A Review of PASC

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A Review: Persons, Animals, Ships and Cannon in the Aubrey-Maturin Sea Novels of Patrick O’Brian

Anthony Gary Brown

Reviewed by Dan Connolly

Dan Connolly is a freelance indexer in Barrington, RI, and list owner of IndexStudents, a mailing list designed to address issues of training and continuing education for indexers. His e-mail address is dan@wfwbooks.com. This article appeared in the July/Aug. 2001 issue of Key Words, the bulletin of the American Society of Indexers.

I must apologize for the delay in offering this review. The book was published in the summer of 1999. It came to my attention when I started to do research on creating an index to O’Brian’s series in early 2000. Through my participation in an online discussion list, I was informed of the existence of PASC, as it is commonly called (in response to my call for an index to O’Brian’s opus), and obtained a copy forthwith. A close examination of the book yielded two thoughts: first, "Damn, that’s a fine piece of scholarship." and second, "It’s not an index."

For those unfamiliar with the "Sea Novels" referred to in the title, let me fill in the gaps. The books detail the lives and adventures of Capt. Jack Aubrey and his companion, Dr. Stephen Maturin, as they wend their way through life in the Royal Navy of the Napoleonic era. The novels are more than mere adventure stories, having been compared favorably with Jane Austen’s precise and evocative land-based novels of the same general era. The flowing and easy to read text belies the richness of detail, profundity of expression, and accuracy of fact that went into their creation. While full of battles and sea adventure, they go beyond anything that Forrester wrote about Hornblower.

Some details on PASC itself are in order. It is some 330 pages, double-columned, and contains 4,500 entries. Its scope is clearly stated in the title. Brown refers to it as a "biographical dictionary" and the emphasis of the volume is clearly on persons and summaries of the importance or relevance of those persons. At the same time, in addition to its exegetical component, it is a crude index to the contents of the series (through vol. 19 of the 20-volume series—Brown is working on a supplement that will bring it up to date), offering locators to the volume and chapter of the heading’s appearance.

Brown created the book to explain the literary and historical allusions that are legion in the O’Brian oeuvre. O’Brian’s careful mining of his primary reference sources (including the Naval Chronicle and the Encyclopedia Britannica of the day (1810) for plot, character inspiration, and the flora and fauna of the discovered world, deserve this sort of explanatory guide (for the less erudite among us, including myself).

The book covers both fictional and real persons. In a carefully thought-out typographic system, the real and the fictional are tackled and related. For instance, references to fictional creations are discussed in roman type, while references to real persons and ships are set out in italic type. In many cases, a real person served as the inspiration for the fictional, and these instances are duly noted in the fictional character’s entry, after he or she has been identified and located within the canon.

Locators, by the way, are simply chapter numbers and they are truly just approximations. Brown chose chapter numbers because pagination was only standardized across the various U.K. and U.S. editions over the last half-dozen books or so. To deal with anything more specific was going to prove difficult, if it was to be comprehensive. Unfortunately, some of the chapters run to 50 or 60 pages, and so the result is that you need to do extensive skimming of the text to find the relevant passages. This points up that the book is meant to be used as a dictionary, more than as an index. That is, in the reading of O’Brian’s books, PASC is to be consulted while you are at the point of confusion, and not to locate specific passages.

Cross-references are ingeniously handled though. There are, of course, See references where the reader is directed to a preferred form of the entry. In the italic-type sections (real entries), an asterisk (*) precedes the first use of any name for which there is an entry. Brown includes a concise and excellent six page introduction to the dictionary, in which he itemizes the conventions used within it. For the most part, they are elegant solutions.

Of particular note are the lengthy biographies of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. Because the series rarely leaves the perspective of one or the other of them, it would be exceedingly arduous to attempt to locate their appearances and thoughts more precisely than Brown has done. Being, in effect, the metatopic of the series, their treatment deserves comment though. Aubrey’s entry is nine double-columned pages long. The information is practically inaccessible as a quick and ready reference, were one looking for a specific incident to re-read for instance. This is a failing, but it is redeemed by the fact that the summary of Jack’s career over the course of 19 books is as accurate and as concise as possible. It is a mini-biography, and gives one an immediate flavor of the books. Maturin’s entry is about eight pages, and is similarly difficult and fascinating.

Another minor quibble that I have is that the book leaves one lost if you don’t know the proper names to search for. If you are hoping to re-read an interesting passage, you are left dangling unless you can pinpoint the name of the characters involved precisely. Brown chose not to index place names, and so you can’t locate the action by geography. The best course is probably to use the Aubrey or Maturin entries as "jumping off" points in your search. The reader should scan those entries as soon as he or she obtains the book.

Finally, it’s a pity Brown couldn’t wait for the last book in the series. At the time, however, O’Brian was alive and threatening to run the series on for several books more. Sadly, he died in January, 2000, having completed 20 books and having made early progress on book 21. There are no certain plans for a supplement to include the 20^th book (Blue at the Mizzen), but Brown says "it's more likely that a 2nd edition of PASC would not only include a BATM update but also full geographical entries for the whole series. I would encourage him to proceed apace.

The best audience for PASC should be the reader who is beginning the journey through the books. I wish that I had it when I first made my way through them. I suppose that I’ll need to re-read them all, with PASC close at hand. As though I couldn’t appreciate O’Brian’s genius already, I can now catch every nuance of meaning that is to be wrung from it. My quibbles with PASC are minor, and I can’t help but express admiration that a work of such obvious merit ever saw the light of day. Given the difficulties (financial, mostly) of scholarly publishing, such an undertaking is to be mightily commended.

ISBN: 0-7864-0684-4; 342 pp., introduction, list of abbreviations, references, bibliography; $35 sewn softcover (7x10) 1999

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