The Hundred Days (Aubrey - Maturin Series #19)

Amazon.com
The year is 1815, and Europe's most unpopular (not to mention tiniest) empire-builder has escaped from Elba. In The Hundred Days, it's up to Jack Aubrey--and surgeon-cum-spymaster Stephen Maturin--to stop Napoleon in his tracks. How? For starters, Aubrey and his squadron have been dispatched to the Adriatic coast, to keep Bonapartist shipbuilders from beefing up the French navy. Meanwhile, one Sheik Ibn Hazm is fomenting an Islamic uprising against the Allies. The only way to halt this maneuver is to intercept the sheik's shipment of gold--because in the Napoleonic era, as in our own, even the most ardent of mercenaries requires a salary.

The Hundred Days is the 19th (and, we are told, the penultimate) installment of O'Brian's epic. Like many of its predecessors, it features a fairly swashbuckling plot, complete with cannon fire, exotic disguises, and Aubrey's suspenseful, slow-motion pursuit of an Algerian xebek. Yet it never turns into a mere exercise in Hornblowerism. Partly this is due to O'Brian's delicate touch with character--the relationship between extroverted Aubrey and introverted Maturin has deepened with each book, and even Aubrey's reunion with his childhood companion Queenie Keith is full of novelistic nuance: "They sat smiling at one another. An odd pair: handsome creatures both, but they might have been of the same sex or neither." Nor does the author focus too exclusively on his dynamic duo. Indeed, The Hundred Days is very much a chronicle of a floating community, which Maturin describes as "his own village, his own ship's company, that complex entity so much more easily sensed than described: part of his natural habitat."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Napoleon escapes from Elba, and the fate of Europe hinges on a desperate mission: Stephen Maturin must ferret out the French dictator's secret link to the powers of Islam, and Jack Aubrey must destroy it. Boldly conceived and brilliantly executed, The Hundred Days is Patrick O'Brian's most ambitious novel yet, and surely one of his most rewarding. In this climactic — but not final! — adventure in the celebrated Aubrey/Maturin series, O'Brian succeeds in grafting his familiar, ever compelling principal characters to an historical event of tumultuous significance: the final defeat of Napoleon. The result is entertainment, excitement, and an intriguing exercise in what if . . . history, all encompassed in a magnificently rounded and complex work of fiction.|

SYNOPSIS

Patrick O'Brian is far and away the best of the Napoleonic storytellers, and his new book, The Hundred Days, is the 19th in a series telling of the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his friend, Dr. Stephen Maturin. It is also one of the best of the series; a classic naval adventure, crammed with incident, superbly plotted and utterly gripping. In our exclusive feature, Bernard Cornwell, author of the celebrated Richard Sharpe novels (and a fair Napoleonic storyteller himself) reviews the penultimate book in the celebrated Aubrey-Maturin series.

FROM THE CRITICS

Paul Kennedy - New York Times

. . .[T]hese naval tales are blended into a larger panorama of Georgian society and politics, science, medicine [and] botany. . . .Is this, then, the end of the line for the O'Brian series?. . . .it seems a fair guess that our famous duo will shortly appear in [the Southern] hemisphere for further adventures.

New Yorker

They're funny, they're exciting, they're informative. There are legions of us who gladly ship out time and time again under Captain Aubrey.

John Skow - Time Magazine

. . .[T]he series swims . . .on an ocean of wondrous language. . . .If there is a serious flaw, it is that since the novels are mostly about men, they are probably mostly for men. . . . .female characters. . .remain ashore. . .

Publishers Weekly

The Aubrey-Maturin series (The Commodore, etc.) nears the two dozen mark the way it began, with colorful historical background, smooth plotting, marvelous characters and great style. The title refers to Napoleon's escape from Elba and brief return to power. Capt. Jack Aubrey must stop a Moorish galley, loaded with gold for Napoleon's mercenaries, from making its delivery. The action takes us into two seas and one ocean and continues nearly nonstop until the climax in the Atlantic. We're quickly reacquainted with the two heroes: handsome sea dog Jack Aubrey, by now a national hero, and Dr. Stephen Maturin, Basque-Irish ship's doctor, naturalist, English spy and hopelessly incompetent seaman. Nothing stays the same, alas: Jack has gained weight almost to obesity, and Stephen is desolated by the death of his dashing, beautiful wife--but they're still the best of friends, each often knowing what the other is thinking. The prose moves between the maritime sublime and the Austenish bon mot ("a man generally disliked is hardly apt to lavish good food and wine on those who despise him, and Ward's dinners were execrable"). There are some favorite old characters, notably Aubrey's steward, Preserved Killick: "ill-faced, ill-tempered, meagre, atrabilious, shrewish" and thoroughly amusing. Chief among entertaining newcomers is Dr. Amos Jacob, a Cainite Jew ("they derive their descent from the Kenites, who themselves have Abel's brother Cain as their common ancestor"), who comes from a family of jewel merchants and has an encyclopedic grasp of Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish languages (and politics). Jacob is as expert as Stephen at spying and even more of a landlubber. O'Brian continues to unroll a splendid Turkish rug of a saga, and if it seems unlikely that the sedentary Stephen would hunt lions in the Atlas mountains (with the Dey of Algiers!), O'Brian brings off even this narrative feat with aplomb. (Oct.)

Library Journal

For the benefit of those who are unacquainted with O'Brian, it was nearly 30 years ago that he began writing his elaborately staged historical seafaring novels about the escapades of Tory naval captain Jack Aubrey and his physician-scientist friend Stephen Maturin. Series fans know how O'Brian takes a few established facts of history and contrapuntally builds an adventure story around them in which Aubrey and Maturin play some indispensable role. On this 19th outing, the dauntless duo performs feats of derring-do to help thwart Napoleon's plans to conquer Europe. The book teems with amusing scenes, vivid dialog, glib phrase-making, and the tall-tale-spinner's gift for never taking the picaresque adventures of his characters seriously. Behind these merits, however, the plot moves with a medieval slowness. The spark of life is missing, and even the most ardent O'Brian idolaters would have to admit that he is beginning to show traces of the assembly line. Not recommended except for those libraries determined to have a complete set of O'Brian's works. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/98.]--A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston Read all 13 "From The Critics" >

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