First and last glimpses of two worlds
I have before me John le Carr's first novel and Patrick O'Brian's unfinished last one, both to be published (or republished, in le Carr's case) this month; and for some reason their sitting here together, side by side, alpha and omega, seems vaguely wonderful. They represent the first and last sights of worlds so well known, so much talked and written of, that it is dreadful to contemplate that they might never have come into being at all.
In his introduction to ''Call for the Dead" (Walker, $18), first published in 1961, le Carr says he began to write the novel out of ''screaming, frenetic" boredom. Working for the British Foreign Office, he spent his days surrounded by mediocrity and incompetence, wondering ''whether the fools were pretending to be fools, as some kind of wonderful deception. Or whether there was a real, efficient secret service somewhere else." He had to invent the latter, but not in the present novel. Here, with the chief exception of George Smiley, born in middle age, is the British Secret Service in the fullness of its mediocrity; and here, too, are the first fruits of le Carr's long hours in the Foreign Office reading dossiers, vetting their subjects for trustworthiness, an impossible task that became a creative drill, a matter of ''inventing people out of the meagre clay of telephone taps, purloined mail, and investigators' reports."
''Call for the Dead" immerses us in the dyspeptic world that was le Carr's Cold War. The plot hinges on an apparent suicide that makes no sense, an event whose niggling discrepancies proliferate quickly into a big can of worms. Le Carr's enduring themes all make their appearance in this short novel: class, of course, and all its markers and manners, as well as time serving, buck passing, and temporizing, the competing calls of personal and patriotic loyalty, various species of betrayal, and the first in le Carr's line of charismatic ideologues. There is, too, a nice display of good old-fashioned ripping-yarns grotesquerie that I especially enjoyed: ''Somewhere beneath him a cripple dragged himself through the filthy water, lost and exhausted, yielding at last to the stenching blackness till it held him and drew him down."
If John le Carr engendered George Smiley out boredom, it is clear that Patrick O'Brian returned to his two heroes, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, out of loneliness. ''21: The Unfinished Twenty-First Novel in the Aubrey/Maturin Series" (Norton, $21.95) consists of a facsimile handwritten manuscript and a typed one, both left behind by O'Brian when he died, in January 2000. Not much can be said of the story, as it breaks off in midsentence in the third chapter before things really get going. Jack, now a rear admiral, and Stephen, affianced to a fellow naturalist, and HMS Surprise, as doughty and trim as she ever was, have just polished off a mission to Chile to further the country's independence from Spain -- the sort of caper that peace with France necessitated to keep the series afloat.
Ordered off to South Africa, the Surprises must first contend with Argentine hostility to their Protestant selves, which unpleasantness is dispersed by the appearance of Jack's silver-tongued illegitimate son, Samuel Mputa, who has become a papal nuncio. They also have dealings with an arrogant, ambitious admiral of the Royal Navy and his presumptuous, bad-egg relative, Henry Miller, and stop to pick up Sophia and the twins (Charlotte and Fanny -- or ''what's her name," as Jack dubs the second), as well as Brigid, Stephen's daughter; Christine, his intended; and Edward, her brother. Social tension arises, and a duel ensues between Stephen and the importunate Miller: scarcely a fast-paced encounter, thanks to the latter's cowardice and what action there is being hampered by the thickets of O'Brian's penmanship.
But who cares? We do not read O'Brian for plot. We read to enter the world he created out of genius and a soul that was at once austere and celebratory. We read for his limber, flawlessly paced style, and because his delight in his subject is infectious. We revel with him in the punctilios of naval hierarchy and shipboard domestic arrangements, in nautical appurtenances, and in all the customs and exigencies that constitute O'Brian's version of life in the Royal Navy of the early 19th century. We read him too for his mesmerizing vision of nature and her myriad quirks, for the dashes of the macabre that season his humor, and for his portrayal of an enduring friendship between two men.
Even in these 60-some pages, all the familiar themes and running jokes are gratifyingly present. Foremost among them are Jack's passion for order and the immemorial custom of the service, and his discountenance of any slight to either his ship or the Royal Navy. Nothing brings this out so powerfully as an inspection, and we are treated to the preparations for a grand one, with the crew beautifying both themselves and the ship, and Killick at work on Jack's rear-admiral's uniform, which glorious raiment has suffered from ''termites in Malaysia," ''a shameless wombat in New South Wales," and ''innumerable forms of vermin" who have attempted to ''ruin the gold lace with their squalid dejections." Meanwhile, below in the sick berth, Stephen's patients have been rendered ''correctly rigid in their cots, washed pink, brushed and incapable of movement, almost of drawing breath, so tight-strained were the sheets."
Yes, yes: all is as it should be aboard the Surprise -- but less so, it becomes clear, with her creator. Indeed, this strange volume, part literary work, part artifact, gives, in its marginalia and the occasional, scribbled note, poignant testimony to its author's final, desolate days. Bereft since March 1998 of his beloved wife and amanuensis, Mary, O'Brian had been attempting to keep at least Aubrey and Maturin alive, now typing up his own handwritten pages, the task that was once Mary's, and worrying about such things as ink cartridges, missing shoes, and, worst of all, lost pages of text: ''These lost MS chapters are the almost daily bane of my life: could there be a malignant hand?" It is heartbreaking to read this. ''In this case," he consoles himself, ''I may be able to rebuild the odd pages: but I shall have tea first and concentrate what wits I still possess." There follow a few rough notes, a sketch of a dinner seating, and the manuscript ends. It's the end of a world.
Katherine A. Powers, a writer and critic, lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@earthlink.net.
