FanFare

In the final book of the twenty-book series: peace has erupted again, and the Surprises are rich and rudderless: doomed to be blind drunk, poxed, and stripped before Sunday, with dangerous notions that there ain't no martial law and they ain't slaves. However, there is work to be done. The disgusting British Empire's business in Chile is unfinished, now even more complicated by a rift within the juntas and the addition of a freelance meddler, Sir David Lindsay, with his uniform like that of the Royal Navy but with rather more lace, and with his rebuilt Asp and her long brass chasers. A thorny situation to resolve – if the Surprise can ever find a shipyard to heal her mangled shattered foreparts and go from all ahoo to all a-tanto – with no hope of a prize or distinction at the end of it. Is it Jack's implacable fate to be yellowed? Be astonished by the answer within Blue at the Mizzen. Meanwhile, Stephen courts the potto lady. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on Dec 31, 2018 - 9 comments

In the nineteenth book of the twenty book series, the disgusting British Empire flexes its cannon, Carbonari, and Cainites to thwart the Hashashin machinations of Napoléon, who is, if anything, abler aft far Elba. Lionesses are ended; cousins(?) clasp hands; drawers hit the deck; long-legged Naseby consumes Dupuytren's contraction; Montpellier snakes make poor pets; Killick snaps a tusk on a third class boy; Poll Skeeping makes loblolly girl; Pippin gets pipped; and all the livelong Deys don't amount to many as the mission goes from the Rock to Kasbah to the battle royale on Fortnight Island. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on Nov 11, 2018 - 11 comments

This is the eighteenth book in the Aubrey-Maturin series. Jack Aubrey still has the seventy-four Bellona, but no cruise, merely a station blockading Brest; Jack's got a jobbing captain Jenkins, is opening his mouth in Parliament, and is resisting enclosure – that universal good! – to make an enemy of his superior, Admiral Lord Stanraer; Jack's Preventative prize money is entangled, and heartbroken Mrs. Williams has destroyed his marriage with proof of Jack's Haligonian dalliance from book six. Peace looms for the disgusting British Empire, and Jack faces a career endgame of empty rank without command or respect: neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red herring: an admiral of an imaginary yellow squadron, the kind of person Lord and Lady Keith would not acknowledge on the street. Meanwhile, Stephen fires the elegant fowling piece of the world; Bonden's ten-year tail is caught in the mill; quicksilver, hog's lard, and mutton suet make blue ointment; Mrs. Williams is buying chintz and swearing affidavits; the Chileans want to give it a go; Killick is called honest; Sir Joseph Blaine is a coca-gnawer too; a bear makes an arrest; and Diana conspires to get Sophie's groove back for the first time. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on Sep 27, 2018 - 18 comments

In the seventeenth book of the series, Jack wrangles the Ringle, and the Surprise comes home at last to England, to emptied Shelmerston, to gardens become children to alien spades, to Mrs. Williams recovered as a bookie with an entourage and perhaps using snuff, to doubts about Diana's conduct, to measles-ridden swollen-faced hoydens, to a scarlet trull with a loaded horse-pistol, and to Stephen's fairy daughter Brigid who only needs a good shaking, the black hole, bread and water, and the whip. Pullings is ecstatic because Aubrey is made Commodore and given a squadron to West Africa, for the slave trade is to be ended, if not by will by force, despite Lord Nelson's love of the disgusting British Empire's system of colonies. Jack nearly unbosoms himself; Bonden recalls a bodice; Freetown and the Bight of Benin await, full of pottos, sodomy, and the CFR 80% yellow jack. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on Sep 2, 2018 - 9 comments

