Not everyone reacted this way, of course. And some astute critics recognised that here was something exceptional. But no one, least of all O'Brian, realised that this was the birth of what has become a legendary friendship in English fiction that occupied him for 30 years and produced 20 volumes. Remarkable for two characters who loved and needed each other but who, as O'Brian wrote, were almost as unlike as men could be -- unlike in nationality, religion, education, size, shape, profession, habit of mind.

The reclusive O'Brian, who died in 2000 aged 85, came to appreciate some feting towards the end of his time, and even in death continues to pick up awards for his novels about the great days of sail, somewhat ironic for a writer with little personal experience of the sea. But few honours would have been more delightfully received than the one he is to get shortly: the naming in his memory of a recently discovered weevil -- Daisya obriani -- by the Nature Discovery Fund of the Canadian Museum of Nature, funded in this case by The Gunroom of HMS Surprise, a group which, like many other such organisations and millions of readers around the world, is devoted to the O'Brian books, in particular to his third novel HMS Surprise. Apart from his deep interest in the environment, the naming links him directly to his inimitable character Stephen Maturin, scientist, philosopher, botanist, ship's surgeon and part-time spy, who generally prefers creatures to people -- with the exception of his admiring friend Jack Aubrey, the laddish, strict but decent and fearless captain of the frigate Surprise and other ships that sail through O'Brian's majestic feat of writing and imagination. Far from leaving their devotion with the author, the Gunroom has applied to name a new species after Maturin. Apparently there are millions of unnamed species available. Still, it's not every day a writer and one of his characters have creatures named after them as an act of homage. The honours emphasise the seductive force powering O'Brian's literary achievement -- the friendship between Aubrey and Maturin, the drawcard for many readers who would otherwise never be caught dead in a historical novel.

His books were and still are a cult among the intelligentsia -- and tinged with intellectual snobbery; nothing mass-market or airport about this
audience's usual tastes. Taking on O'Brian is as much a project as a pleasure. Immersing yourself in the naval life of the early l9th century and O'Brian's style -- dense, full of unpredictable diversions and distinctive for its period dialogue and sailing jargon -- is not always easy. Go with the flow, however, and you will soon find yourself embedded for the whole voyage. Fans are proud to proclaim their commitment to O'Brian and tend not to waste time on the unconverted. They may be likened to the dedicated followers drawn to Robert Graves's Roman novels and the intensely felt Greek tales of Mary Renault, an influential friend of O'Brian's. Like them, he created and lived in a specific literary world that brought him lasting admiration. The extent of the enthusiasm for his world can also be seen on the internet, where devotees chat and feast on his life and work inspiring an appetite for the books across the globe. It's a select club, and that's the way its members like it, but it's not for boys only. By most accounts women are no less taken with O'Brian's world, whether on land or (most of the time) at sea. And while there are appealing women in the novels, any conversation with O'Brianites quickly tells you that female readers find their vicarious kicks mainly in bold Captain Jack -- afloat since he was 12 -- or the more cerebral Stephen -- essentially a landlubber -- for all their long and distant sea adventures.

And now the club seems likely to get a sudden boost in membership with the arrival in December of the long-awaited first screen depiction of O'Brian's work, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, directed by Australian Peter Weir and based on the 10th novel in the series in which the Surprise pursues the enemy around Cape Horn. Success or failure, the film, with Russell Crowe playing Aubrey and Paul
Bettany as Maturin, will produce more readers. As for the purists, awaiting the slightest slip-up in authenticity and accuracy (is Crowe's Aubrey too slim? Is Bettany's Maturin too tall?), the film might prove more agony than ecstasy. Typically, Weir has sought to get the details right, sailing around the Horn himself and researching everything from the sounds of tall ships of the period down to what the men used for toilet paper.
Obviously, with so much to encompass in two hours' screen time, there have had to be changes. The biggest and least surprising, given that this is a $US135million ($196million) Hollywood film, is that the enemy, an American 32-gun frigate in the book, is now French. Not too convincingly, the producers deny that this is politically motivated and point out that Americans are frequently depicted as villains even in American films.

The idea of an O'Brian film has been around for a long time. Sam Goldwyn Jr, who produced The Madness of King George, perceptively optioned the novels years ago and talked to O'Brian about possibilities, though the writer had little understanding of how movies worked. Weir turned down the project in the 1990s as too difficult. He only accepted when Tom Rothman, co-chairman of 20th-Century Fox, presented him with a specially made sword he imagined Aubrey would carry. Weir agreed to take on the film if he could do it his way -- choosing the linear adventure of the 10th novel -- and keep the sword even if he didn't do it. Early reports -- and the little I've seen -- suggest that Weir's fine hand
will satisfy the club as well as the box office. He is, after all, regarded as an artist, not just a director. Even so, without a single woman in it and set entirely at sea, the film is risky. In an intelligent book on the movie, The Making of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Tom McGregor notes that when O'Brian portrayed women on board (as he does in The Far Side of the World) it invariably signalled something toxic or calamitous. ``You can't realistically have a woman on board as a toxic calamity without descending into some sort of gruesome farce.''
Co-producer Sam Goldwyn concurs: ``If there had been a woman on board she'd have to be `the girl'.'' That, adds McGregor, ``would lead to a different film altogether, with things veering off in an Ava Gardner sort of direction. Tempting, perhaps, but also highly distracting.'' So what we have is life, according to Crowe, on a planet 42m by 9m otherwise known as the frigate HMS Surprise, with 197 men, boys, sheep and goats.

