Without the Utmost Pertinacity

Blows had not yet been struck. None would be, which is often the case when older men in golf shirts start yelling at one another. But, at the time, hostilities appeared inevitable. We were well within spray range of each other, yardarm to yardarm, you could say.

Now look. I’m not saying that all fiercely conservative conservatives are a few jibs short of fully rigged. Perish the thought. It just happens that the one shouting at me was.

Otherwise, it was a pleasant, late-summer day in the countryside. Friends were hosting forty or fifty neighbours at a part garden party, part picnic, part barbecue. The gathered crowd couldn’t have been nicer, the setting could hardly have been more bucolic. The fly in the ointment was the volume of one of our tablemates. For someone who lived among the fens and woodland haunts of a rural phone exchange, he had strong opinions about bike lanes. We learned too late that immigration and taxes were subjects best avoided. In the golden light of the generally tranquil afternoon, his volleys of saliva droplets were as visible as cannon smoke.

My tone, I hoped, was jocular. I said that he could probably be heard a kilometre away. An exaggeration, but not a huge one. Intended as a rhetorical flourish. Alas, the metric system was a touchy subject. One of several. Don’t get him started on the legacy media.

The pitch of our little chat increased. So did the bursts of profanity. Tempers were hoisted. Quarters were bristled. Powder was primed. A collision appeared unavoidable as we sidled our beams ever closer. And it was at this dangerous moment (broadside imminent) that I made the mistake of shifting my attention from my opponent’s looming size (disconcerting) to his eyes (worse).

A well-stoked flame burned there. Uh‑oh, I thought. I recognized the uncomplicated glare of righteousness. Had I been a betting man, my money wouldn’t have been on me.

Have you read Patrick O’Brian? It’s a question asked, perhaps a little too eagerly, by those who have. Among O’Brian readers, there is a current of mutual appreciation — the assumption that people who are interested in sea stories are more interesting than people who are not. This is not universally true, of course. Let me introduce my wife. But it’s true enough. As with most coteries of literary enthusiasm, there is, embedded in the irritating evangelism of Patrick O’Brian devotees, a worthy inclination. We want to share something good.

The many books of O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series have been described in the New York Times as “the best historical novels ever written.” Hilary Mantel fans may disagree, but you don’t have to be far into Master and Commander or H.M.S. Surprise to realize that you are in the hands of an exceptionally good writer — moreover, an exceptionally good writer who sees the past in such high resolution that reading him is like stepping out of a time machine and onto the deck of a Royal Navy frigate, Leda‑class, in 1814. Off Madagascar, with a nasty storm heading your way. And a French man‑of‑war firing eighteen-pound cannonballs at you.

That’s the thing about O’Brian: the reader is thrown into drastic situations with no preparatory instruction. There is no primer available. There are no helpful thumbnails on nineteenth-century naval tactics or marine protocol. No stopping of the action to explain what a mizzen topmast staysail is. Reading Patrick O’Brian is like having a few too many drinks with some awfully friendly chaps in a tavern down by the harbour and waking up the next day outbound for the Cape. On‑the‑job training, you could say.

Historical non-fiction is something else. David Grann’s The Wager is gripping, rich in assiduously researched detail and equally nautical in subject. The difference is that Grann’s readers are kept informed — as readers of non-fiction rightly expect to be.

Grann is particularly good at slipping information into the action. “At last, nearly a hundred feet above the water, Byron reached the main topgallant yard, where the highest sail on the mast was set,” Grann writes. “Then he awaited his orders: to furl the sail or reef it — roll it up partly to reduce the amount of canvas spread in heavy winds.”

Patrick O’Brian does not need to be so immediately instructive. What he does is create a world that is so astonishingly complete, readers (those who didn’t attend a naval academy) often go through a few paragraphs, sometimes a few pages, without knowing what’s happening. Or not exactly. “As the wind came round on to the beam they set staysails and the fore-and-aft mainsail: looking up at the set of the fore-royal and having it braced round more sharply, Jack could see it perfectly well.” But (such is the novelist’s art) we keep reading, confident that things will become slowly, accumulatively, gradually clearer — as things do with experience.

O’Brian’s readers are guided by their ignorance — in the sense that we set ourselves the task of addressing that ignorance while continuing (with pleasure) to follow the story. If we keep our eyes open and our wits about us, things will become clearer as the narrative unfolds. The capacity to embrace uncertainty is a good life skill to have. It comes in handy, particularly when dealing with reality.

He was big, which gave me pause. His nose suggested that he’d been in a lot more fights since grade 6 than I had. Nonetheless, there we were, thrown together by fate, at close enough quarters for me to see something in his fierce, unyielding eyes that concerned me more than the half-empty mickey in his jacket pocket. What really scared me, though I took pains not to show it, was his certainty.

He had no doubts. About anything. Not politics. Not economic history. Not drag queens. Not liberals. Not virology. Not Trudeau. And certainly not about the specifics of our dispute, which had to do with how loudly he started yelling at my wife when she groaned (as one does) at the mention of Donald Trump.

When I first read Ian Fleming paperbacks (after the Hardy Boys, before Steinbeck), I did so with only a hazy idea of the adult world in which James Bond operated. I had no clue about baccarat, for instance. I knew it was played in a special section of the casino and always involved beautiful women in evening gowns. Beyond that, my grasp of the game was not firm. To be honest, I wasn’t much clearer on sex. The ability to follow a story with a few (sometimes enormous) gaps in background information is an under-celebrated benefit of early reading. There were many unfilled blanks in Fanny Hill. But I lived with these gaps, as precocious readers of J. D. Salinger’s Nine Short Stories learn to do. We get the knack of living in a world that is too complex for us to know everything about what’s going on. I thought having gaps was just part of reading adult books. I thought trying to fill the gaps was just part of growing up.

The great lesson of reading great books is that there are great minds — sometimes way greater, no offence, than present company. The existence out there, in the vast universe of public discourse, of a more knowledgeable, better-informed, more soundly reasoned, entirely different opinion than the one you currently hold to be self-evident is a possibility that readers take on board at an early age. You think you’re pretty smart? Isaac Asimov begs to differ. Got a big vocabulary? Have you read any Jules Verne? There are pages of Tolkien that require a graduate degree in Norse sagas.

A big part of being a reader is not knowing everything. That’s often why we keep turning the page. Uncertainty is part of our baggage. That anything is possible is both entirely reliable and entirely unhelpful information to have in one’s possession. What else can you do but take it on board? No doubt, in a universe as enormous as the one we find ourselves spinning around in, there are even fiercely conservative conservatives who deserve our attention. You never know. We cannot always judge what is to windward, however wide the berth, however struck the topgallants, however double-breeched the guns.

A certain amount of uncertainty prevails — in naval battles, in Patrick O’Brian novels, in skirmishes at barbecues. Yet for many (men, usually), the uncertainty that comes with the possibility of being wrong — or, worse, somebody else being right — is not easy to embrace. That’s better than being stupid, though. “Doubt is not a pleasant condition,” said Voltaire. “But certainty is absurd.”