This is the sixteenth book of the Aubrey-Maturin series. His Majesty's hired vessel Surprise is full of Shelmerstonian Sethians, sure, but also Traskites, Brownists, Arminians, Muggletonians, and Knipperdollings, some of whom might be sympathetic to the fully-manual subsistence-level presumably-heteronormative Pacific-island proto-Communism NOW dreams of the Franklin's Monsieur Turd Dutourd who is "neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring but partook of each; the Sphinx," according to Jno. Aubrey, and by Dr. Maturin's lights, a good man led astray by the mumping villain Rousseau. The Surprise's five-book ongoing mission for the disgusting British Empire to stab her ally Spain in the back promote abolition and independence culminates in boat-, body-, and barky-wrecking trials of water, fire, air, ice, lightning, poison, earth – all the JRPG elements – plus the deadly accurate spit of anti-colonialist llamas, but you will never mind a face full of llama spit, my dear. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on Aug 8, 2018 - 16 comments

In the fifteenth book of the Aubrey-Maturin series, the Surprise ships no wives, except for when she does, and Mrs. Clarissa Oakes (née Harlow Harvill) has all the Surprises' flesh a-creep, and they're horny on mains'l. The Surprise, leaving far astern the disgusting British Empire's continent-defiling penal colony (the southern one) is obliged to extend the Empire's tendrils just a little bit more into Polynesia, where awaits her most shocking humiliation yet. Beetles will be boxed, wads will be cheese, peasecods will be gathered, and as the Surprises have reaped, so shall they sow. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on Jul 31, 2018 - 18 comments

In the fourteenth book of the Aubrey-Maturin series the stranded Dianes repel an invasion of their cricket field by a fresh double fanged lady pirate, Kesegaran, with the assistance of the resurrected Beelzebub; they are saved at last by the bird's nest soup industrial complex; Stephen is immortalized with a fetid insectivorous parasite on the glabrous bugwort; the Cornélie is kited; Gelijkheid becomes Nutmeg after a long baptism, and the Surprise is similarly by the sweetening-cock freed of tons and tons of vile cable slime in the bilge, to say nothing of the cess-pit filth of furtive below-decks micturations; Sweeting's Island survivors Sarah and Emily are disappointingly not named Thursday and Behemoth; they befriend the plague of cokehead rats; to everyone's amazement a cross-jack is bent; Stephen considers the destructive effects of moral advantage in marriage and physick; Martin and Maturin are reunited, and for the first time they eschew the lubbers hole for the futtock shrouds, but Jack is not invited to their tête à têtes and wishes Martin at the Devil; and at long last, in the disgusting British Empire's horrific New and very South Wales, a platypus murders Dr. Stephen Maturin RIP. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on Jul 16, 2018 - 13 comments

In the thirteenth book of the series the disgusting British Empire is at it again, cutting capers on Tom Tiddler's ground: bidding her agent Dr. Stephen Maturin and catspaw Captain Jack Aubrey to the South China Sea, where Aubrey may opine on Solomon's thousand porcupines while Maturin follows a spurned orang-utang up thousand steps to be charged by unicorns; where from the glorious sweep of a stern window is viewed a sky half purple, and not a colony of nondescript boobies after all; where there's no hope for a pinnace be she carvel- or clinker-built; where a fowling-piece mars Ganymede, and the traitor Wray's spleen is at last to be vented; where hope rests on Diane's quarter as Jack's seventeen stone bends her main royal to the alarm of Spotted Dick; and where at last Stephen returns a pugil in piquet for all the poops and garstrakes he's endured. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on Jul 4, 2018 - 12 comments

In the twelfth book of the series there can be hardly any hope at all, for Captain Aubrey is pilloried and struck from the List, his career in ruins, beaten joyless and thin, father of a sod, swab, and whoreson beast, while his particular friend Stephen Maturin is a mere opium-eater and coca-gnawer in an operatic mess of a marriage to a balloonist in a dower-house. Sophie's bloom is withered and Diane must be cut out, the Surprise has lost her H.M.S. of the D.B.E. and lies profaned in a smugglers cove, ever quarter-davit-less, while the horrible old Leopard is hogged and deformed. Joe Plaice is unwelcome aboard, Padeen is melted, impacted: the lamb in wolf's clothing that lies down with the lion, while Mr. Martin is unfrocked for rogering, the cook worships peacock Satan, and it's all, all of it, uninsured. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on Jun 16, 2018 - 13 comments

