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Patrick OBrian: A Life Revealed
by Dean King
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (2000-03-15)
ISBN: 0805059768
EAN: 9780805059762
Dewey Decimal #: 823.912
Hardcover: 488 pages
Edition: 1st
SKU: 3AB6-002-7-0707
Condition: VG+ VG+ First Editio
Comments: First Edition - Trade edition, full number line. Clean copy, no markings by previous owners; Dust jacket slightly rubbed/soiled; Corners and ends of spine lightly bumped; Minor edgewear; Tight copy. *International Buyers Welcome!* (except for prohibitively heavy items, as noted) - Satisfied customers in over 40 countries! We ship quickly and guarantee satisfaction. Your purchase helps support a U. Chicago student
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
The untold life story of a novelist whose greatest fictional creation was his own identity.
In a 1998 article in New York magazine, Dean King offered readers a small sampling of the secret history of Patrick O'Brian, the creator of the bestselling series of Aubrey-Maturin novels. O'Brian has always guarded the secrets of his personal history with a zealousness that has bordered on the obsessive. And for years his fanatical readers have speculated on the true story and spun myths about his past based on the lives of his characters.
Dean King at last unveils the story of Richard Patrick Russ, a writer and intellectual who emerged from the Second World War as Patrick O'Brian, a persona created in his own imagination and later refined by decades of rumor and speculation. What motivated this radical change of identity? Was it connected to O'Brian's service during the war, or the messy divorce from his first wife? Or was it the inexplicable act of an eccentric genius?King has crisscrossed Europe to speak to long-lost relatives, friends, and colleagues of his famously reclusive subject and has fashioned this wealth of information into a dramatic narrative that will appeal to an audience far wider than O'Brian's already dedicated fans.
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Amazon.com Review
Hailed as the Irish author of "the greatest historical novels ever written"--the 20 swashbuckling Napoleonic-era adventures starring Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin--Patrick O'Brian was not such a great guy. In fact, he wasn't really Patrick O'Brian: he was actually the Englishman Richard Patrick Russ, who abandoned his semiliterate Welsh wife and dying, spina bifida-plagued child in 1940 and reinvented himself as a writer and as a human being. He did well as a writer, winning kudos as a biographer (Picasso), translator (Papillon), and old literary sea lion. But he was less than humane, as Dean King's A Life Revealed reveals. The son of a rotten father, Russ/O'Brian became a rotten father himself, cutting off all contact with his son, granddaughters, and even siblings. As he chillingly wrote in his biography, "Parents are supposed to love their children, yet surely there is the implied condition that the children should be reasonably lovable?" Though he was kinder to his second wife, the Countess Mary Tolstoy, whose reckless driving injured both of them, he once wrote that Picasso was "sucked dry and rendered sterile by women, children, routine." For his part, O'Brian preferred poverty and exile in Southern France with Mary--remote from his family origins, penning masterpieces in a house with books but no electricity or running water. Only in his 70s did he become rich and famous. You can't deny the many striking parallels between O'Brian's life and his work--even though he did. Rotten fathers permeate his fiction, as the fathomless woe must have permeated him upon his mother's death from tuberculosis in 1918, when he was 4. It's great fun to read about his mad-inventor father's machine to cure VD by electrocuting the bladder and compare it to Maturin's practice and devices--and to hear about the future author's salty Uncle Morse telling the lad about encounters with pirates. Captain Aubrey clearly derives partly from Patrick's sociable man-of-action brother Mike (who changed his surname to O'Brien, another family defector). And of course Maturin proves to be in large part a self-portrait. Fans of Aubrey and Maturin may find King's A Sea of Words (a lexicon of arcane terms that O'Brian uses) more delightful than his exposé of O'Brian's impressive yet appalling life, but it is one thorough and convincing exposé. --Tim Appelo
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Customer Reviews
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A Fine Biography
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-04-02
This is a fine biography of O'Brian, particularly in light of the problems faced by the author. In the first place, O'Brian attempted, at every turn, to suppress all knowledge of the facts of his early life. King was not, in short, an 'official' biographer who was presented with stacks of diaries and journals and invited to ask any question that might occur to him. Nevertheless, King was able to ground his narrative on a bedrock of serious scholarship and a first-hand awareness of his subject's work, ethos and experience.
