Dueling Bios - The PatrickO'Brian Compendium

The Patrick O'Brian Compendium^©

Dueling Bios

The recent publication of Patrick O'Brian: The Making of the Novelist by Nikolai Tolstoy means we now have two full-length biographies of the man formerly known as Patrick O'Brian¹. Your webmaster has made an exhaustive study of both volumes, and distilled his thoughts into this handy comparison table.

Point of Comparison	Dean H. King Patrick O'Brian	Nikolai Tolstoy Patrick O'Brian: The Making of the Novelist
Period Covered	Cradle to grave	Way before the cradle to 45 years shy of the grave (yes, it only goes to 1955 or so, and there will be other volumes)
Missing Periods Revealed	Pretty much everything before 1946	The entirety of the subject's life, at least to the mid-1950s when the book ends
Sources Used	A variety, mostly uncovered using subtle clues and investigative journalism	A whole bunch of family archives, diaries and ephemera not available to those outside the family
Author's Genetic Relationship to Subject	None	Was O'Brian's stepson - POB's second wife's son from her first marriage
Author's Emotional Relationship to Subject	Deferential, at times exasperated	Reverential, at times fawning
Author's Relationship to Subject While Subject Was Alive	Try though King might, Patrick O'Brian wasn't interested in speaking to Dean King in person	Cordial relationship of stepfather and stepson, communicated and visited frequently
Level of Healthy Editing	Good, keeps book flowing well	None whatsoever, rambling tangents the order of the day
Level of Excruciating Detail in Narrative	Low	VERY high
Opinion of Other POB Biographers	Unknown - temporal issues, i.e. there were no other POB biographers when this book was written	VERY low - much of the book is spent telling how Dean King got it wrong
Subtext	While a truly great writer, POB's private life was not a model of decorum	POB was a truly great writer and all his psychological machinations have been greatly overblown
Read it in One Sitting?	Probably not	Not unless you graduated Evelyn Wood's course summa cum laude
Conclusion Reached	POB was secretive and very guarded about his private life to a point just this side of clinical paranoia	POB was a brilliant, but private person
Density of Text	Good solid read	The occasional personal anecdote is nice, but the overwhelming number of them in this book is excessive
Footnotes	Almost none	There must have been a clearance sale at the British branch of the Literary Device Store on footnotes
Illustrations	Goodly number of black-and-white photographs, mostly contemporary though some taken in the present day	Also a goodly number of black-and-white photographs, and more of the subject himself than King used
Who Should Read It	Anyone interested in POB's Aubrey/Maturin body of work and who might be curious about the author's creative process	Anyone who just can't get enough of minutiae about our favorite author
Part of a Series?	No, though the author has spent a good portion of the past two decades illuminating POB's work for us	Yes - this is just part one
Currently Available at Amazon and Other US Bookstores	Yes, though Amazon lists it as out-of-stock (1/30/2005)	To be published by W.W. Norton in 2005
Author's Other Titles & Work	Very much a nautical guy - see the Compendium's Dean King page	Prolific writer, though NOT nautically-inclined - a sample listing may be found at Amazon.com

^{1 Tolstoy's biography, while lengthy, is actually less than "full-length" in that it only chronicles POB's life through the mid-1950s.}