In the eleventh book in the Aubrey-Maturin series, Sir William admires Spotted Dick, Jack's known to have sired a papisher, Captain Goole's tripe heist grudge never dies, and the Surprise – sailing as she does with the most admirable celerity with some particular arrangement of the bowlines – is set after the Spartan on her final voyage home to the heart of the disgusting British Empire. There await: thief-takers, pickpockets, publishers, sharp nobs, pork pies, leathern conveyances, the celestial toby, laughing cuckoos, medium-sized jelly-bags, Fanny Wray's nautical boudoir, Covent Garden hummums, burned Grapes, quiet combes, rotten boroughs, Deadly Never Greens, crushed duodecimpunctati, and the doom of empires: lawyers. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on Jun 8, 2018 - 14 comments

Russel Crowe and Paul Bettany play Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, Captain & Doctor respectively of the frigate Surprise, ordered in 1805 to sink, burn, or take as prize the French Acheron. The Acheron may be a Yankee-built super-frigate of forty-four guns, but she's still vulnerable at the stern, like the rest of us. An adaptation of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin historical fiction series, directed and co-written by Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock). [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on May 30, 2018 - 33 comments

In the tenth book, the little old sixth-rate Surprise is given a final mission before the knacker's yard: to go from Gibraltar to the far side of the world, if need be, past the logistic reach of the disgusting British Empire, to protect her whalers from the American Norfolk, thirty-two. A journey where seas are vast, spars are sparse, Colnett's book and midshipman apply, Jonahs meet their finners, and specktioneers cry; where the beautiful curve of a stern window is admired and leaned out of. It occurs that the Surprise is mutilated, Jack's loins are imperiled, Stephen adds an addiction; Horns are got around, Palmer's Paradise sought while Old Sodbury's found, and HERMIONES DIE. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on May 30, 2018 - 16 comments

The ninth book of the series finds Jack and Stephen at ease in Malta. Jack basks in the twin glow of Tom Pullings's captaincy and the clockwork chelengk on his number one full-dress scraper. Even his once-nemesis Andrew Wray, the acting Second Secretary of the Admiralty and accused card-cheat, has done Jack a noble turn. Stephen is less at ease. Too many people seem to know the plans of the disgusting British Empire, and even more telling: the handsomest woman in Valletta is paying him particular attention – he, with his shrewish phiz, a known urinator. Something is amiss, and there's not a moment to lose, and what is more, speed is the essence of attack. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on May 22, 2018 - 15 comments

In the eighth book of the series, Captain Aubrey's prospects are limited to the Worcester, seventy-four, the wall-sided mouldy rotten old floating coffin pride of the British shipyards. She is ordered to join the blockade at Toulon, back in the Mediterranean where Jack and Stephen first met. Blockade work is hell – Sisyphean tacks – and despite Handel and Hamlet, Aubrey's spirits sink as low as London Bach's old man can take them, for Maturin is often away. (Maturin himself is overmatched by Professor Graham, the unnatural philosopher, who will have none of Stephens' triced gumbril puddings, by and/or large, and will not use a coaster on Diana's gleaming object). Furthermore Jack is under the eyes of his old nemesis, Admiral Harte who will end Jack's career for good and all if Jack bungles the Mediterranean machinations of the disgusting British Empire. All told there are too many rhinoceroses, parsons, Lesbians, Beys, and double-bottomed defecators for Jack's comfort. Spouse-breach is in the air, while on the water lurks the Torgud, firing thirty-six pound marble balls from the monstrous Portuguese cannons in her waist. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on May 14, 2018 - 17 comments

In the seventh book of the series Aubrey, Maturin, and Diana Villiers flee Halifax a little too late aboard the private packet Diligence. Their enemies are well paid, well informed, and desperate to get their hands around Diana's neck and the titanic jewel thereupon. Stephen waves a raven penis in Paris and attempts to rescue a Godfather near Gdańsk, with help from the hermaphrodite Humbug. Jack faces the ruin of his heart, the shipwreck of his fortune, as well as literal shipwreck of the Ariel. The infinitely perilous lee-shore beckons, and the weather is all ahoo in the northern waters of the disgusting British Empire. Also featuring guest PC Jagiello, first level Bard. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on May 6, 2018 - 20 comments

