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neilrcoulter's review against another edition
3.0
This book was a motivation for me to finish reading the Aubrey/Maturin series. I'd started the biography before finishing the series but was surprised to be seeing so many spoilers about plot points in later books in the series. So I put the biography aside and went back to Aubrey/Maturin. I'm glad I did, because throughout the biography, Dean King reveals things from the later books in Aubrey/Maturin. I suppose this is necessary to a point, but it felt a little unfair to have to wait to read the biography until after reading everything else.
I don't envy King's task of writing a book-length biography of an author who lived a deliberately private, and in some ways deceptive, life. I believe he does a decent job with a difficult assignment, but he often has to stretch a small detail into a significant part of the story. I also felt that sometimes, especially in the first half of the book, King so wanted O'Brian's life to fit standard biography formulas that he forced details into biographical cliches.
In his adulthood, O'Brian was secretive and elusive about his past. He apparently broke off connections with his family, and certainly changed his name and retreated with his second wife to a peaceful hillside home in Collioure, France. Like many authors, he believed that the reader doesn't need to know about the author's personal life in order to fully enjoy the books; and also like other authors, his adult life at a certain point settles into a pattern of writing and mundane daily routines, which doesn't make for a particularly thrilling biography. King does as well as he can.
The portrait King presents is of a somewhat egotistical, sensitive, competitive man who, in his final years of life, achieves the worldwide renown and fame that he always desired. There's not a lot to attract the reader to O'Brian as a person, as he seems to have been "difficult to manage," so to speak. He lost himself in the Aubrey/Maturin story, and by the end of the biography I felt that this is the best thing for his readers to do as well. His biography is interesting, but it doesn't add a lot of insight into the behind-the-scenes world of Aubrey and Maturin.
I found it amusing how King assumes that even people who like Aubrey/Maturin well enough to read a biography of O'Brian still probably aren't going to read anything else O'Brian wrote; so he gives fairly detailed plot summaries of those other books--including a number of short stories in O'Brian's early career, and the biographies of Picasso and Banks. I'm one of those who has read all of Aubrey/Maturin but is unlikely to read the other books, so it was actually kind of fun to have more information about that list of titles that appears in the "Also by Patrick O'Brian" list at the beginning of the books.
I know that there was still some controversy about King's presentation of O'Brian in this biography, so next up is the biography of O'Brian's early life, written by his stepson Nikolai Tolstoy. I'm interested to see another portrait of O'Brian the mysterious.