It is said that a successful biography requires a degree of affection for the biographical subject, something that is complicated when that subject is, by turns, both secretive and irascible. The subject was also quite capable of utilizing his impressive erudition as a weapon, one that he could use as both a stiletto and a bludgeon. King is honest with regard to O'Brian's nature and shortcomings, but (without overlooking them) sees past them to O'Brian's significant strengths as a man and as a writer. Material success came relatively late, but O'Brian labored diligently, trusting in his monumental project and following his own lights. His tenacity and dedication make his eventual recognition all the more sweet and King charts the travails but also luxuriates, with O'Brian, in that ultimate recognition. The result is a narrative with a plot arc that one would expect to find in fiction, but here finds in real life.
I am not a fanatical O'Brian devotee and came to the book as a lover of good biographical writing. O'Brian fans, however, will relish the book as will students of biography. Ultimately it is very hard not to love a dedicated, talented individual whose tastes run to Jane Austen and Samuel Johnson and who feels utterly at home in the eighteenth century.
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A Man and Himself
Rating  (4)
Date: 2008-02-17
5 out of 5 customers found this reveiw helpful
For those of you who always thought that the father of Aubrey & Maturin was an Irishman, this book is a disillusionment.
This is a pathfinding biography (the word 'revealed' in the subtitle is only partly appropriate) of Richard Patrick Russ. Patrick Russ was an Englishman of German descent ('Russ' indicates immigration from further East in earlier centuries, possibly re-immigration), born in London in 1914. Of all years.
He is best known for inventing Patrick O'Brian, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. These 3 men somehow played or replayed different aspects of Russ's real life. To what extent is not fully disclosed yet.
Russ had changed his name to O'Brian in 45. When King wrote the first version of this book, O'Brian was still alive. He did not cooperate. King did not have the access to authentic sources that the second biographer, O'Brian's stepson, was going to have later. I have not read that second biography yet, so I can't talk about that.
The subject is as fascinating as a volume of the famous series of 'historical' novels. Russ seems to have been less than a perfect family man and friend, to put it mildly. The discrepancy to the morality in his novels' heroes is strong, but would we call somebody a hypocrite whose fictional creations follow standards that their creator had failed to meet? A question that King raises in his introduction.
Required reading for all who want to understand better where it all came from.
And since the book is out of print, I expect a properly updated version to show up sooner or later.
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Dean King versus Nikolai Tolstoy--both bios unsatisfying
Rating  (3)
Date: 2006-05-29
Dean King's groundbreaking biography of Patrick O'Brian has taken a real beating of late from Nikolai Tolstoy's recent and competing treatment of his stepfather's first 35 years. Having slogged through both biographies of the gifted but humanly flawed O'Brian, I am happy to say, no one wins. In fact, a pox on both their houses; I am going to forget what I have read and will just start rereading the man's work.
King gets credit for being the first to put together O'Brian's life. Even with all the inaccuracies so helpfully pointed out by Tolstoy, King was able to anchor the main points of that life in a way that make Tolstoy's criticisms often seem petty (more on that). Above all, it must be understood, King has written a biography more of O'Brian's work--what was written when, how it was received, the struggles for recognition--than of his life with all its hidden chapters and strange motivations. Given that King is a devoted reader of O'Brian's works, he can be forgiven for his breathless treatment of how O'Brian came to be known and revered especially in America for his Aubrey-Maturin series.
Which is not to excuse King's excesses of style. His chapter-heading quotations are odd choices that smack occasionally of invincible pretension. What Thoreau and Plutarch had to do with the matter at hand eluded me. King opens the bio with the episode of the writer Richard Patrick Russ changing his name to Patrick O'Brian, and King purports to know what Russ/O'Brian was thinking. King spoke with many people who knew O'Brian, but one is never sure about sources for particular passages because footnotes are wholly absent. Finally, there is a logical inconsistency that dogs King: having established that O'Brian consistently lied about his putative Irish background, King uses O'Brian's writings about himself often uncritically. Many of O'Brian's family refused to speak with King, so perhaps King just had to work with what he had.
King's writing is entertaining, and not always in a good way; it often leaves one with the feeling of not having reached the level of ept. The reaction to an early novel "was as if Beethoven's Ninth Symphony were being performed sotto voce." The potential American market for O'Brian's books "was like a Manila galleon lying halfway around the world, strange, unfathomable, immensely rich." One "watershed review was seeping into the minds of American book readers." At one point, having exhausted his store of merely strange figures of speech, King then compares O'Brian to the Little Engine That Could. I think that's projection at work. In any case, King demonstrates that immersing oneself in good writing doesn't necessarily spill over.
