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Anthropomorphism in O'Brian
p.37, The Truelove. "...he came face to face with two of the dolphins, cheerful creatures, inquisitive but discreet"

2 Hussein Reviews
Amazon.com Review Patrick O'Brian's remarkable career could serve as the textbook model for a writer's life. An invalid in his childhood, he read voraciously, and produced his first novel, Caesar, at the age of 12, while his tutor wasn't looking. It was published three years later in 1930. Hussein (1938), his second novel, grew from a short story O'Brian submitted to an Oxford journal. Having been urged to expand the tale, he trotted out a thousand words a day until the book was done. Over the next eight decades, he produced more than 20 books, including the celebrated Aubrey/Maturin series on the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. In the new introduction to his first two novels (now reprinted after many years), O'Brian discloses that although he had met a few Indians, both Muslim and Hindu, he had never been to India at the time he wrote Hussein. "The book is largely derivative," he explains, "based on reading and the recollections, anecdotes and letters of friends and relations who were well acquainted with that vast country: and it has no pretension to being anything more than what it is called, an Entertainment." A delicious blend of Kipling and the Arabian Nights, Hussein is the story of a Muslim mahout (an elephant keeper for the British Raj) whose bravery and curiosity lead him on a series of lively adventures. After a scandal involving a hated rival, a deadly curse, and a beautiful woman, Hussein is forced to leave government service and make his way as an itinerant snake charmer and storyteller. His stories open into other stories, which connect with the action of the novel, and eventually our hero finds himself in a situation in which, like Scheherazade, his life depends on how skillfully he tells his tale. Even though it isn't "the real thing" as far as nationality or cultural origins go, Hussein is most assuredly the entertainment that O'Brian promised, and the impressive early work of a natural writer. --Regina Marler --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Kirkus Reviews This early work from the now-deceased OBrian (Blue at the Mizzen, 1999, etc.) has nothing at all to do with the Iraqi leader. Written when the author was in his 20s, the story tells of a young mahout (elephant handler) whose father and grandfather also trained the great beasts. The third-person narrative chronicles Husseins childhood, his love for elephants and for a girl named Sashiya. Forced to flee his hometown in India, Hussein begins a series of adventures that includes stints as a snake charmer, spy, and thief, but he eventually returns to claim his love. OBrians readable and gripping tale is aptly subtitled: it never strays beyond the realm of entertainment. Hussein doesnt claim the readers affinity as the protagonists do in such later classics as The Golden Ocean and The Unknown Shore, in which the characters leap off the page and propel us from one event to the next. Also missing is the sense of place OBrian usually manages to convey in his far-flung adventures; perhaps because he hadnt been there, the landscape of India never comes alive. OBrians faithful fans will be better served sticking to his seafaring adventures. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

NY Times review Hussein
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/30/books/books-in-brief-fiction-poetry-o-brian-dry-shod.html Books in Brief: Fiction & Poetry; O'Brian Dry Shod By Linda Barrett Osborne Published: Sunday, April 30, 2000 In HUSSEIN: An Entertainment (Norton, $23.95), published eight years later and set in India, nature also challenges the young hero, although human intrigue and emotions seem far more unpredictable and treacherous. Hussein is a young mahout, or elephant trainer, who sets out to make his fortune and to win Sashiya, the woman he loves. With courage, cunning and luck, he eludes everything from wild dogs to assassins, and he cleverly adapts himself to a number of professions, including snake charmer, storyteller and spy. O'Brian times the narrative perfectly; there is barely a moment to catch your breath before Hussein dives into another adventure. Love is treated with dry wit in this novel, and loyalty (man to man, man to elephant) is paramount. Although O'Brian had never been to India at the time he wrote Hussein, he convincingly conveys a sense of time and place. The pleasure O'Brian himself takes in the storyteller's art is evident in the energy and inventiveness in each of these early novels. Linda Barrett Osborne

http://capecodhistory.us/books/Obrian.htm
From Dean King's book: Hussein: An Entertainment. London: Oxford University Press, 1938. Subsequently published under author name Patrick O'Brian. Boston Spa: The British Library, 1999.

