The Royal Navy stumbled badly on the outbreak of war against America in 1812. In August, the USS Constitution sank the HMS Guerrière. In October, the USS United States captured the HMS Macedonian, and in December the Constitution sank the HMS Java off the coast of Brazil. The tiny American navy—six frigates were all the capital ships it mustered on the outbreak of war—was managing what the much larger and more experienced fleets of Napoleonic France, Spain, and Holland had failed to do: beat the British in a straight fight.
When the eighteen-gun brig USS Hornet sank the equal-sized HMS Peacock in under fifteen minutes in February 1813, the navy of Nelson seemed to have lost its aura of victory. But, honor was restored on June 1 when Captain Philip Broke and HMS Shannon captured the USS Chesapeake, one of the U.S. Navy’s frigates, in a short violent ship-to-ship action just outside of Boston harbor. Shannon’s disciplined gunnery killed so many of the Chesapeake’s officers and crew that the British were able to board and easily capture a ship that carried many more men.
It has never been established why the American captain, James Lawrence, took his ship out of safe harbor and into action that June day. He may have wanted to test his youthful crew and take them away from the temptations of port or perhaps he simply underestimated the professionalism of the Royal Navy after the string of U.S. victories.
While history doesn’t answer the question, fiction can. In his novel The Fortune of War—the sixth in the Aubrey/Maturin series—Patrick O’Brian created impetus for Lawrence’s impetuousness. He goes into battle to recapture Dr. Stephen Maturin who has escaped from Boston with papers that describe the whole of the French-American intelligence operations in England and Europe. Lawrence’s failure becomes, in O’Brian, a double victory for the British— in the naval and the clandestine war.
The Fortune of War brings the War of 1812 to life. In the course of simply trying to get his two heroes home to England from India, O’Brian managed to include them in the Java’s defeat by the Constitution, to describe the life of captured British officers as they await exchange, and then the action of the Shannon. Captain Broke is presented as the cousin of O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey, with full details of how Broke’s father used to cane them for their youthful misdeeds. We learn that British naval officers opposed a war with the United States, which they saw as a distraction from fighting Napoleon; how Britain was overstretching its military resources; about the debate over whether the crews of the volunteer U.S. navy would prove better than impressed ones; how Captain Broke burned all his captured prizes—discarding a large fortune—to keep his ship at perfect readiness to fight the Chesapeake.
There has been no end of novelists chronicling the Age of Nelson, from first large-scale wooden ship action, the Battle of Quiberon Bay in 1758—the year before Nelson was born—to the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. The shelves sag under the weight of the naval fiction of C. S. Forester, Alexander Kent, Dudley Pope, James Nelson, Richard Woodman, and many more. These writers are all good at getting the varied sails before the wind and beating to quarters as the ship comes up against the enemy. But they are mostly very basic genre fiction, putting history to service in a sequence of commonly plotted entertainments.
In every genre, there are one or two writers whose excellence of craft raises the form to art. Patrick O’Brian, who died in January 2000 at 86, so honed his craft that the Aubrey/Maturin novels are peer to the great sagas of the nineteenth century. O’Brian’s twenty novels (plus an unfinished twenty-first) about the Nelsonian navy have now been bound into a beautiful five-volume edition.[1] These are the story of two men: Jack Aubrey, naval officer, and Stephen Maturin, naturalist, physician, and occasional spy. They meet in early 1800 on the island of Minorca at Port Mahon. Aubrey has just been promoted to Master and Commander, allowing him to captain the smallest ships of the British Navy, and has gained his first command, the sixteen-gun brig Sophie. He asks Maturin to serve as surgeon on the ship. The latter agrees and sets in motion a great friendship fostered first by a love of music. The two spend their evenings together aboard ship playing chamber music: Aubrey on his violin, Maturin slightly more adeptly on the cello.
I don’t wish to spoil the plots of these wonderful novels, but I’ve enjoyed deducing the heroes’ backgrounds from offhand remarks throughout the series. Aubrey is thirty when the novels begin, and it seems that he became a lieutenant in 1792, served variously on HMS Agamemnon, Arethusa, Colossus, Orion, and Ardent. He was present at the victories of Cape St. Vincent (February 1797) and Camperdown (October 1797). He was then second lieutenant of the fifty-gun Leander at the Battle of the Nile in August 1798.
