Command performance

Russell Crowe shivers the timbers heroically in Peter Weir's magnificent high seas drama

Among the 103 novels my fellow Booker Prize judges and I had to read in the summer of 1988 was one of the nautical adventures featuring the dashing early Napoleonic naval officer, Jack Aubrey, captain of the HMS Surprise, and the cerebral ship's surgeon and naturalist, Stephen Maturin.

  1. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
  2. Production year: 2003
  3. Country: USA
  4. Cert (UK): TBC
  5. Runtime: 135min mins
  6. Directors: Peter Weir
  7. Cast: Billy Boyd, Paul Bettany, Russell Crowe
  8. More on this film

Patrick O'Brian had been writing this sequence since 1971 and in cult circles his serial duo had become as popular as Holmes and Watson. It came to the Booker judges bearing encomiums from Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, and among so many empty literary novels, I found it a refreshing break.

The book was not, however, taken particularly seriously by the judges. Such slight, rather patronising discussion as we accorded it took the form of considering it a little superior to C.S. Forester's Hornblower novels and the maritime yarns featuring Dudley Pope's hero, Commander Ramage.

We all thought it inferior to William Golding's equally well-researched nautical trilogy, the first volume of which, Rites of Passage , had won the Booker in 1980. In retrospect, this seems a pity. We missed a legitimate opportunity to broaden the Booker short list by including a superior genre novel that might well have influenced the choices of subsequent judges.

Now I can make amends by welcoming an excellent, strikingly beautiful movie inspired by O'Brian's novels, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. The title derives from the first Aubrey-Maturin novel and the tenth book in the series, which is the principal source. The film's director, Peter Weir, and John Collee, his co-screenwriter, have made a major change by shifting the time from 1812 to 1805, some weeks before Trafalgar, and turning the enemy into France instead of the United States. They've also taken the bold step of eliminating any scenes shot in ports (the only landfall is on the Galapagos Islands) and reducing the female presence to a couple of Brazilian girls, seen briefly but not heard, on a small trading boat.

What they concentrate on is life aboard the HMS Surprise, a vessel of 28 guns and 197 souls, and the much larger French privateer, the Acheron, which Aubrey has been ordered to pursue and capture or destroy. The journey takes them from the northern coast of Brazil around Cape Horn to the Pacific where the French ship intends to lay waste the unprotected British whaling fleet.

The movie gets off to a start similar to that of Saving Private Ryan. Before we've been introduced to the officers and men of the Surprise, there's a bloody battle in the South Atlantic fog that goes beyond any previous seafaring movie in its depiction of death, terrible wounds and material destruction. A tousle-haired, rosy-cheeked 13-year-old midshipman has his left arm sawn off by the surgeon, Maturin (Paul Bettany), who goes on to save the life through trepanning of an old salt with 'Hold Fast' tattooed on his fingers.

Though his ship has been nearly destroyed, Captain Aubrey remarks of the French marksmanship: 'Damn fine gunning'. Throughout the movie Weir varies the pace and rhythm as the Surprise goes through horrendous storms, is iced over going round the Cape, is stuck in the doldrums without water or rain, until finally there's another magnificently staged battle.

Master and Commander has a conviction rare in historical movies. The dialogue is neither fustian nor anachronistic. The faces of the crew look lived in, as if they might have been painted by Hogarth or Rowlandson. Every nail, sail and coil of rope seems in the right place, and the constant tilting of the camera keeps us aware that we are at sea on a pitching, heaving boat. There's also an interesting evocation of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner when a Marine officer wounds Maturin while aiming at an albatross.

The Surprise is described as 'this wooden world' and it becomes an explicit image of England in Jack Aubrey's rallying speech before the final battle: 'Though we be on the far side of the world, this ship is our home, this ship is England.' Yet it isn't triumphalist in any obvious manner and the constant debates between Aubrey, the inspired leader and supporter of traditional values, and Maturin, the naturalist and harbinger of a new outlook on the world, are well written and performed.

In addition to their long friendship and trust, they share a delight in making music together (Maturin on the cello, Aubrey the violin) and engage in witty repartee. In the climax, lessons of natural history are brought to bear on naval strategy to help the Surprise defeat her formidably enemy.

Paul Bettany as the inward, intellectual figure in his round, steel-rimmed spectacles and Crowe, the extrovert man of action with his tied-up mane of fair hair, are both excellent.

The casting of an Australian actor as a British naval hero is part of a long tradition - Errol Flynn as Sir Geoffrey Thorpe in The Sea Hawk, Rod Taylor as Sir Francis Drake, Peter Finch as Lord Nelson and Mel Gibson as Fletcher Christian. What they all have is a powerful presence coupled with a manly grace.

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