A review by sadie_slater
The Far Side of the World by Patrick O'Brian

5.0

The Far Side of the World is the tenth of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, which means I'm now halfway through the series. (Counting the remaining books to work this out I discovered that I own two copies of The Wine-Dark Sea - does anyone need one?) This one takes Jack and Stephen, once again on board the Surprise, round Cape Horn and into the vast expanse of the South Pacific in pursuit of a US naval ship, the Norfolk, which has been sent to prey on British whalers. As always with O'Brian's novels, though, it's less about the ostensible mission and more about the smaller incidents and accidents of day-to-day shipboard life, dealing with extremes of weather and all the difficulties resulting in a large group of people co-existing in a small space for a long time. It is, as always, a delight; I read O'Brian much more for the prose and the characters than I do for the plot, and the descriptions of the voyage, the weather, the marine life and occasional landfalls are wonderful. There are also many delightful interactions between the characters; I particularly enjoyed the sequence where Stephen falls overboard (surely not, I hear no-one at all cry) and he and Jack, who has dived to his rescue without a moment's hesitation, become separated from the ship and are rescued by a boat of Polynesian Amazons, while Jack's tendency to misquotation results in some very funny moments. A lovely book to immerse myself in.