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Comment by stnmtn | Hacker News Reader

I'm fascinated with Cochrane and this era. For anyone who is looking for novels that attempt to tell the story of people like Cochrane, look no further than Patrick O'Brien's books. Starting with Master and Commander

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A couple of Robert Brightwell's (Thomas) "Flashman" series* have the eponymous hero as a shipmate of Cochrane - first in the Mediterranean in "Flashman and the Seawolf" [0] and later in South America in "Flashman and the Emperor" [1]

Both are great rollicking action adventures.

* Thomas is the uncle of the more famous Sir Harry Paget Flashman, V.C., whose memoirs are edited by George MacDonald-Fraser.

[0] https://robertbrightwell.com/my-books/flashman-and-the-seawo...

[1] https://robertbrightwell.com/my-books/flashman-and-the-emper...

Jack Aubrey was very consciously modeled on Cochrane according to O’Brien. The general arc of his naval career pretty closely follows that of Cochrane’s.

In case anyone's interested:

there is an interview with O'Brian on YouTube.

(Don't ask for a link. Just search.)

The details of all of the battles in O'Brien's books are drawn from Royal Navy records, albeit with some adaptation to fit the plot and characters. Cochrane's (Jack Aubrey in the book) capture of the Spanish frigate is the climactic scene in the first book, 'Master and Commander.'

I have been looking for a "Harry Potter for adults" for quite a while now. This series came the closest.

I have read all 20 books!

Or look further and try the Hornblower books? Less naval terminology, sharper characterization.

I don’t think that’s fair at all. My advice to people struggling with the naval stuff in Master and Commander is to keep reading. The important stuff gets explained in plain language to the perpetually lubberly Maturin, presumably for the benefit of the reader.

Aubrey and Maturin are two of my favorite characters in all of literature. The depth of their motivations, their relationship, and their own personal wants are at the heart of the series. The best parts of the entire series are frequently their adventures on land rather than the purely naval parts.

The hornblower books are for folks getting bored on their 3rd or 4th read through of the Aubrey/Maturin series :-)

I love the books as well (especially in my very nice Folio Society edition).

As for the impossible naval jargon, I found it amusing to see the movie in (Danish) cinema, where the incomprehensible naval terminology was replaced in the subtitles with… incomprehensible Danish naval terminology.

I don't mind the naval terminology, it's interesting. But I think Hornblower is deeper than those guys. And... all of literature? I mean, Karamazov?

I don't want to critique personal taste, because it's ultimately preference and who am I to judge yours? On the other hand, one of O'Brian's strengths is his wonderful characters along with his beautiful prose. Even to the point that later books, like The Thirteen Gun Salute to The Commodore (a 5 book stretch) have an awfully boring and uncompelling series of plots and I still liked them anyway.

I do like Hornblower. I've read all the books more than once, I bought the ITV show, and I even hunted down the Gregory Peck adaptation. To me Hornblower was a deeper character than I might have any right to expect in a historical adventure series, but his repetitive self-loathing in the face of his genius (genuinely a compelling choice) grates after so many books and so many successes and he begins to feel like a caricature of himself.

Like the grandparent, Aubrey and Maturin are my favourite characters in anything I've read. Everyone will tell you how they and their relationship is wonderfully depicted, but it could also have something to do with how many books there are and how often I've re-read them. At this point they're old friends so it'd be disloyal of me not to love them as much as I do.

I didn’t think it was necessary to put a disclaimer: they are my favorite characters in all of the literature that I personally have read. I can’t speak to my preferences about the millions of books I haven’t read, Karazamov sadly being one of them. I certainly hope that there are literary characters out there that I would like as much, or more, but I haven't met them yet, and so, continue searching.

I haven’t read Hornblower since I was a teenager, so some it might have gone over my head back then. My read on it was that it was more of an adventure story than anything. With the Master and Commander series I often find that the parts where they aren't at sea are the most interesting (The Fortune of War, The Surgeons Mate, Treason's Harbour are three of the books with particularly interesting periods on land). I am also biased since the subtle humor in the books is something I find particularly funny.

I like the naval terminology, even though I don't understand most of it.

Not having read the Hornblower books since adolescence, I can't compare them, but on "characterization" : sorry, bro. O'Brian's the master of it. Two very good actors took on Jack and Steven (Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany) and made a classic movie.

Unfortunately the movie oversimplified the characters. Jack in the books is a complex guy, who has besides his good traits some unpleasant parts (his obsession with making money with get rich quick schemes on land which often land him in debt, and his obsession with taking "prizes" at sea for personal gain more than duty). Crowe's Jack is just a generic hero. And Stephen is a complex guy too, who is an intelligence agent in addition to being a doctor and naturalist. Bettany's Stephen ignores this whole part of his character.

Ok. But you're criticizing the movie, not the books.

I absolutely adore the Hornblower books. Almost anything by CS Forester, really.

Patrick O'Brien's books are too dry for me. There's lots of characters stopping and explaining naval terminology to each other, or long conversations about feelings and posturing and etc.

In comparison, Forester writing really captures the adventure and gives you the spirit of the era in much less verbose but sharper prose.

It's dry in the sense the same sense Jane Austen's fiction is dry: it spends a lot of time chronicling the everyday minutiae of a bygone era. But whereas Austen was writing about her contemporaries, O'Brian does so at a remove of two centuries. As a literary and research achievement it's just .. stunning. I re-read this series at least once every decade, and each time my awe over what he has managed to accomplish in these books somehow increases. There is an old NYT book review (https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/06/books/an-author-i-d-walk-...) that expresses it better than I can.

O'Brian & Forester wrote fun adventures in the golden age of sailing.

You can look a little further still to check out Dudley Pope's Ramage series.

My suggestion would be to try the audiobooks instead (the ones narrated by Patrick Tull).

Yes, those are fun. My idea of what Jack and Stephen sound like in my mind is based on the voices Tull does for them. Although the voices he does for Indian and Chinese characters is a bit cringe.

All his lines as Padeen are super cringeworthy too.

For those having difficulties with naval terminology, seek out a copy of "A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion to the Complete Seafaring Tales of Patrick O'Brian" by Dean King. Hornblower's naval terminology is the same as O'Brian's, and it's great guide to both.

Horatio Hornblower is a lot of fun as well. It's fiction but based on a lot of Cochraine's ruses. It's both a highly rated TV miniseries (inexplicably unavailable on any streaming service in the US) and a series of books.

I've read all of Hornblower many times, starting in elementary school nearly 55 years ago. I've not read O'Brian at all, though I loved the "Master and Commander" movie.

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