The history books tell us how the Leander was too small to fight in the standard line of battle, but, once the night encounter was well under way, she glided in between two French ships of the line, Le Franklin and L’Orient, and raked both with very little fire in return, suffering only fourteen wounded. Nelson chose her for the honor of taking the victory dispatch to England, but, just off Crete, Leander encountered one of the two French ships that had escaped destruction in Aboukir Bay, the Généraux. It was an unequal battle as the French was a seventy-four, vastly outgunning and outmanning the British. Leander’s Captain Thompson and his crew fought gallantly but surrendered when it was obvious that continuing would only lead to slaughter. Their brave fight won them renown and the captain a knighthood; fighting spirit was more important than victory in the Royal Navy. (The American John Paul Jones won the Battle of Flamborough Head, yet the British crown knighted the losing captain because he had fought against superior odds and done his duty by protecting the merchantmen in his convoy.) Généraux was finally captured by Nelson’s Foudroyant the next year. We learn from a dockside comment in Master and Commander (1970), the first of the series, that Aubrey was commanding the Généraux when she sailed as a lawful prize into Port Mahon. Out of history O’Brian crafted the event that earned Aubrey his promotion from lieutenant—gained generally through conspicuous gallantry or in a successful ship-to-ship battle. O’Brian implies that either Aubrey’s taking part in the Leander’s fight or his bringing of the Généraux into harbor gave him his first epaulette and set in motion the series.
Maturin’s life before Port Mahon is more difficult to sort out. Half-Irish, half-Catalan, he had been deeply involved in the failed independence movements of these would-be nations. Napoleon’s tyranny threw Maturin onto the side of the English, but he remained a guarded outsider, hence the perfect spy. His professional life before the navy was as a naturalist and occasional consulting physician. His utter indifference to money and day-to-day matters cast him upon the waters of fate, and so he took up Aubrey’s offer of a cruise on the Sophie, expecting a king’s ship to “be a most instructive theatre for an inquiring mind.”
Over the course of twenty books, we follow these two through great victories and shattering defeats, through wealth, poverty, success and failure in love, and family. We grow to love them because of the delight the author himself takes in their adventures. The books are more reminiscent of Jane Austen—especially her most naval novel, Persuasion—than of C. S. Forester. It is almost a cliché to compare O’Brian and Austen. (O’Brian enthusiasts like to point out the similarity between the names JAne AUsten and JAck AUbrey.) It is easy to imagine the Bennet girls turning up for a dance, and a chance to meet eligible naval officers, at Aubrey’s residences at Melbury Lodge or Ashgrove Cottage, just as it is easy to imagine Maturin visiting an old friend at Lyme Regis and meeting the families from Uppercross Cottage, or Admiral Croft or Captain Wentworth or William Price appearing at one of Aubrey’s ports of call. O’Brian wrote up as history what Austen wrote up as life.
More pertinently, Austen inspired O’Brian’s artfully simple writing. Each had a great gift for characterization and for drawing the reader into another world:
“I never was a great reader,” said Jack. His friends looked down at their wine and smiled. “I mean I never could get along with your novels and tales. Admiral Burney—Captain Burney then—lent me one wrote by his sister when we were coming back with a slow convoy from the West Indies; but I could not get through with it—sad stuff, I thought. Though I dare say the fault was in me, just as some people cannot relish music; for Burney thought the world of it, and he was as fine a seaman as any in the service. He sailed with Cook, and you cannot say fairer than that.”
“That is the best qualification for a literary critic I ever heard of,” said Yorke. “What was the name of the book?”
“There you have me,” said Jack. “But it was a small book, in three volumes, I think; and it was all about love. Every novel I have ever looked into is all about love; and I have looked into a good many, because Sophie loves them, and I read aloud to her while she knits, in the evening. All about love.”
“Of course they are,” said Yorke. “What else raises your blood, your spirits, your whole being, to the highest pitch, so that life is triumphant, or tragic, as the case may be, and so that every day is worth a year of common life? When you sit trembling for a letter? When the whole of life is filled with meaning, double-shotted? To be sure, when you actually come to what some have called the right true end, you may find the position ridiculous, and the pleasure momentary; but novels, upon the whole, are concerned with getting there. And for that matter, what else makes the world go round?”