Dean King ref
Dean King, intro p xiv Patrick O'Brian: A Life By Dean King Edition: reprint, illustrated Published by Macmillan, 2001 ISBN 0805059776, 9780805059779 416 pages

p. 63 "in 'Cheetah,' which ran in the Oxford Annual for Boys, Patrick wrote another episode about Hussein and continuied to examine the mysteries and nuances of Indian storytelling, or at least the British version of it.

search "Dean King" Oxford Hussein

pp 68, 69 "During this time Patrick continued to write stories and work on a novel set in India, which Kaberry, his Oxford University Press editor, had encouraged him to write on the basis of his his Hussein stories." p 70. ...Patrick wove his Indian tales into a meandering novel called Hussein: An entertainment." p 71.  Kipling's "great, gray, formless india," as seen in Kim, certainly influenece Patrick.  But Hussein, being entirely Indian, allowed for even deeper immersion into the culture than did Kipling's half-Irish Kim.  Hussein falls in love with a beauty named Sashiya, murders his evil-spririted rival, and thus embroils himself in a vendetta with the dead man's family.  As a result, the handsome clean-cut youth with a high-bridged nose is destined to roam India, surviving by his wits. Like Im, Hussein is unsuspectingly drawn into what Kipling called "the Great Game that never ceases day and night throughout India" (Kim, p. 158).  "There is an incidental Secret Service backgroud, which Mr. Russ is too wise to labour in detail," wrote Professor L.F. Rushbrook in his review of Hussein in the South Asian Review. "Perhaps he has learned wisdom from the single artistic fault in the construction of Kim. However this may be, Hussein really knows very little indeed of the inner meaning of what he is doing -- whic is exactly as it should be in real life!" As Kipling wrote of colonial India in Kim, "This is a world of danger to honest men" (p. 130). Patrick's India, too, is an ethical morass. The good Hussein will win at all costs. Even murder is justified if the murderee is villainous enough and the act is committed in Hussein's pursuit of Sashiya, who represents his highest ideals. As Patrick cunningly wrote, "Hussein's code was an elastic one, and it would stretch surprisingly on occasion; but he did not like making a cuckold of a man whose salt he had eaten, when he was not in love with the woman" (p.228). Hussein is faithful to Sashiya, but as Patrick puts it, "like most men, faithful in his own way (p.212). p. 72 Patrick had already arrived at a technique that would hallmark the Aubrey-Maturin novels, examining humanity through the friendship of two men. Such relationships provided some of his most humorous and touch passages.  One scene in Hussein (originally in the story "Cheetah:) particulary stands out. (when he gives Yussuf opium for instruction. their little game of wits leads to...)  This scene, where the two gain respect for one another in their witty duel, sets the stage for their friendship, which is later forged through an act of self-sacrifice. The white cobra, first seen in Patrick's earlier story "The White Cobra," also found its way into the novel. Feroze han, Husseins' master in the Great Game, tells a variation of the tale in which he steals the snake from a village by seducing the wife of the priest and lying to her about the direction in which he is headed. Patrick no doubt took pleasure in cuckolding the priest, who at the end of the short story mercilessly beats Hussein. Patrick would say in his foreword to the 1999 reprint edition of Caesar and Hussein that he expanded the Hussein stories into a larger work while living in Dublin in a Leeson Street boardinghouse "kept by two very kind sisters from Tipperary and inhabited mostly by young men studying at the the national university with a few from Trinity." (Since he married elizabeth in London in February 1936 and Richard was born there in February 1937 and the book was published in April 1938, it is difficult to fit this into the chronology, unless he spent some time there soon after leaving the air force and nearly three years passed between the time he wrote the book and its publication, which isw unliely.) Whether or not he finished the book on a bench in Stephen's Green "with a mixture of triumph and regret," he had, indeed, refined his craft in storytelling. He had experienced the exaltation of writing well, in a groove, where everything felt just right, and this sense of pleasure, unachievable by other means, he enver ceased to pursue. p. 73 In April 1938, two years after Kipling's death, Oxford University Press published Hussein: An Entertainment, with a Welsh dedication reading "I fy ngwraig annwyl/a fy mab bychan," "To my dear wife/and my small son." At 2,965 copies, the print run was modest, but this was the first work of contemporary fiction ever published by the prestigious press, a coup that was not lost on the author. fortunately for Patrick, the book's reputation did not depend on the number f copies printed but on its critical reception. With the magic of a good storyteller around a campfire at night, he had achieved an aolmost hypnotic effect. Though reverantial fo Kim, Professor Rushbrook could not resist Patrick's spell. "Such a story as this is full of traps for an author who does not know Indian life like the plam of his hand," wrote the Professor. "Mr. Russ is to be contratulation on escapting all the obvious mistakes and a good many of the more subtle ones...