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marginalgloss · 6 years

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every rope an end

‘The wake stretched away, as true as a taut line now, and after a while he said, ‘He longed for a daughter, I know, and it is very well that he should have one; but I wish she may not prove a platypus to him,’ and he might have added some considerations on marriage and the relations, so often unsatisfactory, between men and women, parents and children, had not Davidge’s voice called out, ‘Every rope an-end,’ cutting the thread of his thought.’

It’s hard to put my finger on a single thing which, for me, makes Clarissa Oakes the weakest instalment so far in Patrick O’Brian’s series of historical novels. It is in many ways the most typical one yet: the one which bears most boldly every trace of his style. But it’s also where all his deficiencies become most apparent.

As usual, the story picks up almost exactly where the last book left off: with Maturin getting stung by a duck-billed platypus, and Jack Aubrey sailing away from the grim confines of New South Wales towards South America. Their long-postponed mission to Peru is about to be put off once again, first by a twist of fate and then by a new task. Firstly, Jack discovers that a woman has stowed away aboard the surprise: she is Clarissa Harvill, a fugitive from the colonies in a relationship with one of his officers, Oakes. And then he is given a new task: to visit Moahu, a tiny island not far from what is now known as Hawaii, and to settle a dispute between local rulers in favour of the British.

For a long time the novel is most notable for its total lack of explicit drama. Jack’s annoyance at the presence of a woman on board is emphasised constantly, but it is never really permitted to boil over. All we get is pages of pettiness: smirks and sniggering behind his back, and once or twice punishments that are modest by the standards of the navy. Even the question of what should be done with Clarissa is somewhat sidestepped. There’s a great sequence where Aubrey makes a sort of show out of pretending to sail up to a deserted island to drop her and Oakes off there; how convenient that their boats cannot find a safe space to land.

Part of this deception is because he understands that he has to be seen by the crew to be doing something, but to punish them too hard would be regarded as insufferable hypocrisy. As Stephen points out: ‘…the service is a sounding-box in which tales echo for ever, and it is perfectly well known throughout the ship that when you were about Oakes’ age you were disrated and turned before the mast for hiding a girl in that very part of the ship.’ And so he takes the only other honourable option open to him: he marries the couple on board.

Except that this is not the end of the deceit. After many pages of slow and sometimes interminable travel, it becomes increasingly apparent that Clarissa has been sleeping around below decks. The reader is never permitted to see any of this directly. As so often in O’Brian, much of the real action happens off stage. We only hear about it in drips of information — first through Maturin’s suspicions about the strange behaviour of the crew, and eventually through his confidential (but chaste) exchanges with Clarissa. It is not long before a sort of tribalism emerges amongst the officers and seamen; every myth about women acting as a disruptive influence on an all-male crew is proved to be worthwhile.

Clarissa herself is sometimes intriguing but ultimately insubstantial. For too long we know nothing about her, except that she is good looking enough to turn heads. And when she does tell her story, it is tragic, but tragic is all it is: it’s a grim retread of every story of every fallen woman from that era. (That she shares the name with the protagonist of Samuel Richardson’s eighteenth century novel is almost certainly not a coincidence.) She has a certain endearing independence, but none of the stage presence of Diana Viliers or Sophie. For most of the book she is simply a cipher for femininity.

And I was troubled by the novel’s diagnosis that the root of Clarissa’s promiscuity is in her abusive childhood, where she was so often the victim of rape that sex ceased to have any meaning for her. Here she is describing her later life, working in a brothel:

‘…it has a certain likeness to being at sea: you live a particular life, with your own community, but it is not the life of the world in general and you tend to lose touch with the world in general’s ideas and language – all sorts of things like that, so that when you go out you are as much a stranger as a sailor is on shore. Not that I had much notion of the world in general anyhow, the ordinary normal adult world, never having really seen it. I tried to make it out by novels and plays, but that was not much use: they all went on to such an extent about physical love, as though everything revolved about it, whereas for me it was not much more important than blowing my nose – chastity or unchastity neither here nor there – absurd to make fidelity a matter of private parts: grotesque.’

Parts of this bring to mind the old idiom that everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer. This notion of ‘the world in general’ strikes me as oddly anachronistic for the early nineteenth century: such was the diversity of standards of living at that time that I doubt Stephen would have recognised any such thing. And there’s something dismissive of the actuality of sex about this, I think: the author is not especially interested in what happened to Clarissa, more in looking at her as another example of an alienated soul, living out of time, at large in the world.

Except in her case it is a dismissiveness that’s consistent with the vague sense of contempt so often evident in O’Brian’s work for the sexual impulse in general. So often in this books there is the sense of passion as something dangerous, even monstrous, in human nature; something that must be controlled at all costs. Maturin is the exemplar of this, whereas Jack is the exception that proves the rule — in moral terms, O’Brian allows him certain urges, even to sleep around on his voyages, so long as it occurs in the wider context of maintaining his life as an officer and a married father. In a certain light he has something of the bearing of a prize steer.

There is still a great deal to enjoy in Clarissa Oakes. The dialogue is frequently delightful — some of the author’s best — and as always, there’s a plethora of interest to be found in the minor details of the text. I especially enjoy the dark joke hidden in the novel’s alternate American title of The Truelove; this is a book entirely without romance, and the ship of that name is only a beat-up old whaler of negligible interest. Yet most of this is incidental. This is the first book in this series where I was expecting something more which never came.

#books #patrick o'brian #clarissa oakes

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