Desolation Island

"I think it’s one of those series where you can probably pick up whenever and it would make sense, but it works best if you do start at the beginning and see how the characters develop. I had a bit of trouble with the series as it went on. It becomes more about Stephen and loses a bit of the naval side, I felt. But at the start, it’s this really good story and with a good balance between the two main characters. Desolation Island has everything that I love about naval fiction. There’s a near-mutiny, there are storms and all this seafaring stuff. They go down near Antarctica. Polar exploration is one of my niche obsessions in history, so I really like the setting. Patrick O’Brian is good at bringing to life what it would have been like on those ships: the big details and little details, the lower decks of the normal crew, and the officers. It’s like a slice of life narrative he has in his books, where it’s very, very intimate and very focused on the characters and their behaviors and their world. He’s good with the seafaring jargon as well, and the technical details—I think almost too much, at times. He shows that he knows what he’s talking about, and it’s very authentic. I like Jack and Stephen as characters because they’re so different to start with, and they don’t get on that well. Then, as the stories go on, they find they’re becoming more and more similar to each other. They’ve got these unifying points that they bond over. And they’ve got a shared experience on the sea as well, which is a theme that I really enjoy in naval fiction—the shared bonds and the shared almost traumas they have on the sea. Maybe not traditional readers of the series, but I know a lot of people who see a queer element in their friendship. I don’t, particularly. Especially with Jack, I don’t really get queer vibes from him. But what I like is that it’s almost like a platonic marriage between them, and everything they go through together."