Actually, Master and Commander is a Domestic Fantasy About a Codependent Life Partnership!

Over the course of summer 2023—giving myself a hard deadline of Labor Day—I set out to read my way through Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series of nautical adventure novels, beginning with Master and Commander.

I was just coming up for air, that May, after the beautiful maelstrom that was my own debut novel’s publication. Almost simultaneously, my partner and I received the long-awaited confirmation that their cancer treatment had been successful. All the news was good, miraculous even—but my brain was oatmeal. I needed a reading project that would feel like a warm bath: something gentle but time-consuming; masterful but formulaic.

O’Brian’s novels, published between 1969 and 2004, fit the bill. The series consists, debatably, of either twenty volumes or twenty-one—the final, posthumous installment is unfinished. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, the books follow the career of Jack Aubrey as he rises through the ranks of the Royal Navy, alongside his ship’s surgeon and “particular friend,” Stephen Maturin.

(Stephen, as it happens, also moonlights as an intelligence agent. I found this substantial twist, not revealed until book two, prominently spoiled in the jacket copy for book one. This was my first sign that these novels exist in a temporal paradox. It feels as if one is only ever meant to be rereading them, never encountering them for the first time.)

I dove into the Aubreyad with a preconception of O’Brian’s work as, let’s say, classic Father’s Day gift material—fodder for straight military-history buffs. I had also, however, heard Jack and Stephen’s relationship described as an odd-couple love story—though the tone of this interpretation is often maddeningly tongue-in-cheek, citing the “bromance” of Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany in Peter Weir’s 2003 film adaptation.

Concerns aside, as someone who enjoys both historical fiction and not being straight, I was ready to give the books a chance to charm me on both fronts.

Here’s where I ended up, three months and seven thousand pages later: the Aubrey/Maturin series is not only a military-historical epic but also—I would even say primarily—a work of domestic fantasy about a life partnership so codependent it breaks the space-time continuum.

First: this story is, indeed, a romance. (This is almost certainly against O’Brian’s intentions, but—here we proclaim the mystery of queer resonance in fiction—the characters speak for themselves.) Beginning with their enemies-to-lovers meet-cute (almost coming to blows over chamber-music audience etiquette), Jack and Stephen trace an arc familiar from a thousand rom-coms. After the realization that both men play themselves (violin and cello, respectively), they are soon arranging duets between naval battles.

Their deepening intimacy over the first several books is one of the series’ great pleasures: Stephen swoops in to save Jack’s reputation at a court martial; Jack goes rogue on a risky undercover mission to rescue Stephen in Minorca. Trope by trope they grow jealous over competing admirers, affectionate over trifling gifts, crabby when one of them snores or hogs the coffee pot. Eventually, they both marry—but all four participants understand that the story they’re in is the story of Jack and Stephen’s relationship.

Thus far, it’s all familiar territory—especially for queer readers accustomed to recognizing ourselves between the lines.

With time and, it must be said, repetition (particularly noticeable to the chain-reader), Jack and Stephen become an almost supernaturally effective team. O’Brian emphasizes the value of the partnership by focusing—with humor that can verge on sadism—on his characters’ individual weaknesses, rather than their strengths. Stephen may be able to trepan a skull on the deck of a rolling ship, but he can’t be taught to remember which side is starboard; he manages to fall overboard at least once per book. Jack, by contrast, boasts a sailing ability tantamount to extrasensory perception—but in any other context he struggles to follow the simplest train of logic or conversation. Quite the handicap, for an officer sent on sensitive diplomatic missions.

Throughout the series, neither Jack nor Stephen makes any measurable progress on their deficiencies—such being the nature of the running gag. Instead, O’Brian has the two men fit themselves to one other’s blind spots. Eventually Jack automatically stands by to catch Stephen as he inevitably falls between the jolly-boat and the ship’s ladder; Stephen, in turn, can sense from miles away that Jack has given his power of attorney to a landshark. This is, of course, a heightened but recognizable version of how real relationships develop. And it’s a joy to watch it charmingly executed by O’Brian, whose delight (particularly in his sparkling dad-joke dialogue) is palpable.

As we progress from two books to four to twenty—as Stephen and Jack settle into their partnership—their familiarity begins to affect the very mechanics of their universe.

This starts small: catchphrases recur, as do (again, with all due respect to Mr. O’Brian) entire near-identical scenes; neuroses are amplified; a mutual fondness becomes a vehement refusal to be separated (which on several occasions threatens Naval strategy). Eventually the books seem governed by cartoon physics: Stephen tumbles over an increasingly vertiginous series of taffrails and yardarms into the ocean, always to be rescued by a swan-diving Jack; Jack is stabbed, shot, and splintered by an endlessly escalating series of enemy broadsides, always to be stitched up or “physicked” by Stephen. (“I sew his ears back on from time to time,” Stephen summarizes their relationship at one point.) The reader begins to understand that, in this world, challenges are relentless but always, improbably, survivable; bodies are vulnerable but always, amazingly, repairable.

