Richard Temple, by Patrick O’Brian

Richard Temple is Patrick O'Brian's third novel, published in 1962.

The novel is about a young Welshman named Richard Temple, who is a painter and son of a rector. The novel is somewhat disjointed. In the first part of the book we meet Temple in a German prison during World War II. He has become involved with British intelligence and captured by the Germans in France. He has been subjected to daily interrogation and torture. To avoid saying anything, he has created a new identity in his mind, pseudo-Temple as he calls it, a dumb, unlucky semi-criminal who was caught smuggling along the French-Spanish border.

But mostly the book deals with Richard Temple’s life, from his youth to the present. His attempts to build a life, become a person, create good paintings, get paid decently for his work, and so forth. His economic problems, his misery, his hopes and disappointments, fidelity and betrayal, and periods in deep financial trouble. And his development as an artist – in this case as an artist that never really made it, who scraped by, somehow survived.

Temple is a complex, interesting character, albeit not very sympathetic. He even falls in with a gang of thieves and becomes a forger of famous paintings, drifting along hand-to-mouth.

The book returns to the present a few times, most notably at the very end, which is very well done.

I liked Richard Temple, even though it was a completely different Patrick O’Brian than the one I have come to like from the Aubrey-Maturin novels. The writing is very good and the sharp eye for observations is here as well. An interesting read.

The Golden Ocean, by Patrick O’Brian

This was the first historical tale of the sea by Patrick O'Brian, written in 1956, before he started on the Aubrey Maturin series. It is a wonderful book that fictionalizes the incredible adventures of Commodore George Anson (later Admiral Anson, 1st Baron Anson PC RN (23 April 1697 – 6 June 1762), a British admiral and a wealthy aristocrat, noted for his circumnavigation of the globe and his role overseeing the Royal Navy during the Seven Years' War) and his small fleet of ships that set out intent on circumnavigating the globe. They experienced some of the most gut-wrenching tragedies that are imaginable and lost the majority of the men (his force went from 961 to 335 men) on the first leg of the journey, around Cape Horn. Most of them died to scurvy (lack of vitamin C).

O’Brian tells the story masterfully and very engagingly. The tale is told mostly from the perspective of a young Irish midshipman - Peter Palafox, son of an impoverished Irish parson - and it is tempered with subtle humor, wonderful irony and sidesplitting hilarity.

During the journey the fleet is continuously reduced, until they in the end have only one of the originally six ships left – the flagship HMS Centurion. This ship, and Lord Anson (see picture), is famous not only for having sailed around the world, but also for having captured one of the richest prizes even – a Spanish galleon full of riches – and returning to England laden to the gunnels with an incredible fortune. Wikipedia writes:

The indomitable perseverance he had shown during one of the most arduous voyages in the history of sea adventure gained the reward of the capture of an immensely rich prize, Nuestra Señora de Covadonga, possessing 1,313,843 pieces of eight, which he encountered off Cape Espiritu Santo on 20 June 1743. Anson took his prize back to Macau, sold her cargo to the Chinese, and sailed for England, which he reached … on 15 June 1744. The prize money earned by the capture of the galleon had made him a rich man for life, and it enabled his heirs to rebuild Shugborough Hall, the family estate.

The Golden Ocean tells a tale of hardship, illness, cold, shipwrecks, hunger, courage, ambition and sea battles. The writing in this book is as good as in the later and more famous novels. Here, as in O'Brian's other novels, the characters live and breathe, they love and hate, they veer off the straight and narrow and they feel very, very authentic.

When young Peter Palafox sets out on this journey together with his lifelong friend, Sean, he hopes to find his fortune. They live through some of the worst hardships imaginable, but he does, in the end, return home with a vast fortune. The Golden Ocean is a great book, worthy of the creator of the marvelous Aubrey-Maturin series, and a delight to read for any fan of the series!

Links to books by Patrick O'Brian at amazon US, amazon UK, amazon CAN, Barnes & Noble, Bokkilden.no and Haugenbok.