What about Killick?
That’s what I want to know with filming under way in Mexico on “The Far Side of the World,” a Peter Weir-directed movie based on the late Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels of the British Navy and its sailing ships in the Napoleonic era.
Those 20 books, written between 1969 and 1999, center on Capt. Jack Aubrey and his particular friend Stephen Maturin–the one, large-bodied and large-spirited, a born sailor and born leader of men; the other, an introspective, often troubled , added Irish-born physician and naturalist who, in his hatred of Napoleon, doubles as a spy. Spurred by a front-page essay a decade ago in the New York Times books section, the once quietly successful novels became international best sellers with more than 5 million copies now in print. The series has been called a masterpiece by none other than David Mamet, and O’Brian has been compared with Jane Austen and Herman Melville.
As a film, “The Far Side of the World”–it’s not clear whether the movie will use the plot of O’Brian’s book by that name or a pastiche of scenes from the series–has a great pedigree and the early look of a winner.
In addition to Weir, with “The Truman Show” and “The Dead Poets Society” to his credit, the $135 million movie stars Russell Crowe–of “Gladiator” and “A Beautiful Mind” fame–as Aubrey. It’s being filmed at the mammoth water tanks at Fox Studios Baja, where such movies as “Titanic” and “Pearl Harbor” were made. And as Maturin, the producers have signed on Paul Bettany, who did a quirky turn as Geoffrey Chaucer in “A Knight’s Tale.”
Given all that, it’s easy enough to envision the eventual film, built around Crowe’s character: an exhilarating tale of stirring naval battles between tall ships on the high seas and–in between the cannonades and the storms, as sort of grace notes to the action–moments that depict the friendship between the captain and physician.
Which brings me to Killick.
In the O’Brian novels, Preserved Killick is a mother hen/nagging wife of a steward to Aubrey’s, a resolutely acid-dispositioned manservant whose every action is carried out with an undertone of vinegary insubordination. In the book “The Far Side of the World,” the 10th in the series, O’Brian writes: “Killick’s shrill, indignant, shrewish voice [was] a cross between that of a much-tried long-soured nursemaid and of an uncommonly rough tarpaulin-hatted tobacco-chewing foremast-hand.”
He is, in short, eccentrically human.
Yet in all the preproduction publicity and gossip, not a word has been breathed about who will play Killick–or even whether the movie will have a Killick. That’s not much of a surprise, since most movies made from novels, particularly novels such as O’Brian’s that are so full of people, have to pare down the roster of characters.
But it’s also a reminder that the movie–no matter how commercially or artistically successful it will be–can’t capture the essence of O’Brian’s books. The demands and possibilities of a film are simply too different from those of a novel, at least O’Brian’s novels.
In the Aubrey-Maturin tales, the scenes of action are the grace notes, not the relationships. The heart of the story–the many volumes in the series really make up a single 6,000-page work–has little to do with violence and derring-do. Rather, it’s rooted in the day in, day out life of men who serve together on long, long sea journeys, punctuated by usually short stays on land.
It’s lovingly rooted in the patterns of that daily life and the interaction of the men–of Aubrey and Maturin, to be sure, but also such shipmates as Tom Pullings, Awkward Davies, Joe Plaice, Barret Bonden and, yes, Killick.
Consider this scene from “The Far Side of the World”:
“The ship had settled down to the steady routine of blue-water sailing: the sun, rising a little abaft the larboard beam and a little hotter every day, dried the newly-cleaned decks the moment it appeared and then beheld the ordered sequence of events–hammocks piped up, hands piped to breakfast, berth-deck cleaned and aired, the new hands piped to the great-gun exercise or reefing topsails, the others to beautifying the ship, the altitude observed, the ship’s latitude and her progress determined, noon proclaimed, hands piped to dinner, the ceremony of the mixing of the grog by the master’s mate–three of water, one of rum, and the due proportions of lemon-juice and sugar–the drum-beat one hour later for the gunroom meal, then the quieter afternoon, with supper and more grog at six bells, and quarters somewhat later, the ship cleared for action [for gun practice] and all hands at their fighting stations.”
It’s not that women aren’t present in the novels. Aubrey’s wife, Sophie, and Maturin’s spouse, Diana, have fairly substantial roles in some of the books. But like violence, sex plays a subordinate role in the arc of the series.
These are books about male friends and comrades, a subject rarely addressed in literature at such length. Indeed, that’s arguably the major flaw of the series, that O’Brian wrote the same book over and over again. Yet it mirrors its subject.
In taking up one of O’Brian’s naval tales, the reader is signing on to a cruise with the crew. To read the entire series is to ship out with them for the long haul–to participate in the daily routines, to accept the occasional boredom with the occasional thrills–but, mostly, to be part of that community of men. (Buddy films only hint at the complexity of feeling and connection that O’Brian brings to this subject.)
It was a community that O’Brian, a prickly character himself, loved. He talked of his characters as real people and of his joy at being able to go back to their world again and again.
That joy, a quiet glow, is also what’s at the heart of O’Brian’s books. These are men who work together, who know their place, jobs and worth. And who know how to enjoy their competence, companionship and the small pleasures of life.
As Maturin writes in a letter in the final book in the series:
“I wish I could convey the delight of a well-found, well-handled man-of-war, sailing with all reasonable sail abroad, a steady, urgent wind coming in over her larboard quarter, her prow (or I think I should say cutwater) throwing a fine sheet of spray to leeward with each even measured pitch: there is a generally-diffused happiness abroad … and a discreet wave of mirth and satisfaction ripples over the forecastle, while ten knots is greeted with such a thrumping on the deck, such enthusiasm, that the officer of the watch desires the mate of the watch to attend to `that God-damned bellowing and trampling, like a herd of drunken heifers mad for the bull.'”
In an interview with O’Brian less than two months before his death on Jan. 2, 2000, I noted that few modern novelists deal with joy with such relish.
“Poor, poor writers,” he replied. “Perhaps they don’t know it very well. I certainly see a lot of books without it, and sad books they are. There’s a lot of joy in Shakespeare. There’s a lot of joy in Jane Austen. A great deal in Fielding.”
O’Brian’s delight, and that of his characters, is the result of a willingness to look at life with open eyes. O’Brian finds wonder in the action of the wind on sails, in the blissful ignorance of a ship’s boy and, height of pleasure, in the beauty of a bird’s plumage and the structure of its skeleton.
In this last, O’Brian was very much like Maturin. And when he describes Maturin’s ecstasy in the face of the natural world, O’Brian is communicating his own.
This, like depicting the community of seamen and the joy of everyday life, is a difficult subject for a movie to capture. It’s one thing for the camera to show a beautiful scene; it’s quite another to slow the storytelling down enough to communicate the reaction of the characters to that scene.
But it’s in those reactions that the soul of O’Brian’s art is to be found–in passages such as this one describing a trip into a mangrove swamp by Maturin and a naturalist friend:
“They walked with foolish smiles upon their faces, astonished by the butterflies, the innumerable butterflies of so very many different species and by the occasional humming-bird; and once the all-pervading sound of stridulating insects had lasted ten or twenty minutes it could no longer be heard and they seemed to be walking in total silence–very few birds, and these few mute. But when they came to the glade, where the trees stood fairly wide and the ground was clear, they startled a mixed flock of parrots; and there on a well-beaten path they saw a marching column of leaf-carrying ants a foot wide and so long that it vanished in either direction.”
O’Brian’s books are filled with foolish smiles–on the faces of characters, and readers too. They’re a joy.