In the sixth book of the twenty book series, the Leopard slinks into Batavia from the previous book, presumed lost at sea and our protagonists presumed dead. Thereafter a wombat munches lace, persons are subfusc, Jack matches wits with an admirable Drury, Stephen hurlies the wickets, kangaroos grow fractious, Java is sunk, the weevil thing happens, Doctor McLean hae Stephen's bukes, spirits are spilling and La Flèche is weak, thighs are nibbled in the night, it's 1812, maneuvers are damned, Java is sunk, Yankees Doodle, tobacco is spat, a harbor full of beans is overthunk, Herapaths heist, prawling strangles are gluppited, an obsidian phallus brains a Frenchman, Stephen achieves a stalemate, and the Shannon restores pride to the disgusting British Empire. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on May 1, 2018 - 22 comments

In the fifth book of the series, Captain Aubrey proves to be the best judge of a horse in the Navy, and is soon at sea again in the horrible old Leopard. Her ignoble mission is the transportation of convicts to a penal colony of the disgusting British Empire. To Jack's dismay, four women number among the convicts; one of them is the spy Louisa Wogan, an American echo of Diana, upon whom Maturin is to ply his trade. Down to roaring forties the Leopard must go, where the powerful Waakzaamheid keeps a stern vigil, and all things must come together or crash to bits among the cabbages and tardigrades of Desolation Island. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on Apr 21, 2018 - 9 comments

In the fourth book of the series, Captain Aubrey flees Ashgrove Cottage to Capetown, to hoist a pennant on the Boadicea. Made a temporary Commodore, three captains are his to manage and command: stalwart Pym of the Sirius, the flogging Captain Corbett of Néréide, and the dashing Captain Scroggs Lord Clonfert of the Otter. The mission: seize Mauritius and Réunion from the French to preserve the disgusting British Empire's flow of treasure. Meanwhile Doctor Maturin distributes subversive literature whilst enduring the barbed insights of Dr. McAdams and the cruel forks of Governor-designate Farquhar. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on Apr 15, 2018 - 15 comments

In this third book of the twenty book series, hands are maimed, vampires abjured, sloths debauched, the shit and blood of boobies drunk, albatrosses sighted, cables drawn taut to squirting, Dil's three wishes granted, loins admired, tigers overlapped, satisfaction demanded, mangosteens fetched, turtles discovered, logs run off the reel, wheels disintegrated and hearts literally exposed as Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin take the Surprise to the far flung Indian Ocean ports of the disgusting British Empire. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on Apr 10, 2018 - 34 comments

In this second novel of the twenty book series, Commander Aubrey and Doctor Maturin vie with tipstaff and distaff, missing stays and making shocking leeway aboard the vile Polychrest, the Carpenter's Mistake, in the service of the disgusting British Empire of the early 1800s. Introducing Diana Villiers (extreme goth jock) and Sophia Williams (soft prep nerd??) to the series. Special appearance by the Misses Lamb. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on Apr 3, 2018 - 45 comments

Jack Aubrey, R.N. (extreme jock prep) befriends Stephen Maturin, F.R.S. (extreme goth nerd) on the same day he is given his first command, an aging 14 gun sloop – the poor old heavy slow dirty-bottomed Sophie. Her orders: prowl the Mediterranean, and carry out the piratical affairs of the disgusting British Empire. No stern window escapes unappreciated in this first book of the twenty book series. [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on Mar 26, 2018 - 48 comments

Hey. I am embarking on a reread of all 20 Aubrey-Maturin books. I was thinking there might be some MeFites who have never read them, or who would like to reread them, but have been waiting for a sign, or other people to talk with. This could be that sign! We could be those other people! [more inside]
posted by fleacircus on Mar 22, 2018 - 26 comments