“Why as to that,” said Jack, “I have nothing against the world’s going round: indeed, I am rather in favour of it. But as for raising your spirits to the highest pitch, what do you say about hunting, or playing for high stakes? What do you say about war, about going into action?”
“Come, Aubrey, you must have observed that love is a kind of war; you must have seen the analogy.”
No matter how often I read this passage from The Fortune of War (1979), I still delight in the equation of fine seamanship with good literary judgment. And Yorke’s “double-shotted” is a masterful touch. It is the sort of usage that sets O’Brian apart from the other scribblers of naval fiction.
The eleventh book, The Reverse of the Medal (1986), deals with Aubrey being framed and prosecuted for stock fraud. Here are Aubrey and his closest comrades cleaning to receive Mrs. Aubrey at home:
Stephen had grown used to extreme discomfort at sea or in any place where the Navy carried its Hebraic notions of ritual cleanliness, but never had he experienced anything to touch the desolation of Ashgrove Cottage shortly after the various working-parties had moved in at dawn. Now all the doors and windows were out, made fast by dowels to an ingenious system of lines in the stableyard that allowed both sides the maximum of sun and air, and throughout the house there was the sound of sluicing water, violent scrubbings and thumping, and strong nautical cries which strengthened the impression that the place had been boarded and carried by storm. In spite of the celestial weather the cottage was like something between a manufactory, a water-works and a house of correction with the inmates put to hard labour.
When Aubrey is imprisoned in the Marshalsea while awaiting trial, he settles in with optimism:
The bare little rooms had been sanded and scrubbed; various neat lockers economized space; a complication of white cordage in the corner showed that a hanging chair, that most comfortable of seats, was being made; and hammocks lashed up with seven perfectly even turns and covered with a rug formed a not inelegant sofa. Jack Aubrey had spent most of his naval life in quarters very much more confined than this; he had also a good deal of experience of French and American prisons, to say nothing of English sponging houses, and it would have been a hard gaol indeed that found him at a loss.
O’Brian had a fine ear for dialogue, too. Here is a thief-taker—a sort of private investigator—talking to Maturin about discovering the con man who set up Aubrey:
“What do you mean by a sharp?”
“I am sorry to talk low, sir: it is a cant word we use to mean a dishonest person. They reckon you are a flat if you don’t snap up whatever offers: the world is divided into the sharps and the flats… . Why, sir, as to colleagues …” Pratt hesitated, rasping his bony jaw. “Of course, it would save a mort of time, having Bill work south of the river,” he muttered and aloud he said “There is only Bill Hemmings and his brother I could work with really cordial. They were at Bow Street with me.”
O’Brian maintains his style when he gives voice to the lower classes: a trick that writers as good as Kipling and Trollope couldn’t manage. Instead of odd contractions and painful inversions, O’Brian dropped a word here or there or fussed the adverb to create a sense of a Scots brogue and the intense biliousness of Aubrey’s personal servant Preserved Killick.
The writing can also rise to stirring heights. When Aubrey is convicted of stock fraud and the judge orders him pilloried, the government holds over the sentence until news of it has spread abroad to bring crowds to join in a public punishment. Aubrey’s comrades are outraged at such treatment for a man who has spent his whole life fighting the nation’s enemies. From far and wide, navy men mass and clear the square around the pillory, bodily threatening every civilian looking for a bit of dirty pleasure:
Jack was led out of the dark room into the strong light, and as they guided him up the steps he could see nothing for the glare. “Your head here, sir, if you please,” said the sheriff’s man in a low, nervous, conciliating voice, “and your hands just here.” The man was slowly fumbling with the bolt, hinge, and staple, and as Jack stood there with his hands in the lower half-rounds, his sight cleared: he saw that the broad street was filled with silent, attentive men, some in long toughs, some in shore-going rig, some in plain frocks, but all perfectly recognizable as seamen. And officers, by the dozen, by the score: midshipmen and officers. Babbington was there, immediately in front of the pillory, facing him with his hat off, and Pullings, Stephen of course, Mowett, Dundas … he nodded to them, with almost no change in his iron expression, and his eye moved on: Parker, Rowan, Williamson, Hervey … and men from long, long ago, men he could scarcely name, lieutenants and commanders putting their promotion at risk, midshipmen and master’s mates their commissions, warrant-officers their advancement.
