It is fortunate for Patrick O’Brian that he developed the Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin series of seafaring novels, for he could not have continued in the direction that he took in “Richard Temple” and sustained a career as a writer of fiction.
“Richard Temple” is not a bad novel. Indeed, it has several fine parts, though the whole is less than the sum of them. It simply is not a terribly compelling novel.
Written in 1960-61, O’Brian’s third novel was published in Britain in 1962 but failed to find an American publisher. Reading it now, on its first U.S. publication, you can understand the Americans’ decision in the 1960s. It is more interesting after the fact of Aubrey/
Maturin than it could have been on its own at that time.
The novel begins (and ends) with the title character, a British intelligence agent in occupied France, being interrogated by his German captors. There is no good reason for the prison setting, except possibly that O’Brian himself had been in British intelligence during World War II. Otherwise, the great bulk of the novel consists of a flashback, Richard contemplating his tumultuous past as an artist.
Tumultuous, yes, but the telling of it is dense, brooding – the term “navel-gazing” comes to mind – even obscure. “Richard Temple” is essentially a bildungsroman, exploring, in the manner of but nowhere near as well as “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” the protagonist’s mental, emotional and moral development and his attempt to understand, and make his way in, an often heartless world.
Richard’s father, a rector, dies young, leaving him and his mother, a woman sinking into drunkenness and promiscuity, nearly penurious. Through the assistance of an uncle, an Anglican clergyman on the make, Richard receives training as an artist. His subsequent career, despite his talent, is rarely lucrative, and includes stints as a member of a house-burglarizing gang and a counterfeiter of Utrillos.
Points of comparison can be found between Richard and O’Brian’s life, not least the struggles of a poor writer-artist. O’Brian’s stepson, Nikolai Tolstoy, apparently considered “Richard Temple” so autobiographical that he leaned upon it heavily as a source for his biography of O’Brian, published last year.
Like O’Brian, Richard was solitary and “did not quite seem to belong anywhere.” Still more pertinent is the issue of confused identity. Richard seems confused – and makes up fanciful stories – about his background. O’Brian was born Richard Patrick Russ in 1914 but in 1945 legally changed his name, a revelation that came out two years after O’Brian’s death in 2000 and led to speculation about his motive for disguising his past.
A comparison also can be seen between “Richard Temple” and the later seafaring novels in the person of Philippa Brett, a strong, complex and passionate young aristocrat whom Richard not too successfully pursues. She closely resembles the not-quite-attainable love of Maturin’s life, Diana Villiers.
The novel takes a decided turn for the better (and brighter) when Richard runs into Philippa – or, rather, the other way around. Philippa, who notwithstanding her self-possession is something of a female version of the silly twit, runs him down with her car, after which she visits him in the hospital and pours out her apologies – apologies both abject and comic.
In fact, the entire tenor shifts dramatically at this juncture, and not merely because people in the novel – largely bereft of dialogue up to now – begin talking to each other. Philippa invites Richard to convalesce at her family’s estate, and we enter a new world, that of the Bright Young Things and the Country House Set.
This extended section offers some of the best scenes in the book. Characters who might have come straight from the pages of Evelyn Waugh or Nancy Mitford or even P.G. Wodehouse talk about improbable events in a tinklingly phony way that is nevertheless a delight.
But the jollier times do not last. The rich and well-born here are as false, ungrateful and insincere as they are in Waugh or Mitford – or anywhere else except Wodehouse. Richard plunges back into a world made even bleaker by the onset of World War II. Whether he emerges-well, that may come as a brusque, but not unrealistic, surprise.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book review editor, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
Richard Temple
By Patrick O’Brian
Norton, 336 pages, $24.95