[His} spelling of Indian names suggests that he has picked up his knowledge by ear unsupplemented by eye. But the quality is undeniable." The Times Literary Supplement called an episode in which wild dogs chase Hussein the "best adventure in the book" and noted that there was an underlying humor to the story that the :the author scarcely sets himself to divelop." The review added that Hussein's "methods of self-help would scarely have commanded the approval of Mr. Samuel Smiles."  (Smiles, a Victorian, wrote moralizing books such as Self Help and Thrift.)  As evidence, the review pointed out that Hussein "stole the faithful elephant,....had a rival for the hand of Sashiya done to death by the arts of a dreadful fakir,...[and} finally won through to fame and fortune by murdering the Rajah of Kapilavatthu and stealin ghte Rajah's money and jewwls."  The reviewer failed to qualify this by mentioning that, within the context, Hussein in most cases cated justly.  The critique was most notable for the fact that this important literary newpaper noticed the book at all. In the United States, Hussein made a much bigger splash. On May 8, both the new York Tiems Book Review and New York Herald Tribute extolled the novel. Botgh reviewers seemed swept away by the author's control of the beguiling genre, his effortless storytelling, his ability to transfix the reader in this mysterious Eastern adventure. In the Times, Percy Hutchison wrote: If one has no feeling for Kipling's animal stories, and does not enjoy the bloody and sugared picaresque Arabian tales we devoured so avidly in our childhhod Hussein is to be passed by. But if a better elephant story has been written between "My Lord the Elephant" and Hussein we have had the misfortune to miss it. Moreover, Patrick Russ, who studied his craft with Arabian story-tellers, has mastered the art of spinning an Oriental yarn in that oriental manner so different from the Occidental that few have mastered it. Hussein is gorgeous entertainment not only in the story which it unfolds but also in the manner of the telling." In his review in the New York Herald Tribute, Thomas Sugrue, not to be outdone, was moved to eleoquence: "Young Patrick Russ, the author of Hussein, has said to himself, "Let's make an Arabian Nights story, keep the plot structure and sequence, but rewrite it as a modern, realistic novel." He probably didn't quite know what was going to happen when he began. He was like an alchemist, mixing things on chance: Indian politics, fakirs, the lovely maiden in the tower, the elephant who loves and understands, the curse that kills, the bag of gold, the misfortunes sowed by fates, the rescue of the lovely maiden from the tower, and all the minor ingredients that go to make up the old and the new in the East. The result, when he saw it, must have been something of a surprise, for the experiement turned out as fortunately as Ben Franklin's attempt to catch lightnining in a jar. The story of Hussein is a swift-moving, well written account of events so fantastic that moosnshine was certainly their mother. As the pages move by things become slightly plauseible, then credible, then entirely believable. Finally they are living, factual events, and Hussein, in quest of his sashiya, is a hero as alive and human as Tom Jones seeking his Sophia." In the July 9 Saturday Review of Literature, a somewhat more ambivalent reviewer nonethless added to the chorus of American ...p74 praise for Hussein: "This medley of Eastern folk-tales, assembled in the form of a novel...resembles the entertainment provided by those professional tellers of tales who have, since before the time of Homer, perpetuated the legends of their people for the price of their daily bread. The adventures are set in that pristine world of fiction where magic joins p75 with realism...excellent entertainment for a thousand and second Arabian Night." Perhaps Hussein's subdued reception in England owed more to the political claimate than to the book;s lack of merit or the nation's penchant for understatement. The stench of genocide was already wafting frm the Copntinent, as is apparent in Wilfrid Gibson's April 22 Manchester Guardian review:  "It is a good yarn, rather in the nature of a boys' story, but with more of a love interest than the puerile are apt to find palatable. It is suffixciently diverting, and I found it a pleasantly relaxing distraction from the stress of contemplating the menace of impending catastrophe which threatens to involve all us poor helpless men of goodwill." The same edition of the Guardian reported the increasing persecution of Jews in Danzig and the Gestapo's robbery and deportation of Jews in Austria.

