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Title: The Surgeon's Mate

Subtitle: Aubrey-Maturin Series, Book 7

Author: Patrick O'Brian

Narrator: Ric Jerrom

Format: Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 56 mins

Language: English

Release date: 01-01-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 31 votes

Genres: Mysteries & Thrillers, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are ordered home by despatch vessel to bring the news of their latest victory to the government. But Maturin is a marked man for the havoc he has wrought in the French intelligence network in the New World, and the attentions of two privateers soon become menacing. The chase that follows through the fogs and shallows of the Grand Banks is as thrilling, as tense, and as unexpected in its culmination as anything Patrick O'Brian has written.

Then, among other things, follows a shipwreck and a particularly sinister internment in the notorious Temple Prison in Paris. Once again, the tigerish and fascinating Diana Villiers redresses the balance in this man's world of seamanship and war.

Members Reviews:

Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World

The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the naturalist-spy-ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin. It takes place during the War of 1812 and begins with the HMS Shannon sailing into Halifax in Nova Scotia with its American prize frigate the Chesapeake, captured after the ferocious fifteen-minute battle that closed the sixth novel, The Fortune of War (1979). Although ecstatic about finally having a British naval victory over the Americans to celebrate, Jack is afflicted by a badly healing broken arm, the uncertain state of his financial affairs back home in England, and absent letters from his wife Sophie. Stephen is pleased to have escaped from Boston with a passel of helpful American intelligence documents, including names of American spies among the British, and with Diana Villiers, the woman he has loved for years (and the previous six books in the series), and who has finally agreed to marry him. However, despite the obvious benefits of marrying Stephen, including regaining her British citizenship, she is getting cold feet, and Stephen himself is having to deal with a kind of void where his passion and love for her once burned.

This book shares the strong points of the earlier entries in the series. First, without boring veteran readers O'Brian efficiently brings new readers up to speed, here by having Jack and Stephen report about their recent actions to their superiors and colleagues. Second, O'Brian evokes a believable, fully-realized historical world, that of the Napoleonic wars, with characters thinking, speaking, and acting the way one might expect them to think, speak, and act back then and there, rather than as 20th century people transported to the early 19th century. Third, he excels at making long periods of inaction compelling and then suddenly disrupting them with brief, intense scenes of suspenseful, never repetitive action of various types, in this book ranging from naval battles and storms to covert actions and interrogations. Finally, the deep friendship between the perfectly complementary odd couple, Jack and Stephen, is a pleasure to behold. Jack is huge, florid, loud, emotional, good natured, open; Stephen small, sallow, circumspect, intellectual, misanthropic, secretive. At sea on land, Jack is an instinctive and confident leader aboard a ship; adept ashore, Stephen is quite out of place, if not in the way, aboard a ship.