The Rendezvous and Other Stories

Ahoy, shipmates! I enjoyed the Aubrey-Maturin books as much as any of you. I was introduced to them by a Medieval musicologist, not someone you'd expect to swash his buckle much, and I read the whole series in one summer. I'm still hoping that another all-concluding volume will be discovered in a secret cask somewhere in Provence. I wouldn't want O'Brian to have been another writer than he was. Nevertheless, his early short stories display the fact that he COULD have been a very different writer, and perhaps a very great different writer. I rather lament the writer that he wasn't as much as I value the writer he was. The stories in The Rendezvous apparently represent O'Brian's own selection, and thus part of his literary testament. Most of them would be impossible to regcognize as his work if one encountered them anonymously. They are terse, dark, evocative, elusive, and beautifully crafted. Another reviewer has already identified the masterpiece of the collection, "The Chian Wine", a story about ritualized Jew-baiting in an otherwise idyllic village. It's a story that will knock you out of yourself. A classic. But there are other stories of almost equal power, and then there are graceful flirtations with an aesthetic never exposed in the Aubrey-Maturin books. Too bad cloning hadn't been perfected in time to create two Patrick O'Brians - one to write the great sea novels that he wrote, and another to write the great psychological novels that he could have written.

This is a compilation of short stories, written by Mr. O'Brian over many years. They are emotionally dark, speaking to man's helplessness against the forces of nature and emotion, but they are masterpieces of characterization and understatement.Read "The Chian Wine" first and you will be astounded.