[In the following negative review, Clausen complains that The Yellow Admiral is repetitive and that O'Brian should have stopped the Aubrey/Maturin series after the seventh novel.]

It's been a long voyage, but Captain John Aubrey, RN, and Dr. Stephen Maturin seem to be heading, if at a leisurely pace, for their final port. Aubrey and Maturin, as millions of readers know, are the co-protagonist of Patrick O'Brian's 18 novels about life on the high seas during the Napoleonic Wars. By the end of The Yellow Admiral, Napoleon has at last been exiled to Elba and peace has returned to Europe—though only for the moment.

It seems an age since Stephen and Jack met at a concert (both characters are accomplished amateur musicians) on the Mediterranean island of Minorca in the spring of 1800. It has been an age, 27 years to be exact, since the initial volume in the series, Master and Commander, issued obscurely from Collins in England and Lippincott in this country. After the first three novels Lippincott was replaced by Stein and Day, which brought out the next two. The series had no American publisher throughout the 1980s, when eight further volumes appeared in England. Not until 1990 did Norton begin bringing out new installments as they appeared and, perhaps more important, a uniform paperback edition of the whole collection.

In retrospect, they were on to a good thing. At first the books were a specialized taste. About 1993, however, they started to catch on in this country as a phenomenon almost reminiscent of Tolkien in the late 1960s. While they seldom appear on the bestseller lists, collectively they make enough money to inspire a range of spinoffs. Norton has reprinted a batch of O'Brian's early works; he started publishing fiction, nonfiction, and (as a literary Irishman who lives in France) translations in the late 1940s. An authorized Patrick O'Brian companion is promised for early '97, not to mention a separate cookbook with recipes for all the exotic naval dishes served in the novels. Our heroes are sometimes reduced to eating rats and insects, so it ought to be an unusual compilation.

A collection of appreciations and bibliographic notes appeared in 1994. A compact disk entitled Musical Evenings with the Captain is likewise available. Finally, the happy publisher announces in its latest Patrick O'Brian Newsletter, “To celebrate The Yellow Admiral, we have commissioned a handsome blue cap—baseball or yachting, depending on how you see yourself—with the title in gold stitching.” Frodo, or his 1990s equivalent, lives.

What sort of beast have we here exactly? O'Brian is often compared with Jane Austen, clearly one of his chief literary inspirations. Two of her brothers were naval officers during the Napoleonic Wars; O'Brian's versatile, extremely effective style and some of his characters echo especially her last completed novel, Persuasion, in which an admiral and several captains play prominent roles. The fact that the six Austen novels have risen to unprecedented popularity (particularly in Hollywood) during the same three or four years as O'Brian's triumph no doubt tells us something important about the late 1990s, though it might be hard to say exactly what.

Another antecedent is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. In this case the Holmes character is Dr. Maturin, whose position as a brilliantly over-qualified naval surgeon of ambiguous origins provides cover for a career in espionage. Like Holmes, he suffers from wild swings of mood and takes drugs; in times of leisure he practices “natural philosophy” (high-class amateur biology) and delivers papers at the Royal Society. Captain Aubrey is a more developed Watson: a man of action whose intellectual attainments are lower than Maturin's, yet is unrivaled as a commander of naval vessels in time of war. His special talents become manifest not only in battle but when improbable feats of seamanship are required to save his shipmates in the Antarctic or the South China Sea.

Neither of these men can function competently at home in England. Each of them falls in love during the second novel, pursues the object of his affections ineptly, and eventually makes a marriage that would be even more disastrous if the husbands were ever home. Both men make, lose, make, lose, and make large fortunes—Aubrey through prize money from capturing enemy ships, Maturin by inheritance. Whenever Aubrey spends time in England, somebody is sure to win huge lawsuits against him. Once he even gets thrown out of the Navy for having supposedly taken part in stock market fraud (actually he was framed).

As a blunderingly plain-spoken Member of Parliament in the era of pocket boroughs, he enrages the government, which repeatedly blights his naval career. Maturin, on the other hand, spends most of his time ashore trying to make up with the lovely Diana, his obsession and, after the seventh novel, his spectacularly mis-matched wife. Because all the major characters are developed with a certain amount of depth, these events are alternately comical and tragic, or sometimes tragic and comical at the same time.