p54 Times Literary Supplement. "The best things in the book are four Indian episodes conerned with one Hussein, ex-Mahout and elephant-their, snake-charmer and swindling discov erer of cobras with which he had 'slated' likely bungalows with the aid of the bribed staff. These are very well told, and have every appearance of truth to fact."

p55 Beasts Royal issued in September 1934

p55 Beasts Royal, four tales he had already published and eight new ones

p54 lasting relationship with the editors of Ozxford University Press's story collections Oxford Annual for Scouts and Oxford Annual for Boys. He published 8 stories '33-'40 in Herbert Strang's two annuals, which were run primarily by charles John Kaberry, a juvenile department veteran and children's book author who encouraged the young, talented writer

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/o/patrick-obrian/hussein.htm
Hussein (1938) by Patrick O'Brian

HUSSEIN tells the story of a young mahout - or elephant handler - his childhood and life in India and his relationship and adventures with elephants. Patrick was in his early twenties when he wrote it. First published in 1938 Hussein: An Entertainment is a marvellously readable adventure story set in India. Reviewers in the United States were particularly enthusiastic: the New York Times compared Hussein favourably to Kipling's Kim, calling it 'a gorgeous entertainment'. Thomas Sugrue wrote in the New York Herald Tribune: 'The story of Hussein is a swift-moving, well-written account of events so fantastic that moonshine was certainly their mother.Hussein, in quest after his Sashiya, is a hero as alive and as human as Tom Jones seeking his Sophia.'

http://www.findingdulcinea.com/features/happy-birthday/2008/Dec/Patrick-OBrian.html
Happy Birthday, Patrick O’Brian, Author of the "Aubrey-Maturin" Series of Novels December 12, 2008 by Liz Colville “Hussein: An Entertainment,” written when the author was 20. Both books had long been out of print until Norton resurrected them for the U.S. audience. O’Brian’s writing has been compared to great naval writers like Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, as well as to Jane Austen.

http://www.wwnorton.com/POB/bio.htm
About Patrick O'Brian Hussein: An Entertainment, written when he was about twenty years old. Both of these books had long been out of print.

http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/Our_Titles/Pages/Home.aspx?objId=12350
‘Like O’Brian’s seafaring yarns, Hussein is full of engaging adventures, curious lore, fond descriptions of food and scenes of battle… Here fully thirty years before Master and Commander was published is the unmistakable texture of O’Brian’s historical fiction. Hussein has it all: the immersion in another world, full of local colour, the delight in a specialised vocabulary, the relish of male camaraderie, travel, treasure and fighting.’ David Sexton, Evening Standard

http://www.alternativehealth.co.uk/alternativhea-21/detail/0006513727/203-3192299-7951909
Editorial Reviews 'It has no pretensions to be more than an entertainment' writes O'Brian in his 1999 introduction to this, his second work of fiction, first published in 1938. His story of a motherless Indian boy growing up in the days of the Raj among the mahouts, or elephant handlers, that served both British and Indian elephant owners is certainly entertainng. Hussein, the young hero, falls for a beautiful Indian girl already promised in marriage to an elderly business man, and arranges for a spell to be cast on the luckless suitor who then dies, causing his relatives to swear vengeance on Hussein. Even stronger than the love interest is the attachment formed by Hussein to the elephant, Jahangir, to whom he is assigned. This relationship is at the centre of wild, dangerous, often heroic encounters with brigands, snakes, tigers, spies, murderers and jealous women, described with all the imaginative zest that O'Brian later put into his famous tales of sailors in the Napoleonic Wars. 'The work on which I learnt my trade, and one that opened a well of joy that has never run dry' he says, and the reader can feel that joy in the drive and power of the writing, which, although almost incredibly exhuberant is full of invention and fire that sweeps disbelief aside with the conviction of the story telling. O'Brian had never been to India when he wrote Hussein and was certainly drawing on documents, letters, and above all Kipling's Kim for his background material - but every page reeks of India. Whether he is describing the habits of elephants, the sounds of the jungle, or the law of the Muslim O'Brian is totally compelling. A book to read for the fun of the 'entertainment' and the light that it throws on the development of one of the great writers of historical fiction. (Kirkus UK)

Hussein itself
first edition: 1938 Oxford Univeristy Press

1999 W.W. Norton & Company ISBN 0-393-04919-1 ISBN 0-393-32181-9 pbk.

v Foreward

O'Brian thinks he wrote it at the urging of Mr. Kaberry, who ran the Oxford annuals, who said, "it would be a pity to publish mo more than the abbreviated form I showed him, and suggested that I should expand it to a book."

rarely wrote less than a thousand words a day

"I finished it on a bench in Stephen's Green with a mixture of triumph and regret." (Dublin)

based on "reading and on the recollections, anecdotes and letters of friends of relations who were well acquainted with that vast country; and it has no pretension to being anything more than what is called, an Entertainment. But it did have a distinction that pleased my vanity; it was the first work of contemporary fiction that the Oxford University Press had published in all the centuries of its existence.