This quasi-magical resilience also applies to the duo’s favorite floating home: the HMS Surprise, an aging twenty-eight-gun frigate that still bears the initials Jack carved into her woodwork as a lowly midshipman. As her commander, he sails with Stephen to the eponymous Far Side of the World—battling the French and Americans as well as the Naval bureaucracy that consistently seeks to decommission the Surprise (always, of course, after one last mission).

Here is where things really go off the rails. There is no way to say this that will not sound outrageous to the uninitiated: about a third of the way into the Aubreyad, time itself starts looping, and the Surprise begins to function within its own private spacetime.

Whereas the first several books in O’Brian’s series map onto a roughly real-world chronology, volumes seven through eighteen all take place in what one web timeline terms “the repeating year 1813”—or, as O’Brian himself described it, “1812a,” “1812b,” and so on. The year passes with Stephen and Jack breaking out of prison in Brittany. It passes again, with Stephen and Jack chasing an American frigate around Cape Horn. It passes again. And again. For twelve novels, while the historical timeline marches toward Waterloo, Jack and Stephen are unstuck in time together on the Surprise.

At one point O’Brian’s narrator—wryly, one imagines—mentions the “pleasant illusion of eternity,” the ship moving “towards a horizon perpetually five miles ahead, never nearer.” (The characters themselves are not conscious of the time loop, though they seem at times to be struggling towards awareness—“I cannot remember my age,” Stephen says at one point, “without I do a subtraction with pen and ink.”)

Of course, the simple explanation for this chronological bubble is that O’Brian was running out of war faster than he was running out of hijinks. By his own description, he was simply having too much fun: “had the writer known how much pleasure he was to take in this kind of writing,” he says in his foreword to the tenth installment (his first acknowledgement that it had been 1813 for a suspiciously long time), “he would certainly have started the series much earlier.”

O’Brian is insistent that his use of these (as he calls them) “hypothetical years” does not render the series a work of fantasy or science fiction. I am neither a sailor nor a historian, and I have no quibble with O’Brian’s avowal on those terms—but I was reading his books, that summer, primarily as a portrait of an remarkable relationship and (goddammit) for FUN, and I have to object that lovingly crafting your soulmate heroes a canvas-and-rigging time-loop pocket universe absolutely does change what you are about, sir.

This is where, were I Captain Jack Aubrey, I would look up suddenly from a hopeless chaos of paperwork and say, “I tell you what it is, Stephen.”

I tell you what it is, reader: by my reckoning, the introduction of the “hypothetical years” is when The Aubrey/Maturin series stops being about naval history and starts being about marriage.

My own partner and I have been together now for over a decade; together we have endured pandemic lockdown and cancer treatment, written thousands of pages, moved between apartments and jobs and triumphs and traumas. After (and amidst) all this I find I have an intuitive understanding of “the repeating year 1813”: endlessly climactic situations, remixed adversaries and goals, always with the same double-bill above the title of each installment. (And yes, particularly since the pandemic, a disconcerting habit of forgetting one’s own age.)

In book eight, O’Brian describes one married couple as having “nothing in common but love and friendship, and a series of strange, surprising, shared adventures.” He’s not speaking of Jack and Stephen, but the description fits them perfectly—as it does any love story. What is life, after all, but a serialized adventure?

One of the great joys and curiosities of marriage, in my experience, is the way it opens a private universe governed by its own laws—a space to celebrate, to grow, to weather storms (some more damaging than others). A space for trading backstories, showing the places you’ve carved your initials in the woodwork. A space for exploration, crossing together to the far side of the world, sewing one another’s ears back on as necessary. A space for improvising duets, a “deep mutual comprehension” elevating the results beyond the sum of the players’ individual talents.

And if this space could be a semi-enchanted vessel called, almost too perfectly, the Surprise?

The bubble in which Jack and Stephen travel is a bittersweet one—the Surprise is perpetually on “the last leg of her last voyage.” But for Jack and Stephen this knowledge of their ship’s (and thus their story’s) mortality becomes “a kind of quiet heart-break, always in the background,” only, for instance, making Jack take “very particular notice of [the Surprise’s] excellence and of each day he passed on her”—eating toasted cheese with Stephen, and practicing their Corelli in C major, and bickering over the last cup of coffee.

Reading this passage at the end of that miraculous and harrowing year in my own life and partnership, I found it deeply resonant. The elation in quotidian routine, with “quiet heart-break always in the background”; the shared perpetual present born of communal joys and traumas. The back-of-mind knowledge that, one way or another, every series must end in an unfinished, posthumous volume. Then—while we’re lucky—the return to the “illusion of eternity.”

For anyone feeling keelhauled by reality, I strongly recommend diving into the repeating year 1813 for a summer or so. O’Brian’s series is justly celebrated as arguably the greatest work of historical fiction ever penned. It is also underrated as an affecting celebration of domestic partnership. In Aubrey and Maturin I found a love story for the ages, and a poetics—even a physics—to describe life’s most important relationships.

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Mutual Interest by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith is available from Bloomsbury Publishing.