Dynamic Duos

Well, I tried reading somebody else for a while, but I've fallen off the Patrick O'Brian wagon and am voraciously working my way through book seventeen (!) in the Aubrey-Maturin series, The Commodore. It's going to be a crushing letdown, I'm afraid, when I reach that point in the series where O'Brian died and there are no more naval adventures in store for Captain Jack Aubrey and ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin. I now realize that I'm a sucker for a good, literary buddy story. Here are my top three dynamic duos, all of them straddling the line between entertaining pulp and high-falutin' literature:

3. Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call
Larry McMurtry taught English at Rice University years before I ever attended, but one of his former colleagues told the story of how, at a certain point of McMurtry's career, it looked like all his glory days were behind him. Up till then, he was probably most famous for The Last Picture Show, a book noted for lamenting the passing of the small-town American community (and infamous in my family for having been adapted into a movie with a skinny-dipping scene that my brother's 11th grade English teacher made them watch). In a slump, McMurtry thought of easing his way into semi-retirement before he hit upon the story of a couple of retired Texas Rangers who decide to organize a cattle-drive from Texas to Montana, along the way confronting the last vestiges of their former, frontier life. That story became the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove, and eventually grew into a four-book series about the friendship between Augustus "Gus" McCrae and Woodrow F. Call.

Gus and Call are mismatched in the true, buddy-genre fashion. Gregarious, philosophical, and magnificently lazy, Gus has spent his whole life nurturing not just his romantic cowboy notions, but also his weaknesses for gambling, women, and talk for talk's sake. He is a perfect foil for Call, a laconic yet reliable stoic who possesses few vices and admits to none. On the road to Montana both men confront the great regrets of their lives; for Gus it is the woman he should have settled down with, and for Call it is the boy he can never quite bring himself to recognize as his son. It is a tremendous book, full of vivid Western characters and great humanity, equally given to humor and heartbreak. As old friends, Gus and Call can recognize in each other those deep-seated flaws that, over a lifetime of hardening, will ultimately lead to tragedy, but it's too late to change each other and there's nobody else worth arguing with. If you've never seen the mini-series with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones as Gus and Call respectively, you are in for a big, sprawling, six-and-a-half-hour treat.

2. Reginald Jeeves and Bertram Wilberforce Wooster
Douglas Adams was of the opinion that humorist P.G. Wodehouse outranked William Shakespeare on the list of great, English, comic writers. Having slogged through dozens of Shakespeare plays for class, while breezing through dozens of Wodehouse novels for fun, I'm inclined to think that Adams got it right. Wodehouse (pronounced "wood house") worked very hard on his prose, pasting each page of his chapters in sequence around the walls of his study so he could single out and re-write those pages that weren't as funny as their mates. It shows. I can't get through a single page of Wodehouse without cracking a big smile, sometimes going as far as to guffaw at appropriate intervals. Not too shabby for someone who wrote lyrics and librettos for over thirty musicals (including Anything Goes and Show Boat) and a whopping 96 books between 1902 and 1975. And yet none of his creations are as dear to my heart as the pairing of Reginald Jeeves with Bertram "Bertie" Wooster.

Before AskJeeves.com there was simply Jeeves, the apotheosis of velvet, deferential cunning. However, there would have been no need to create Jeeves if Wodehouse had not first created his true masterpiece in the form of narrator Bertie Wooster, amiable upper-class twit extraordinaire. Simply put, Bertie needs a minder. Gullible, over-educated yet dim, and far too honorable for his own good, Bertie cannot step outside his upscale London flat without being assaulted by disapproving aunts or undeserving school chums eager to draw the easily-led aristocrat into some brush with matrimony or the Law. Bound by his outmoded "Code of the Woosters," Bertie will never refuse to help a friend no matter how questionable the end or the means, and as a result he frequently ends up, not fifty pages into the plot, accidentally engaged to this month's Toxic Bachelorette and threatened with bodily harm by this week's Jealous Boyfriend.

Enter Jeeves, an unassuming servant whose Machiavellian intellect fairly towers over the feeble-minded Wooster and whose quiet resourcefulness knows no creative or ethical bounds. As one critic put it, Jeeves is essentially a well-dressed deus ex machina who swoops in at critical moments to save Bertie's bacon, usually in a slightly underhanded way that humiliates Bertie enough to remind him of his place in their inverted hierarchy. Contrary to the direction of most comedies, Jeeves novels are essentially anti-marriage plots, as the valet helps free his master from cloying, conniving, and controlling women so that Bertie can remain all the more completely under Jeeves's firm, yet generally benign, control. It's a marvelous double-act that only Wodehouse could have pulled off for so long and so consistently.