“The head a trifle forward, if you please, sir,” murmured the sheriff’s man, and the upper half of the wooden frame came down, imprisoning his defenceless face. He heard the click of the bolt and then in the dead silence a strong voice cry “Off hats.” With one movement hundreds of broad-brimmed tarpaulin covered hats flew off and the cheering began, the fierce full-throated cheering he had so often heard in battle.
My heart fills with joy at this perfect exultation of the loyalty of fighting men to each other. I feel the same way when I read a description of James Graham closing the gate of Hougoumont at Waterloo. And Stevenson’s “Requiem,” and Tennyson’s “Ulysses.”
Such writing was common throughout England’s history until the debacle of World War I. It is a prose of certainty, the robust writing of a nation that lived safe beyond the sea, that had a better government than its enemies, that had clergy that preached a benevolent God, that had traders among its first citizens. Only England could produce writers like Austen, Trollope, or the diarist John Woodforde. The twentieth century bled all this out of England with two murderous wars, imperial overstretch, rationing, and a social state replacing Georgian and Victorian individual reliance. O’Brian reached back to it superbly, perhaps as only an outsider or malcontent could. (He showed himself both, moving to France and claiming to be Irish.) He preferred the pre-modern world and sought refuge in a better past. His writing is a product of that preference.
I’ve focused on The Reverse of the Medal because it is one of the series’ lesser books. Its interest is primarily social. The Surprise—the sweet-sailing frigate which Aubrey commands through many of his adventures—arrives at Bridgetown in the West Indies where gossip about Aubrey’s youth and amours is recounted. He meets his son by a black woman whom he had hidden aboard ship when he was a midshipman. Aubrey sits on a court martial, and Maturin operates on a fellow doctor. They sail home, failing to capture a fast American privateer. Aubrey is set up to bear the brunt of a stock market scam. Maturin discovers that his wife has left him and that his allies are on the outs in naval intelligence. Cricket is played. The house is cleaned. Aubrey and his wife Sophie are reunited just before he is arrested. Maturin purchases Surprise from the auction block. Aubrey is condemned, the pillory fails, and he accepts Maturin’s offer of Surprise as a privateer. Maturin, just as the novel ends, discovers who the traitor in Whitehall is and why he set Aubrey up. But we learn no more until the next book.
The Aubrey/Maturin books are digressive by nature. There is no shortage of the naval missions and battles that characterize the Hornblower school of naval fiction, but O’Brian gave a tremendous amount of space over to Maturin’s investigations of natural history and his medical practices—exotic fauna, birds and beetles, trepanations, bleeding, tincture of laudanum. This may sound dull, but I have a mind not the least interested in what we now call the life sciences and haven’t found myself skimming. The same is true of O’Brian’s Austenian narration of life ashore with its amorous adventures and financial worries and speculations. Then there are balloon ascents, diving bells, dueling, card-playing, hunting.
O’Brian focused on the things he could describe with interest. Actually that isn’t right. He focused on the things that it interested him to describe. In The Reverse of the Medal, it is the coves at the ship auction, a royal levee where Maturin talks to the Duke of Clarence, the cricket match, Reverend Martin shopping for household items for his wife. These have little to do with the plot but establish the habits of that era and bring our two heroes ever further into roundness. The main characters in naval fiction tend to be larger-than-life heroes sporting perhaps one failing or foible to make them “interesting.” Aubrey and Maturin have a full complement of faults that might be damning if we did not know them so well. Aubrey is a tremendously successful fighting captain, but on land he is like a babe in arms. He accidentally commits all sorts of amorous and financial sins that don’t diminish our love for him, for, as with a dear relation, we see his sins as accidents of circumstances. We can acknowledge his love for his wife and children, his faith with his comrades and his country.
O’Brian’s clarity in writing character makes him a peer of the great nineteenth-century novelists: Tolstoy, Dickens, Flaubert, George Eliot, all of whom wrote historical novels. Vanity Fair, Middlemarch, and War and Peace are to my mind the three greatest novels of the nineteenth century, and they are all set in the historical past. The stature of the historical novel—like history painting—is quite diminished today. I suppose the genre is seen as less than fully creative in an age when the advice given in writing programs and workshops is to “write what you know.” It is quite silly since some of our best writing is in the historical genre. The now-forgotten J. G. Farrell was in this tradition. He died too young—at forty-four—to reach his prime, but his last finished novel, The Singapore Grip (1978), is certainly one of the finest literary works of the 1970s. This satiric retelling of the fall of Singapore in 1941 is poignant, but also laugh-aloud funny. (The “Naming of Parts” sequence is the most amusing bit of fiction I know post-Lucky Jim.) A contemporary historical novelist worthy of mention in the same breath as O’Brian and Farrell is Derek Robinson. I cannot recommend his trilogy about the Royal Flying Corps in World War I—Goshawk Squadron (1971), War Story (1987), and Hornet’s Sting (1991)—too highly. They are caustic, utterly modern, and offer penetrating insight into the minds of First World War pilots.