It was fairly well received, and in the writing of the book I learnt the rudiments of my calling: but infinitely more than that, it opened a well of joy that has not run dry."

Patrick O'Brian Trinity College, Dublin 1999

SF paper EXCELLENT
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/01/10/DD82830.DTL&type=books APPRECIATION Patrick O'Brian -- An Austen of the Deep Aubrey-Maturin tales explored friendship Jon Carroll, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, January 10, 0

Patrick O'Brian led two different lives. In 1945 he changed his name, his nationality and the circumstances of his personal life. He reinvented himself, which allowed him to invent two of the most enduring characters in 20th century fiction: the brave, good-natured, slightly thick career naval officer Jack Aubrey and the analytical, melancholy, secretive naval surgeon Stephen Maturin.

O'Brian died last week at age 85. He was a widower; he had completed what he said would be the 20th and last book in the Aubrey-Maturin series (although he was rumored to be working on the 21st); he had become rich and famous at a time of life when even lucky men and women depend on reputation and memories. He went out on top, in one of the cities he loved. His passing was sad but not in any sense a tragedy.

MORE THAN ADVENTURE YARNS People unfamiliar with his books can be forgiven for thinking they are the literary equivalent of Errol Flynn movies, filled with blood running on the decks and talking parrots and men with peg legs calling each other ``matey'' -- appropriate perhaps for sailing geeks with a little Peter Pan in them. This impression was not helped by his publisher's decision to put the identical frontispiece in each book: a drawing of a square-rigged three-masted naval vessel with each sail carefully labeled, as though such knowledge were important for an understanding of the books. It's not.

The books do have wonderful scenes of naval warfare, with a full complement of blazing guns and sudden death. There is a chase scene in ``Desolation Island'' that can raise the respiration rate of adults by as much as 50 percent.

But O'Brian's favorite writer was Jane Austen, and the books can best be thought of as companion volumes to her novels, with formal differences in rank replacing the differences in social position that intrigued her, and the complicated friendships of men replacing the complicated negotiations of courtship. O'Brian's readership was by no means exclusively male; his memorable 1995 visit to Herbst Theatre, San Francisco, a gathering of addicts, drew a diverse and loving audience. Typically, the author did not milk the adoration; he wanted to be read, but he had no use for celebrity.

O'Brian's books are novels of manners as much as they are sea

stories. There is much comic conversation, as in Austen, although O'Brian went in for broad slapstick as well, as in Aubrey's trek across the mountains of Spain attired in a bear suit. Throughout, the real topic is the intricate and steadfast friendship between Aubrey and Maturin.

O'Brian (who hated talking about himself, partly because he had told so many lies about his personal life) would never say so directly, but it is clear that Maturin was almost a self- portrait. Maturin, like O'Brian, was slight of build, clever, interested in scientific matters (O'Brian once wrote a biography of British botanist Joseph Banks), physically inept although always game, moody to the point of depression. Maturin was a spy by trade as well as a doctor, which meant that he had many secrets, just like O'Brian, and that he kept them well, out of loyalties he felt no need to explain.

IRISHMAN BY CHOICE O'Brian, born English, claimed to be Irish. The truth eventually came out, but when he died in Dublin (too far from his adopted home of Collioure in France), the Irish Times had the last word on that, editorializing that if he wanted to be Irish that badly, well, let's call him an Irishman then.

Meanwhile, the books survive. Newcomers are advised to read them in order; the first three are ``Master and Commander, ``Post- Captain and ``H.M.S. Surprise.''

There will always be time for a little fiddle music in the captain's great room after dinner, with Stephen's melancholy cello keeping up with Jack's sprightly violin on perhaps the Scarlatti, with the royals and loftier staysails swollen with a following wind and white bow wave spreading wide, out into the night.

..

This article appeared on page E - 2 of the San Francisco Chronicle