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Review
A welcome reissue of O'Brian's moving and very fine first novel - a novel of "unassuming proportion and immaculate design" (Kirkus, August 1, 1952). This precursor to the author's Captain Jack Aubrey series about the Royal Navy (begun with The Mauritius Command in 1970) concerns (to quote ourselves) the "testimonies of Joseph Aubrey Pugh, an Oxford don of middle years, and Bronwen Vaughan, the young wife of a Welsh farmer, before a divine inquisitor....For in a small village in North Wales, and in the grandeur of the lonely landscape of mountain, tarn and valley, farm and quarry, Pugh - a man of rather neutral talents and desires - finds a refuge from established habit and discontents. And in Bronwen's serenity and beauty he finds a first romantic inspiration which lends a new impetus to his days. It is, however, the denunciation of an itinerant preacher which stirs the ugly speculation of the villagers which only has its respite with the act in which Bronwen takes her life....A chaste and disciplined prose lend purity to a quiet, tragic idyll for the discriminating reader." (Kirkus Reviews)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
Published in 1952 as "Three Bear Witness", this is a sinister tale of love and death centred around Joseph Pugh, an Oxford don who leaves "the great university" for a life in a wild and beautiful Welsh farm, and for Bronwen Vaughn, the wife of a neighbouring farmer.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Firstly, I would advise you, for the benefit of your own and the world's general edification, to take the average star-rating for this book as 5 (i.e. ignoring Mr Oxtoby's remarks below.)
It is only a 'puzzling book' if you are the kind of blinkered reader that can only find satisfaction in something if it falls neatly into an established genre - i.e. a person who can only appreciate new material in the light of old material.
O'Brian, writing as he does using his own feelings and experience as reference points (rather than a self-conscious guess as to what is or is not genre-typical or acceptable), has written a story with a truly feminine subtlety to it.
The LEAST interesting thing about this novel is its narrative structure; to even talk of such things is to have utterly missed the boat here. Like saying that Shakespeare had used a 'very clever ploy' in writing rhyming couplet. To praise structure over content is rather like esteeming marriage over love.
This is a poignant story about a man who finds love unexpectedly in an insensitive world. It is unlikely to be similar to anything you have read before.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The story: an Oxford don rents a remote Welsh cottage, and slowly sinks into the local landscape. He begins to like the people on the hill farms and, when he comes into an inheritance, chucks in his job and buys the cottage. His relationships with his neighbours deepen...
The writer: Patrick O'Brian is author of the wonderful Aubrey/Maturin series of historical novels; he has also written biographies of Picasso and Sir Joseph Banks. He translated many books from the French, including Papillon and the works of Simone de Beauvoir.
My opinion - a strange book, unlike anything else I have ever read. It is subtle, multi-layered, and beautifully written. The story is somehow not the main thing, but the atmosphere is - O'Brian gets the cadences of talk just right, people's souls, too. The poor hill farms, the back-breaking work, the thin line between farming and starving; the village gossip; personalities, landscape, feelings.
He conveys the personalities and the uncertainties of the personalities very well, and the shifting of the personalities according to the subject. The book is built up, as is the tension, by a series of chapters with three people's testimonies; as we get to know them better, they shift under our reading, and I certainly shifted between liking and disliking the main person, Mr Pugh. Sometimes I thought he was a tiresome prig, sometimes an honest-to-the-bone likeable sensitive person; until the story took over, and my likes were neither here nor there. The slow build-up immersed me, and then the story became ominous and dark, very real, and infinitely sad... an exceptional writer.
The writer: Patrick O'Brian is author of the wonderful Aubrey/Maturin series of historical novels; he has also written biographies of Picasso and Sir Joseph Banks. He translated many books from the French, including Papillon and the works of Simone de Beauvoir.
My opinion - a strange book, unlike anything else I have ever read. It is subtle, multi-layered, and beautifully written. The story is somehow not the main thing, but the atmosphere is - O'Brian gets the cadences of talk just right, people's souls, too. The poor hill farms, the back-breaking work, the thin line between farming and starving; the village gossip; personalities, landscape, feelings.
He conveys the personalities and the uncertainties of the personalities very well, and the shifting of the personalities according to the subject. The book is built up, as is the tension, by a series of chapters with three people's testimonies; as we get to know them better, they shift under our reading, and I certainly shifted between liking and disliking the main person, Mr Pugh. Sometimes I thought he was a tiresome prig, sometimes an honest-to-the-bone likeable sensitive person; until the story took over, and my likes were neither here nor there. The slow build-up immersed me, and then the story became ominous and dark, very real, and infinitely sad... an exceptional writer.
4 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Testimonies is a puzzling book. At first sight it appears to be a gloomy affair of thwarted love aet against the proverbially bleak 'Wuthering Heights'-style backdrop. What first causes alarm is that it is written by Patrick O'Brian: a brilliant, illuminating and eminently readable novelist, yet one scarcely known for his feminine portrayal. This is, after all, a man's take on romance, and as far as that goes, it is successful.
However, somehow it never succeeds in drumming up enough passion to be truly convincing or typical of its genre.
The third, and much more interesting, aspect of this book is that it is written in legal-style chapters, each from the angle of different characters, like the Testimonies of the title. This is a very intelligent ploy utilised by O'Brian, but somehow he never gets close enough to the female caracters to breath the life he later expressed so vividly in the Aubrey-Maturin novels.
Also, the constantly changing perspective confuses the reader by its inconsistency of angle by which we judge proceedings.
What is also interesting is that, a decades before Feminist authors began to rewrite the novel, fine male authors were already experimenting.
This is a beautiful work by O'Brian, but sadly pales beside his other works of so much greater perception, flow and, ultimately, power.
However, somehow it never succeeds in drumming up enough passion to be truly convincing or typical of its genre.
The third, and much more interesting, aspect of this book is that it is written in legal-style chapters, each from the angle of different characters, like the Testimonies of the title. This is a very intelligent ploy utilised by O'Brian, but somehow he never gets close enough to the female caracters to breath the life he later expressed so vividly in the Aubrey-Maturin novels.
Also, the constantly changing perspective confuses the reader by its inconsistency of angle by which we judge proceedings.
What is also interesting is that, a decades before Feminist authors began to rewrite the novel, fine male authors were already experimenting.
This is a beautiful work by O'Brian, but sadly pales beside his other works of so much greater perception, flow and, ultimately, power.
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