“Insight” is very much the right word for what the finest historical fiction can give us. History books can be very dry and need space to establish mastery. Fiction can at its best take this mastery and package it better for the reader. It can draw the reluctant in and teach factual knowledge almost by accident.
There will always be questions of factual truth when it comes to historical fiction. Is it better to write about real characters who perform actual deeds or to create characters out of whole cloth? Tolstoy often used real characters in cameos. O’Brian does, too, and in both cases it is what successfully binds the fictional world to the historical one. Reading a historical novel with a real person as hero is an exercise in fact-checking. And if the book is completely outside a recognizable historical reality, it will not have much to tell us about the past. Reading books about the Royal Navy, I find myself noting the données—to use Henry James’s word—for the Aubrey/Maturin stories. Master and Commander is based upon Lord Cochrane’s adventures in the brig Speedy in 1801. Aubrey’s legal troubles in The Reverse of the Medal are based on Cochrane’s trial for stock fraud in 1812. Maturin’s bringing over of the Catalan troops in The Surgeon’s Mate (1980) was inspired by James Robertson’s remarkable journey to find Romana’s Spanish corps in Denmark in 1807. The antarctic struggles of the Leopard in Desolation Island (1978) are based on the sinking of the HMS Guardian in 1789. It doesn’t add or detract from O’Brian’s work to know this, but the pleasure of recognition ties the fictional and historical worlds together in a unique way.
O’Brian’s success has had a good effect on publishers. His single most important source was the forty-odd volume Naval Chronicle, published between 1799 and 1819 by the printer Joyce Gold. This compendium of action reports, biographies, technical description of naval innovations, poetry, and anecdote is the rough thread from which O’Brian spun his gold. A five-volume consolidated edition, edited by Nicholas Tracy, was published in America in 1998. It is impossible to imagine such a thing on my shelves without the O’Brian phenomenon. Dozens of books about Nelson and his navy are published, not by academic or military presses but by the major U.S. trade publishers each season. From where I sit I can see new books on the Royal Navy by N. A. M. Rodger (Norton), Peter Padfield (Overlook), Arthur Herman (HarperCollins), Jeremy Black (Yale), Michael Palmer (Harvard), Tom Pocock (Norton, again), volume one of another giant life of Nelson (Holt), and a Penguin reprint of the very first, by Robert Southey. There are also innumerable companions to O’Brian’s creations, an atlas, a cookbook, and even an invaluable lexicon, A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion for Patrick O’Brian’s Seafaring Tales (Holt).
I luxuriate in these riches, but there is one O’Brian-associated publication I am not looking forward to this season: the first volume of Nikolai Tolstoy’s life of the novelist. Over the last few months there has been a great deal of biographical debate over O’Brian. Tolstoy is his stepson and, besides bringing out his biography, he has engaged in a public feud over the entry on O’Brian in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
The battle was actually joined in 1998 when The Daily Telegraph published an exposé about the novelist’s life. The article revealed that O’Brian was really Richard Patrick Russ and had fabricated much of his life story. In 1940, he abandoned his wife and family. In 1945 he remarried and took on the Irish name. The damning details are many. Fame had come to O’Brian late—he was past sixty years of age—but had come on strong enough for him to warrant a splash in the newspapers. Dean King’s biography followed quickly and its revelations did much to cloud O’Brian’s final months and add bile to his obituaries. Four years later comes Tolstoy’s angry riposte, a 496-page work that only gets up to the subject’s fortieth year.
