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
