H.M.S.)
Rating  (5)
Date: 2009-06-05
1 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
Jack Aubrey commanded H.M.S. Surprise, but this biography of Patrick O'Brian is a surprise in it's own right. Dean King has done an excellent job in his biography of the famous author, especially given the lengths to which O'Brian went to conceal his real background. I enjoyed the book very much, and although Tolstoy's competing biography of O'Brian claims that Dean King has made a lot of mistakes in his book, still it was King who opened up the truth about O'Brian.
Not to give the wrong impression, I am a real fan of O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin books, and I consider him to be a wonderful author. His personal life is outside my judgment, and I was fascinated to follow his progress from humble beginnings to fame.
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A Fine Biography
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-04-02
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is a fine biography of O'Brian, particularly in light of the problems faced by the author. In the first place, O'Brian attempted, at every turn, to suppress all knowledge of the facts of his early life. King was not, in short, an 'official' biographer who was presented with stacks of diaries and journals and invited to ask any question that might occur to him. Nevertheless, King was able to ground his narrative on a bedrock of serious scholarship and a first-hand awareness of his subject's work, ethos and experience.
It is said that a successful biography requires a degree of affection for the biographical subject, something that is complicated when that subject is, by turns, both secretive and irascible. The subject was also quite capable of utilizing his impressive erudition as a weapon, one that he could use as both a stiletto and a bludgeon. King is honest with regard to O'Brian's nature and shortcomings, but (without overlooking them) sees past them to O'Brian's significant strengths as a man and as a writer. Material success came relatively late, but O'Brian labored diligently, trusting in his monumental project and following his own lights. His tenacity and dedication make his eventual recognition all the more sweet and King charts the travails but also luxuriates, with O'Brian, in that ultimate recognition. The result is a narrative with a plot arc that one would expect to find in fiction, but here finds in real life.
I am not a fanatical O'Brian devotee and came to the book as a lover of good biographical writing. O'Brian fans, however, will relish the book as will students of biography. Ultimately it is very hard not to love a dedicated, talented individual whose tastes run to Jane Austen and Samuel Johnson and who feels utterly at home in the eighteenth century.
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A Man and Himself
Rating (4)
Date: 2008-02-17
5 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
For those of you who always thought that the father of Aubrey & Maturin was an Irishman, this book is a disillusionment.
This is a pathfinding biography (the word 'revealed' in the subtitle is only partly appropriate) of Richard Patrick Russ. Patrick Russ was an Englishman of German descent ('Russ' indicates immigration from further East in earlier centuries, possibly re-immigration), born in London in 1914. Of all years.
He is best known for inventing Patrick O'Brian, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. These 3 men somehow played or replayed different aspects of Russ's real life. To what extent is not fully disclosed yet.
Russ had changed his name to O'Brian in 45. When King wrote the first version of this book, O'Brian was still alive. He did not cooperate. King did not have the access to authentic sources that the second biographer, O'Brian's stepson, was going to have later. I have not read that second biography yet, so I can't talk about that.
The subject is as fascinating as a volume of the famous series of 'historical' novels. Russ seems to have been less than a perfect family man and friend, to put it mildly. The discrepancy to the morality in his novels' heroes is strong, but would we call somebody a hypocrite whose fictional creations follow standards that their creator had failed to meet? A question that King raises in his introduction.
Required reading for all who want to understand better where it all came from.
And since the book is out of print, I expect a properly updated version to show up sooner or later.
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