One of the few things about Patrick O'Brian everyone agrees on is that he was an intensely private person, who would have hated the idea of a biography. So now he has two. The first, by the American naval fiction buff Dean King (2000), was heavily based on interviews with O'Brian's son by his first marriage, Richard. Having declined to co-operate with King, O'Brian's stepson, Nikolai Tolstoy, published his own account of his stepfather's early years (2004) essentially as a riposte to King's "many errors".

Obviously, not many readers will really want to get involved in a squalid fight between two children still busily slinging mud sixty years after their parents' divorces, so there's no need to go into all the questions of who slept with whom when, or who paid or didn't pay their maintenance. We all know how vindictive even the nicest people can be when they're talking about their exes. I don't think it really changes our appreciation of O'Brian as a novelist either way.

There are some more pertinent differences, though: King is very good when he's discussing O'Brian's naval fiction, a subject that Tolstoy's book scarcely touches (presumably it will be in Volume 2, if and when). Tolstoy on the other hand has the advantage of access to many of O'Brian's private papers, and of knowing O'Brian very well (although they did not meet during the period covered by this book). He can speak authoritatively in places where King is just guessing. However, both rely heavily on finding autobiographical elements in O'Brian's fiction. Tolstoy is a rather better writer than King, and has the advantage of going second where King can't answer back. Unlike King, he also has the rare habit of proofreading his text (or has a competent editor), so his book is an altogether more agreeable experience for the reader than King's.

Some of Tolstoy's psychological speculation is probably every bit as fanciful as King's, but there are some things that ring true: his suggestion that O'Brian's difficult relationship with his father (more difficult in Tolstoy than in King) was at the root of his touchy personality and anxiety about social class is very telling. He probably over-rates the latter, though: in mid-20th century England, the only people who didn't suffer from some sort of class anxiety were either public-school-types like Tolstoy or manual workers. The idea that O'Brian got his image of leadership and command from the Master of the Ynysfor fox-hunt is interesting, too. Certainly more plausible than the spell on a mythical windjammer or the putative secret service behind enemy lines that King puts forward.

Ultimately, I think dazzyj is probably right that trying to make sense of O'Brian through biography is pretty futile. Even in Tolstoy's account, there's just so much we will never know. Better to read the novels again. If you do read either biography, you should probably read the other as well, otherwise you will end up with a rather distorted view. ( )

A brave but ultimately doomed attempt to describe O'Brian's early years in such a way as to explain what he became. Written by a step-son biased in the subject's favour, the book adds some centrally important details to the still-sketchy story of the novelist's early life, most crucially the fact that he left his first wife because of the affair he was already conducting with his soon-to be second wife (the author's mother, Mary). But Tolstoi's account relies too heavily on speculation based on O'Brian's fiction, and in the end calls to be skimmed through to get to the nub of what it has to say. ( )

NF/NF