On Taking Countries Back

This year the U.S. presidential election day falls in the same week of England's national holiday Guy Fawkes Day, also known as Bonfire Night (November 5th). In fact, it always falls then, and 2016 isn't the first time in our 240-year history that an election has called forth the kind of rebellious energies that inspired the Gunpowder Plotters. Those were the would-be terrorists whose capture the English holiday commemorates: a cabal of frustrated Catholics who thought the shortest way to restore their country to spiritual health was to blow up half the government. A major difference between them and Donald Trump is, they knew the change they were working for was illegal. That's why they worked in secret, and why they knew the game was up when they got busted. What's bizarre -- well, one thing that's bizarre --

The Master

By my title, "The Master," I don't mean Shakespeare. Every once in a while I write some comments about historical fiction, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and since Hilary Mantel (one of the good ones) is taking so long to give us her last book in the Thomas Cromwell series -- I look for it constantly -- the prize today is going to Patrick O'Brian.

Yes, Patrick O'Brian of the Aubrey-Maturin series, the seemingly (and seamlessly) endless, continuous novel, published through the 1980s and 90s and focusing on the years between 1800 and 1815, when the British Navy was fighting Napoleon. The first book, Master and Commander, was made into a movie starring Russell Crowe. It was a pretty good movie, but no film could prepare a reader for the stunning excellence, the beauty, humor, and literary perfection, of these twenty novels. I have read all of them and I read them in one day. Or it seemed like a day.

How is it that O'Brian can write like Jane Austen -- and I mean with such absolute familiarity with her idiom, with the social practices, customs, and particularly the modes of speech of the early nineteenth century -- when, unlike her, he didn't live back then? Is he a time traveler? The depth of his understanding of not only British maritime life during that time of burgeoning empire, but of general middle- and upper-class Regency culture, is astonishing. It's as bottomless as the sea. O'Brian knows, for example, that the Royal Society was maintained by amateur scientists --