Clearly, this will be the mother and father of all buddy films.

Acknowledging the gamble he is taking, Weir said in a recent interview: ``I've tried to give the audience the experience of being at sea, of inhabiting this other world, which is what I enjoyed most about the novels. But it's rare for people who love a book to love the movie made from it.''

Weir has bought himself some box-office insurance with Crowe as Aubrey: not everyone's choice, perhaps, as our man about the masts (Liam Neeson for more maturity?), but given his talent and the seriousness with which he appears to have taken the books -- he says he has read them and he even learned how to scrape a violin like Aubrey -- it seems that Crowe may well be more than Maximus in a blond wig and once again be in line for an Oscar. Weir has no doubts: ``He's got this natural authority. He likes to command. He's the captain of actors.''

Would O'Brian have approved of the film? That will remain a mystery, like so much else about the man.

O'BRIAN, English-born of German descent, though he claimed to be wholly Irish, was the rather impoverished author of several novels and biographies (Picasso, Sir Joseph Banks) when he wrote his saga's opening installment, Master & Commander. While this met with a luke-warm reception, for once the publishing world invested in quality and went on with the series, to increasing if quiet acclaim, with writers A.S. Byatt and Jan Morris among O'Brian's prominent champions. ``We aficionados scarcely feel them to be novels at all,'' wrote Morris. ``They are a world of their own, one full of excitement, mystery, charm and good manners of which, over three decades, we have ourselves become citizens.'' Remarked Byatt: ``If Jane Austen's naval brothers had written novels they might have written the novels of O'Brian.''

When US firm Norton rediscovered O'Brian in l990, The New York Times heralded O'Brian as ``the best novelist you've never heard of'', launching a raft of comparisons with Austen and also Dickens, Melville and Conrad.

Fame did not loosen O'Brian's tongue. He loathed personal questions. Only gradually did it emerge that he had changed his name from Richard Patrick Russ in l945, married for the second time and pretty much buried himself in the south of France. Not much else about him is known. Friends say he built his secretive character Maturin around himself. Like Aubrey's constant companion, he had worked in intelligence, was devoted to natural history, spoke Maturin's languages (French, Spanish and Catalan) and shared his love of music though he could not play the cello. Indeed, it has often been said that he would have been happier living in the l9th century. His last London editor Arabella Pike disagrees, telling me: ``Patrick was one of the most interesting, amusing and complicated people I have ever met. He didn't think he lived in the l9th century at all. His sensibility and intellect did. He was in complete command of the world he wrote about and this allowed him to indulge his fancy.''

Of course there have been others, before and since O'Brian, who have ventured into his Nelsonic waters. Many O'Brian fans grew up with C.S. Forester's 11 Hornblower books. Alexander Kent (alias Douglas Reeman) featured the exploits of Richard Bolitho in 23 novels. More recently there have been series by David Donachie, Richard Woodman and Julian Stockwin among others.

Even though popular and writing well and at length about high adventure and, yes, often about friendships, O'Brian's rivals -- though some have been friends and all admirers -- have never been spoken of in terms of such literary distinction or likened to the peerless Jane. What has set him apart? Says Pike: ``The books are so special and so different from writers like Alexander Kent or Forester because they are not just well-executed, exciting historical adventure stories. They are literature -- made so by the depth and multifaceted nature of the relationship between Jack and Stephen. It is this marvellously depicted, utterly authentic friendship that gives the books their magic. It is one of the greatest friendships in English literature.''

O'Brian himself said: ``The essence of my novels is human relationships and how people treat each other. That seems to me to be what novels are for.'' And though he does not ignore the inevitability of homosexuality at sea, the books reveal the meaning and possibility of beauty in the friendship of two heterosexual men whose pleasure in women provides another dimension to the work. Says Maturin to Aubrey's wife-to-be in HMS Surprise: ``He is a deep old file, and I do not pretend to any great penetration, but I love him more than anyone but you, and strong affection supplies what intellect don't.''

As well, O'Brian's research and erudition in the Nelson-Napoleonic period is definitive -- from birds and navigation to gunnery, shipbuilding, insects and the technology of violins and cellos. He seems to have absorbed the language and manners of the day and siphoned them into his characters, together with a humanity, wit and life force that grows and deepens as the unsentimental saga progresses. He plunges us into a milieu that, even with its horrors -- death at close range, flogging, brutality, pederasty -- is nevertheless an appealing escape from the horribleness of some modern realities. All this with no slackening in the swash and buckle either, as Aubrey's ships crash and creak around the oceans, month after month fighting the Frenchies, the weather, disease and loneliness.

``Few, very few, books have made my heart thump with excitement,'' wrote critic Helen Lucy Burke of HMS Surprise. ``I might have given a better idea of this book if I had simply written 600 times the word superb.'' You know what she means.

``I can do little,'' says Weir, ``but attempt to equal on film the power of Patrick O'Brian's words.'' Everyone is in for a treat if he has succeeded.

Copyright The Australian

(Thanks to Patti)

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