Reading Roundup, March 2024
The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carre (Bookshop|Library)
I picked this one up after reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and being totally absorbed. This one is good, but I think like a lot of Le Carre's later novels, the attention to highly-specific world politics of the time handicaps it to an extent for an audience of today. Whereas the Cold War espionage between Britain/US and the USSR still holds up in terms of metaphor and theme, who even really remembers what the western powers were doing in Cambodia and northeast Thailand during the Vietnam War era? Furthermore, the jaunting all around Southeast Asia in this one just feels like so much window-dressing, and unnecessary to the plotting or even the larger points Le Carre is trying to make through this story.
Foster by Claire Keegan (Bookshop|Library)
This very short novella (a short story, really) about an Irish girl from a poor and potentially abusive background living with her childless relatives for a summer, and the emotional secrets she unlocks. This doesn't seem to be Keegan's most popular offering (at least here in America), but it did exemplify for me (this is my first encounter with her writing) just how good she is at conveying deep emotion. It reminded me a bit of what I've read from Ian McEwan; both can devastate in the quietest way.
The Thirteen-Gun Salute by Patrick O'Brian (Bookshop|Library)
After a somewhat lengthier break from the series than I intended in order to finish The Honourable Schoolboy, I dove right back into this 13th volume of Aubrey-Maturin. This novel marks the beginning of a major voyage around the globe on the part of Jack and Stephen that will take five novels all told. In this one, their original mission to sail to the Pacific Coast of South America and participate in the undermining of the Spanish government there takes a detour, and they instead escort an envoy to the fictional Pulo Prabang in what we now call Indonesia. The book is chock-full of echoes and callbacks to earlier books - the envoy plot is lifted and then reformulated almost directly from H.M.S. Surprise, Jack's return to the Navy, among other elements, echoes Master and Commander, the espionage elements (that largely happen off-stage) recall The Fortune of War, among many others. But it never feels like a rehash.
This book is notable to me as it contains one of my favorite scenes in all of the canon: Stephen's journey to the Buddhist Temple at Kumai. To get there he must ascend the Thousand Steps up the exterior of the crater in which the temple is situated, pondering the history of the current Muslim-dominated population that has replaced a previous Hindu one, depicted primarily in the text by the former's destruction of the latter's reliefs set into the wall along the steps - at least up to a certain elevation. He also has a very close encounter with an orangutan, which is a spiritual experience for Stephen - but as we find when he enters the crater and descends to the temple, this is just the beginning of spiritual ecstasy for him. Within the crater, men have not been allowed to hunt animals for a very long time, and so Stephen finds that pretty much every animal he encounters is hand-tame. He, and we as readers, and Patrick O'Brian as author, spend an extended time reveling in it all. While I disagree to an extent with Mike and Ian over at The Lubber's Hole that it doesn't advance any characterization (in fact, I think it reinforces and explores Stephen's relationship to the natural world - and even perhaps advances his and our understanding of his stance on what separates human from animal), I think it also says something about one of the themes this book quietly explores, which is what each man finds makes life worth living. For Stephen, we have this magnificent extended journey to Kumai. For Jack, it's being back in the Navy above all, but there are quieter moments tied to his sailing the pinnace around the islands taking scientific readings for Alexander von Humboldt, where we see his purest pleasure in simple, small-craft sailing.
The character of Fox, the envoy, is something of a callback to two previous characters - the shape of the plot, as noted above, comes generally from the envoy Stanhope's arc in H.M.S. Surprise. Stanhope does not survive long enough to make it to his post, which is the big alteration here. The characterization of Fox is also something of a remix of Lord Clonfert from The Mauritius Command, who is an interesting psychological case-study. Clonfert is even recalled directly in this book by Stephen in reference to Fox - both characters clearly have some insecurity that compels them to arrogance. In this book, Fox is mostly right on the edge of being outright offensive, but once he has completed negotiating a treaty with Pulo Prabang, he goes right off the deep end. O'Brian ties this explicitly to Greek tragedy in a passage on "hybris" or what we know as hubris, and then in Fox's subsequent fate in the violent typhoon that ends the novel. I have to admit that personally I'm not always invested in the secondary characters that O'Brian introduces us to, but now that I've finished the book I can't stop thinking about Fox. It seems O'Brian was tussling with something in himself here potentially, and it's hard - especially since Fox isn't painted as wholly unsympathetic - not to reflect on my own potential hubris as well. Fox is definitely a character I will be paying closer attention to from the jump the next go-round.