The Hundred Days

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 manoeuvre is to intercept the sheikh'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) instalment of O'Brian's epic. Like many of its predecessors, it features a 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. In part, 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."

Finally, O'Brian shows his usual expertise in balancing the great events with the most minuscule ones. Other authors have written about battles at sea, and still others have recorded the rapid rise and fall of Napoleon's fortunes after his escape from confinement. But who else would give equal time--and an equal charge of delight--to Maturin's discovery of an anomalous nuthatch? --James Marcus

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Aubrey and Maturin bring a new slant to Napoleon's return - Rated
Aubrey and Maturin return to the Mediterranean in this adventure. Their Ionian experience is made use of to intervene in an attempt by the Corsair States of North Africa to fund mercenaries in Europe.

A good plot, with all the expected characterization from O'Brien. Maturin is recovering from the loss of Diana, and there are some intriguing pointers to the way ahead - though I would not presume to read Mr O'Brien's mind!

A disappointing, disjointed continuation of a superb series - Rated
The Aubrey-Maturin books are absolutely wonderful, but the Hundred Days isn't. Maybe the author is getting old and lazy. This book has a number of plot developments that start up and then disappear; the timing of events seems implausible; the most important events (such as the death of Maturin's wife) happen outside the narrative and are simply reported as accomplished fact. The timing is difficult: At the end of Yellow Admiral, Aubrey, Maturin, and their families all seem to be in the Azores, where they learn Napoleon has escaped--the Hundred Days have begun. When the book Hundred Days begins, Diana Villiers has had time to go back to England and get herself killed, and a ship has reached Gibraltar to spread this news--surely by now we've used up at least 30 days? But there's still time for Aubrey to dash all over the Med and the Adriatic and to destroy all sorts of enemy ports and shipping--not that much of this occurs in the narrative (again, we read about it later as an accomplished fact. O'Brian's novels have always been better for personalities and relationships than for action, but he leaves out too much in this volume. Meanwhile, the personalities seem a little weak too. For instance, Maturin is reported to be quite distraught over Diana's death, but after a few pages of moping he seems to be over it. Sure, I'll read the next installment, if there is one, but I hope it's better than this one.

Sad stuff? - Rated
This is a terribly disappointing book. I've long admired O'Brian and think him the finest writer of his generation. I've read and re-read the Aubrey/Maturin novels, I've looked forward eagerly to the each new installment in series; and I've never been disappointed - until now. This book is unworthy of the man. Has he lost interest in his creations, the immortal Killick, Bonden, Pullings et al? If so, it would have been far better to leave things well alone. His heart is perhaps no longer in it. Poor,thin, pale, weak, sickly stuff, as Dr Maturin might say.

..in which the author meets his Waterloo - Rated
I ploughed on, in ever-fading hope that somehow Mr O'Brian might break the surface from the sunken depths of 'The Far Side of the World' (the last 3 words of that title should have been edited: surely, the silliest chapter in the whole series?). I should have known better, because Mr O'Brian has lashed down his actors so tightly now that he clearly does not care to risk anything so interesting as further character development. He does trade off a few casual kills from the long cast of supporting minnows, perhaps because even he didn't think his audience could accept such a knockabout group of wags would all live so long without mishap. But that is the tactic of a flagging soap opera writer. And in this latest effort, I couldn't help wincing ever more at the profoundly patronising tone that Mr O'Brian has sometimes served on us, even from the very beginning of the series. This seemed particularly marked wherever simple, superstitious seafarers perform unlikely comic routines that would shame the worst of Shakespeare's unfunny 'clowns'. Gone also, that grimly satisfying irony, the true feel for the turning tides of fortune that the earlier books evoked so well. The time for Mr O'Brian to rest on his earlier laurels is long overdue: he has delighted us for too long already. Surely, even the most adoring of fans must pretty soon realise that their emporer has no clothes left!

A profound disappointment - Rated
To lovers of Patrick O'Brian's naval roman fleuve set in the Napoleonic Wars (among whom I count myself one of the most ardent), this book comes as a profound disappointment.

It is written with the skill and verve we have come to expect, but all Mr. O'Brian's considerable wit and erudition cannot disguise the regrettable fact that nothing much happens. What is worse, much of what does happen is, from the point of view of those who have followed the series from of old, disastrous.

Not only does the author, in the first chapter and almost one fell sentence, kill off Mrs. Williams (a fact in itself much to be deprecated by those who delight in literary mothers-in-law), but Diana Maturin (nee Villiers) herself. Not satisfied with this wholesale slaughter of two of his finest characters at the beginning, he rounds off his achievement by butchering Barrett Bonden too. We cannot help but wonder whether anyone will survive the next book.

The mainspring of the series since "Post Captain" - and what has elevated it head and shoulders above its innumerable Hornblower-and-water competitors - has been Stephen Maturin's pursuit of Diana. I have always thought that the series truly ended with their marriage in "The Surgeon's Mate" and that the later books, though excellent in themselves have suffered from the same problem as the recent spate of Jane Austen sequels. No-one really wants to know if Elizabeth and Darcy spent their time at Pemberley quarrelling. We would all rather assume future bliss. Just so with "The Ionian Mission" onwards there has been a lack of conviction which has only been intensified by the evident impossibility of fitting all Jack Aubrey's voyages into the time scale.

The introduction of Christine Wood, the widow of the Governor of Sierra Leone in "The Commodore" as a rather obvious future Diana substitute only serves to intensify the loss. In Patrick O'Brian's books we expect the ropes and spars to creak, but not the plot.