If you're not sure if Wodehouse is your cup of tea, I suggest you start with Code of the Woosters and The Mating Season. The former represents the high point of Bertie Wooster's hilarious, slang-riddled, blathering narration (read it out loud and you'll see what I mean), while the latter achieves an incredible technical mastery in juggling four (count 'em, four) rotating pairs of fickle-hearted lovers while showcasing the world's saddest--and therefore funniest--local talent show. Moreover, if you have never seen the television series Jeeves and Wooster, starring Stephen Fry and the rubber-faced Hugh Laurie, you are in for a treat.

1. Captain Jack Aubrey and Doctor Stephen Maturin
Don't act surprised. Anyone who paid attention to the beginning of this post knew that these stalwarts were going to be at the top of my list, and for good reason. The complex relationship between "Lucky" Jack Aubrey and his "particular friend" Stephen Maturin ought to go into any pantheon of great literary duos, taking their rightful place alongside Holmes & Watson, Nick & Nora, Goofus & Gallant. At the dawn of the 19th Century the red-blooded young British Captain Aubrey gets into an argument with the sour young Maturin--arising, as it turns out, from their mutual love of chamber music--and the rest is naval history. For twenty-and-a-half wonderful novels O'Brian followed Aubrey and Maturin from young adulthood well into advanced middle age, chronicling not just the substance of their nautical voyages to the farthest reaches of the British Navy, but also recording the travails of each man's inner life with the deft accuracy of a poet philosopher. Jack Aubrey is in many ways a throwback to a simpler age--a lover of "old ways and old wine"--the robust embodiment of England at the height of her naval powers. However, O'Brian's greatest feat is painting Jack with all the checkered colors of humanity, so that in addition to being a great sailor and formidable leader at sea, he is also a great, blundering jackass on land, particularly in his own home.

Where the red-faced Captain Aubrey is bluff, jovial and artless, the pale-eyed Stephen Maturin is slight, skilled, and thoughtfully morose. If Jack Aubrey is a product of the old century's tradition and spirit, Stephen Maturin is a child of the new Enlightenment, a natural philosopher whose zealous pursuit of knowledge casts an eager if dispassionate eye on humanity and its fellow creatures. Stephen is the ultimate outsider in Aubrey's world--a half-Irish, half-Catalan Catholic who couldn't tell port from starboard to save his life, yet his hatred of a Napoleonic tyranny makes him an invaluable and unlikely ally to imperialist Britain. In another creative masterstroke O'Brian makes this cold, ugly little man one of the Admiralty's most trusted intelligence agents, so that while Jack fights Napoleon's captains in the open ocean Stephen fights his agents in back alleys and behind closed doors, stealing papers and laying traps with reptilian cunning. Unlike Jack's perhaps undeservedly blissful marriage to his wife Sophie, Stephen's unhappy pursuit of Sophie's fiery cousin Diana forms an aching domestic undercurrent to the entire series, occasionally spurring him to dangerous flirtation with his other mistress, laudanum.

Neither of them unblemished heroes, both Jack and Stephen are largely redeemed by what they love: for Jack it is the thrill of the brisk chase and the roar of the cannon, while for Stephen it is the beauty of Creation, in all its stunning variety. There is a telling scene, early in the series, where Stephen is walking up the long lane to Jack's country cottage, his heart torn up over a particularly cruel slight from his beloved Diana. As he proceeds slowly up the path, the English countryside gradually reveals itself to him. Birds glide through the early morning light, while a hedgehog grumbles up the path ahead of him, giving him a weary, backwards look before trudging into the underbrush. "I don't know why I'm happy," Stephen remarks to himself after a pause, "but I am." That ability to capture the highs and lows of life, the steady diet of joy roughly tempered by pain, is what makes the Aubrey-Maturin series shine, and what makes it such a joy to my heart. Put together, Jack and Stephen form a complete picture of something--I couldn't say exactly what--that gets at the heart of what it means to live in this world. For a pairing of two fictional characters, you couldn't ask for a much loftier achievement.

PS: If you have not seen the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World starring Russell Crowe as Jack and Paul Bettany as Stephen, you are in for a treat. Is it too late to harangue Hollywood into making a sequel?