The Hundred Days (Aubrey/Maturin Series): Book 19 - Softcover

O'Brian, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006512119 ISBN 13: 9780006512110

Publisher: Harper Collins, 1999

Synopsis

Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin tales are widely acknowledged to be the greatest series of historical novels ever written. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of their beginning, with Master and Commander, these evocative stories are being re-issued in paperback with smart new livery. This is the nineteenth book in the series.

Following the extraordinary success of The Yellow Admiral, this latest Aubrey-Maturin novel brings alive the sights and sounds of North Africa as well as the great naval battles in the days immediately following Napoleon’s escape from Elba. Aubrey and Maturin are in the thick of the plots and counterplots to prevent his regaining power. Coloured by conspiracies in the Adriatic, in the Berber and Arab lands of the southern shores of the Mediterranean, by night actions, fierce pursuits, slave-trading and lion hunts, The Hundred Days is a masterpiece.

’O’Brian is far and away the best of the Napoleonic storytellers and The Hundred Days is one of the best of the series: a classic naval adventure, crammed with incident, superbly plotted and utterly gripping...This is O’Brian at his brilliant, entertaining best and when he is on this form the rest of us who write of the Napoleonic conflict might as well give up and try a new career. Fans of the series will need no encouragement to buy this book, but if you are new to Aubrey and Maturin then this is as splendid an introduction as you could wish for.’ Bernard Cornwell

About this title

Review:

The year is 1815 and Europe's most unpopular (not to mention tiniest)empire-builder has escaped from Elba. In The Hundred Days, it's up to Jack Aubrey--and surgeon-cum-spymaster Stephen Maturin--to stop Napoleon in his tracks. How? For starters, Aubrey and his squadron have been dispatched to the Adriatic coast to keep Bonapartist shipbuilders from beefing up the French navy. Meanwhile, one Sheik Ibn Hazm is fomenting an Islamic uprising against the Allies. The only way to halt this manoeuvre is to intercept the sheikh's shipment of gold-- because in the Napoleonic era, as in our own, even the most ardent of mercenaries requires a salary.

The Hundred Days is the 19th (and, we are told, the penultimate) instalment of O'Brian's epic. Like many of its predecessors, it features a swashbuckling plot, complete with cannon fire, exotic disguises and Aubrey's suspenseful, slow-motion pursuit of an Algerian xebek. Yet it never turns into a mere exercise in Hornblowerism. In part, this is due to O'Brian's delicate touch with character--the relationship between extroverted Aubrey and introverted Maturin has deepened with each book, and even Aubrey's reunion with his childhood companion Queenie Keith is full of novelistic nuance: "They sat smiling at one another. An odd pair: handsome creatures both, but they might have been of the same sex or neither." Nor does the author focus too exclusively on his dynamic duo. Indeed, The Hundred Days is very much a chronicle of a floating community, which Maturin describes as "his own village, his own ship's company, that complex entity so much more easily sensed than described: part of his natural habitat."

Finally, O'Brian shows his usual expertise in balancing the great events with the most minuscule ones. Other authors have written about battles at sea, and still others have recorded the rapid rise and fall of Napoleon's fortunes after his escape from confinement. But who else would give equal time--and an equal charge of delight--to Maturin's discovery of an anomalous nuthatch? --James Marcus

Review:

'... full of the energy that comes from a writer having struck a vein... Patrick O'Brian is unquestionably the Homer of the Napoleonic wars.' James Hamilton-Paterson

'You are in for the treat of your lives. Thank God for Patrick O'Brian: his genius illuminates the literature of the English language, and lightens the lives of those who read him.' Kevin Meyers, Irish Times

'In a highly competitive field it goes straight to the top. A real first-rater.' Mary Renault

'I never enjoyed a novel about the sea more. It is not only that the author describes the handling of a ship of 1800 with an accuracy that is as comprehensible as it is detailed, a remarkable feat in itself. Mr O'Brian's three chief characters are drawn with no less sympathy that the vessels he describes, a rare achievement save in the greatest of writers of this genre. It deserves the widest readership.' Irish Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Collins
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0006512119
• ISBN 13: 9780006512110
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 281