Tolstoy, having read and disagreed with King's bio of his stepfather, has given us a tedious and defensive account of O'Brian's life until his move to France in 1949. In the end, quite ironically, his biography leaves one less enamored with O'Brian the man than does King's.
Tolstoy's thickest problem is that he's too close to his subject for comfort. The most transparent example of this is Tolstoy's repeated criticisms of Dean King's errors--some factual but most on the writer's motivations--that themselves originate in O'Brian's lies about himself, lies that Tolstoy dismisses as "innocuous pretense" or "romancing." Tolstoy, in essence, just doesn't see what all the fuss is about, but as one of those O'Brian family members who refused to speak with King, he really cannot have it two ways. Likewise, Tolstoy swings between saying that O'Brian knew perfectly well that he was lying about his background (and what does that matter really?), the suggestion that O'Brian believed his own lies (and therefore is not culpable), and the idea that others wanted to believe O'Brian was Irish, so he had to follow along (and therefore should be forgiven).
It's in the substance of Tolstoy's defense of O'Brian--responding to what King unearthed in his research--that things get ugly, or amusing, depending on your point of view. King discovered that O'Brian had an affair shortly after marrying his first wife; Tolstoy gives O'Brian a pass on adultery because the girl was willing and the wife probably would never know! Tolstoy lets us know that "nothing can justify" O'Brian's leaving the first wife and two small children--one with a fatal disease--but he apparently thinks the situation mitigated somehow by the fact that O'Brian was "constitutionally ill equipped" for fatherhood (in fact he hated children), that his little daughter wasn't going to live long anyway, and that in any case he had met and moved in with his soul mate, the author's mother, a woman of wit and education, quite in contrast to the first wife. At one point Tolstoy cannot understand the first wife's bitterness, as O'Brian had done nothing (nothing!) to provoke it.
Tolstoy's biography is more accurate than King's (it helps to have the subject's diaries and papers), there is no doubt Tolstoy is a better writer (a family thing, perhaps), and I have to say his teasing out autobiographical elements from early short stories is very good indeed. But one must question both his judgment and his perspective. He started by wanting to defend O'Brian against what he saw as unfair treatment, but he ended up portraying a far more dysfunctional, far less appealing Patrick O'Brian than Dean King ever did or would.
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Dean King's books are among the classics
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-05-23
4 out of 9 customers found this reveiw helpful
Dean King's books are among the classics. Dean King was written biographies of extra-ordinary people that are well-known, yet
are not known, at all. Patrick O'Brian and Captain James Riley are two leaders in their own worlds, yet their paths never crossed.
Dean King, the extra-ordinary man that he is, had the perception and insight to recognize extra-ordinary traits in O'Brian and Riley, and write their biographies.
Once a true reader of good literature reads Dean King, he will become a reader for the long run.
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Brilliant biography of a very difficult subject
Rating (5)
Date: 2004-09-14
10 out of 10 customers found this reveiw helpful
Having been a rabid fan of O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, and then joyfully discovering his two earlier sea novels, I encouraged every friends and family member I thought would be interested to read those wonderful books. Though biographies are not a favorite genre of mine, I was presented with this book as a gift because it was well-known among my loved ones that O'Brian's work had meant so much to me over the years.
I had no idea of O'Brian's persona.
Dean King is to be commended for putting together a very well constructed biography of an extremely difficult subject. O'Brian deliberately obfuscated his past, distorted facts and outright lied to even close friends throughout his entire life. His attempt to hide his own past must have been a terrible obstacle to writing this biography, but King did a wonderful job.
Ultimately, I realized that I would have keenly disliked O'Brian had I known him personally, and I'm glad that never happened. Instead, I can simply enjoy the fruits of his marvelous creativity.
Dean King is to be commended for his hard work and meticulous research; he is honest at those points when he doesn't have all the facts so presents what he feels is the "most likely" scenario. In summary, being neither iconoclastic nor apologist, King's unbiased and frank account of Patrick O'Brian's strange life and how it translated into the nuances of his novels is perceptive and engaging.
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