#000656
The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey
Patrick O'Brian
The fragment Patrick O'Brian was writing when he died — the unfinished twenty-first novel in the beloved Aubrey-Maturin saga of the age of sail. Published in the United States as *21*, it gathers the three-odd chapters O'Brian completed before his death in January 2000, presented as a corrected typescript alongside a facsimile of his handwritten manuscript, so readers can watch the master at work, cross-outs and all. There is no resolution here, and there was never meant to be one for the reader: Captain Jack Aubrey and the physician-spy Stephen Maturin simply sail on into an unwritten voyage. For newcomers it is the wrong place to start; for the series' many devotees it is a poignant, intimate coda — the last glimpse of two of the most fully realized friends in modern fiction, caught mid-sentence. It is as much literary artifact as novel.
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The author
Patrick O'Brian (1914–2000) was an English novelist, translator, and biographer whose twenty-book Aubrey-Maturin series — set in the Royal Navy of the Napoleonic Wars — earned him comparisons to Jane Austen and a devoted global readership. He guarded his privacy fiercely; after his death it emerged that much of the English-gentry persona he presented was invented, his real name Richard Patrick Russ.
The book
The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey (2004) reproduces the opening chapters of the never-completed twenty-first novel together with a facsimile of the manuscript, a rare public look at a writer's work in progress.
How to read it
Not as a standalone novel but as an elegy and a curiosity. It offers no plot resolution; its value is the intimacy of unfinished, uncorrected prose and one last passage of the Aubrey-Maturin partnership. Readers new to O'Brian should begin with Master and Commander instead.
For more context
Read Nikolai Tolstoy's and Dean King's accounts of O'Brian's carefully constructed life for the story behind the persona.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Patrick O'Brian
- Publisher
- W. W. Norton
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 2004
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Fiction
- Location
- Colorado