By these accounts O’Brian was a poor father and a difficult husband in youth and middle age. He was given to exaggerating his war record. He was secretive and deceptive. All of which might trouble his family and close friends. His acquaintances, however, seem to have found him perfectly delightful. With the roaring success of the Aubrey/Maturin novels from the early 1990s on, O’Brian became the beneficiary of tribute dinners on both sides of the Atlantic. I know a number of people who met him in such circumstances, and he came across as the exemplar of the life he created—crusty writer given to diverting, unworldly statements. Did such a figure need a slipshod biography, followed by a two-volume “official” life, the extremes of both making it quite necessary for a corrective? It seems to me that the controversial ODNB entry, at around three thousand words, is more the right length—and even it seemed quite tedious to me. The only biographical publication that I would like to have is a bibliography of his reading about the navy and natural history.
I doubt that Patrick O’Brian was a happy man. He seems to have escaped from bitterness at his own life to the world of Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. He found what he needed there. It is why he began writing the unfinished, untitled twenty-first volume in the Aubrey/Maturin series in 1999. His second wife, Mary, died in March 1998 and, looking to leave his now lonely house in France, he took up rooms at Trinity College, Dublin. He had been awarded an honorary degree in 1997, and the provost made it possible for him to live in college. He finished Blue at the Mizzen (1999) there, which he had announced would be the series’ last book. But, feeling isolated in Dublin and worried by the media attention from the unauthorized biography, he began a new novel, taking refuge where he had always taken it.
The publishers of 21 have been accused of capitalizing on a successful series. That is undoubtedly true, but I’m still grateful to have the partial story. The text is rough, and there is no sense of where the novel’s plot might have headed. But it does two excellent things. With the text and a facsimile of O’Brian’s working manuscript printed side-by-side, we can see a master at work: all the myriad changes and revisions that lift his style towards art. In the manuscript, the first line reads:
Stephen Maturin squared up to his writing-desk once more: he had been called away to attend to one of the ship’s boys who had contrived to stun himself in the foretops by taking the maul from its place, tossing it to a considerable height and so misjudging the revolution as it fell that the massive head struck him down speechless and unnaturally pale.
In the typed draft, O’Brian has added the phrase “in the lightness of his heart” after “one of the ship’s boys who.” It works better rhythmically and catches the sense of the Joyful Surprise—the frigate’s true name on the naval register—at sea with a happy crew and captain.
The second thing I’m glad to have seen is Admiral Aubrey. The logic to the ending of Blue at the Mizzen was that Aubrey had at last achieved his life’s goal of being made an admiral. He had won a brilliant action with the Chilean navy—shades again here of Lord Cochrane—and been ordered by the admiralty to “proceed to the River Plate, there joining the South African squadron: you will go aboard HMS Implacable, hoisting your flag, blue at the mizzen, and take command of the blue squadron.” It is a fine ending to twenty books, yet I’m very happy to have actually seen Aubrey raise his flag, as happens aboard HMS Suffolk in 21, and the sudden awe with which Admiral Aubrey is treated. Each volume in the series ended with a cliffhanger, with our heroes facing unresolved troubles. The unfinished 21 leaves Aubrey and Maturin as O’Brian always left them, aship and sailing to unknown shores.
The Aubrey/Maturin chronicles are really a single large book, in twenty-one volumes, all about love and war and home and hearth and hunting. Thinking about it, I am reminded of something the great economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron wrote about reading:
I have read War and Peace at least fifteen times, and it is still as rereadable as ever. I do not think it contains a paragraph that appears unfamiliar to me as I come across it. Yet on every perusal I never fail to discover something new in this inexhaustible store of observations, insights, ideas, and images that the previous readings have failed to reveal—to say nothing of the infinite pleasure of drifting again along the stream of that language, so simple and so beautiful, so true to the Horatian ideal of simplex munditiis. A book like this is rereadable senz’altro, and at least twice I began rereading War and Peace at once, starting again after having read the last page.
No one could read the whole of the Aubrey/Maturin series fifteen times, but otherwise Gerschenkron could be describing O’Brian’s masterwork. I shall ever have my bookmark somewhere in the series, knowing I can begin again with equal pleasure when 21 comes to its broken close. On any sad night when I’m taken by gloom with the world, these volumes will be there to drift me along a gorgeous stream of language. I feel a perfect gratitude to Patrick O’Brian.
Robert Messenger is the deputy managing editor of The New York Sun.
Notes
Go to the top of the document.
- The Complete Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian; W. W. Norton, 6,540 pages, $175. Go back to the text.
