Aubrey & Maturin

Twenty novels, the Napoleonic wars, a great deal of rigging: and what Patrick O'Brian actually wrote is the long account of a friendship. Jack Aubrey is a naval officer, brilliant at sea and helpless ashore. Stephen Maturin is a physician, naturalist and intelligence agent, brilliant ashore and a danger to himself on any deck. They meet at a concert in Port Mahon, where Aubrey beats time so heavily that Maturin objects, and they very nearly fight a duel. They share a cabin for the next twenty books instead.

A Bearing can be a person, and this is the proof. Each has his own cause — Jack the service, Stephen the defeat of Bonaparte and the freedom of Ireland and Catalonia — and each has his own mastery, held to a standard the other cannot judge. But what they steer by, when the causes fail and the Admiralty forgets them and the money is gone, is each other. The friendship is the fixed point, and they put it there.

It is Transmission across, where most of this list hands down. Stephen patches Jack up, repeatedly. Jack hauls Stephen out of the sea, repeatedly. Neither keeps count. In the evenings they play — violin and cello, Boccherini and Corelli, in the great cabin — which is as clear a picture of handing across as there is: two people making something neither could make alone, to no audience, for no reason beyond the making.

It holds when it stops feeling good, which is the test. They quarrel, they deceive each other for reasons of state, they love the wrong people and at one point the same one. The friendship survives all of it, less on feeling than on fidelity past fascination.

And it is very funny. Jack's puns are terrible and he is delighted with every one. Stephen cannot learn which side of a ship is which in twenty volumes. The levity is the grease on the whole mechanism.

The limit is the navy. This friendship has a ship to hold it together: a shared task and a small wooden world. Most friendships must manage without the hull.