If God is anywhere in these books, you have to find him in the details. O'Brian must be far and away the world's expert on every aspect of naval warfare during his period. What's more, he makes no concessions to readers who haven't the faintest idea how a frigate differs from a first-rate or what to do if the mizzentop-gallant staysail suddenly carries away to larboard. The books overflow with untranslated nauticalese such as: “‘Hitch on the runner,’ said Jack. ‘No, farther out. Half way to the second quarter. Surge the hawser and lower away.’”

Similar passages can go on for half a page. Then comes gunnery: not only the usual stuff that delivers broadsides, but carronades, stern-chasers, bow-chasers, and such obligatory condiments as slow match. There are no glossaries and few maps. (Dean King and John B. Hattendorf tried to remedy these deficiencies in two elementary, distinctly unauthorized handbooks published by Henry Holt.) Although each volume is more or less complete in itself, it presupposes some knowledge of all the ones before it. The only satisfactory way to read them is in order, a tall order by this time.

Lest these comments sound forbidding, I should add that O'Brian is a brilliant writer and one of the great historical novelists, both in the narrow sense of recreating a believable past world with few anachronisms, and also in making its inhabitants compelling to readers who are not antiquarians. The dialogue sparkles in a dozen dialects. The range of experiences is very wide and nearly every effect is vivid, as if the author had been there. Some of the scenes of life at sea are better than Conrad's. The high point in this respect is an almost hallucinatory chase during an Antarctic gale in Desolation Island, the fifth volume.

Finally, the author's sympathies, like Dr. Maturin's, are broad and tolerant. Americans (with whom Britain is at war in most of the books), Africans, South Americans, Malays, Melanesians, and their customs are delineated with enthusiasm when our multicircumnavigating heroes encounter them. There is a lot to like here, even to take seriously as literature, unless the whole idea of men devoted to the profession of arms repels you.

Despite having read all 18 volumes with appreciation, I think O'Brian would have done better to stop after the seventh. With The Surgeon's Mate (1980) he finished all the themes that started him going in the first place. Aubrey is by now a successful and wealthy captain, the veteran of many campaigns told in patient detail. It is the spring of 1814; both men are well into middle age. At the end of the book Stephen finally marries his Diana. (Jack has already been married for four volumes.) Historically speaking, Napoleon is about to fall. Our characters have just been freed from a French prison and sent home as a gesture of goodwill. Exeunt omnes; curtain; the end.

Whether (and if so why) O'Brian changed his mind I have no idea, but one consequence, serious for a historical novelist, was that he had to abandon chronology. The earlier novels were all set in particular years, at well-defined moments in the Napoleonic conflict, but he had now used up virtually the whole war. Had he decided earlier to write more volumes, no doubt he would have been more economical with the first decade and a half of the 19th century, but having squandered it he had only two choices: to create supposedly earlier adventures for his characters, or to continue moving them forward in time while the historical world stands still. Each course had serious disadvantages. O'Brian chose the second, with the result that after 10 more volumes chronicling a decade's worth of further voyages, campaigns, and signs of aging, Aubrey (still a captain) and Maturin (still a spy) continue to await Napoleon's fall as The Yellow Admiral begins.

The other disadvantage to so long a series is that the characters and action become too predictable. What began as a set of premises hardens into formula. The first half-dozen sea battles, like everything else in the early novels, were fresh and varied. The last half-dozen, though no less well written (and no less based on historical fact), have the air of repetition. Similarly, when Aubrey and Maturin went to the Indian Ocean in The Mauritius Command or the Near East in The Ionian Mission, these were voyages of discovery for the reader. The most recent trips have been more like package tours.

As for the two main characters, the requirements of continuing the series gravely limit the range of alteration possible in them or their situations. Whole crews may drop dead of wounds, scurvy, or accidents at sea, but neither Aubrey nor Maturin can suffer permanent disability without ending the cycle. The number of plausible plot variations within the basic set of premises is finite. When Aubrey first had trouble with a tyrannical superior, when his naivete first lost him a fortune, when he first boarded an enemy deck against superior odds, when the mercurial Diana first ran out on Stephen, the reader's reaction was admiration at what O'Brian could achieve. The second, the third, the fourth time, even addicted readers become a little less tolerant, if only because they know things must again turn out reasonably well in order for the series to go on.

The addicts will nevertheless be sorry when it ends. More skeptical people who have seen a lot of reviews may still be wondering what the fuss is about. To find out, you would have to start at the beginning and make a commitment, but not for all 18 volumes, or even for seven. To make a fair trial, read the first three. If the series turns out not to be for you, at least you'll have something to say about Aubrey and Maturin when those people with the funny blue caps go into mourning.