[In the following review, Mullan offers a negative assessment of The Yellow Admiral, criticizing the novel's weak plot and sparse characterization.]

Auscultation, calidarium, fulvous, grego, grigs, horchata, leet, mumping, sillery, wariangle, xebec: just a small sample from the diction of Patrick O'Brian's The Yellow Admiral, the latest in his series of novels of nautical derring-do, set during the Napoleonic wars, which began with Master and Commander in 1969. Help is at hand for curious readers, who will soon be able to reach for the Patrick O'Brian Companion, recently commissioned by his American publisher, if they do not already own the rival, A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion for Patrick O'Brian's Seafaring Tales. It is to be hoped that the compilers of both these books have been in communication with the author, for he has a special liking for words obscure enough to have evaded dictionary-makers.

The recondite vocabulary is, in a way, what O'Brian's fiction is all about. This is not just because he writes stories of the sea, full of salty slang and names of the parts of ships. Only the last of those words at the beginning of this review is specifically nautical: “xebec”—a small three-masted Mediterranean ship, lateen-rigged but with some square sails. (Two of them, however—“horchata” and “sillery”—are alcoholic drinks: another of O'Brian's interests.) It is rather that the unusual words are prominent signs of the novel's appetite for peculiar lore and encyclopaedic detail. On the one hand, this gives the fiction its life and distinctiveness, for it is clear that the odd bits of knowledge come from the author's own enthusiasms (judging from The Yellow Admiral, ornithology must be one—see “wariangle”). On the other hand, it provides readers with a thickness of texture, a sense of particularity, that is the ambition of most historical novels.

O'Brian's way with information is surely what has won the admiration of literary writers, who include A. S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch and Robertson Davies. He manages, in his way, that turning of research into narrative to which many Booker Prize competitors have aspired. Indeed, he manages his containing of erudition better than some more elevated novelists. The strange assortedness of the items of knowledge that he offers bespeaks the inquisitiveness of the learned amateur rather than the academic. A paragraph will turn from a parenthesis on trade routes to an observation on medical history to mention of a now-forgotten London street name to a detail of Lancashire dialect. Everywhere there are facts, nicely culled.

In The Yellow Admiral, this factuality, as well as being sometimes diverting, is the basis for the novel's credibility. Symptomatically, its very title—apparently a term for a senior officer forced into early, unpaid retirement—requires one of the characters to spend a page describing the peculiarities of the naval promotions system in the early nineteenth century. We are likely to believe that O'Brian has his facts right. Thus he earns a certain faith in his fiction. He is so keen on names and dates and details of navigation that they must be right. And the quirky factuality must be one of the reasons for the huge popularity of his books. The appeal has been said to be “masculine” which it is to the extent that Scrabble or crossword puzzles might be thought “masculine” pleasures.

The interest in absorbing out-of-the-way knowledge into narrative does have its awkward consequences. Sometimes, when the naval action is most furious, the air is full of instructions about “kedging” and “tompions” and the effect is nearly comic. A few passages narrating naval actions are unreadably informative:

The Clorinde, which carried twenty-eight eighteen-pounders, two eight-pounders and fourteen twenty-four-pounder carronades, fell in with the Eurotas, Captain John Phillimore, a thirty-eight-gun twenty-four-pounder frigate, a very powerful vessel, throwing a broadside of six hundred and one pounds as opposed to Clorinde's four hundred and sixty three …

and so on, for a paragraph two pages long. However, such is O'Brian's relish for nautical language, especially if archaic, that his novel can usually live with a slight sense of the ridiculous. His attachment to a particular sub-genre, the kind of naval adventure first popularized by C. S. Forester, allows him the amusement of his erudition without the intellectual gravity that would make it mockable.

Yet he does have problems. Much of O'Brian's historical knowledge gets poured into the speech of his characters. Captain Jack Aubrey and ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin, the friends whose adventures are chronicled in all eighteen “Aubrey/Maturin novels,” are made to tell us what we need to know. So they deliver explanations of, say, the workings of parliamentary committees or the difficulties of navigating off Ushant, often historically interesting but always unbelievable as conversation. “Pray tell me about inclosures, Jack, will you now? I have often heard of them,” says Stephen. And so to a few pages condensed from O'Brian's reading of agrarian history. Throughout the novel, dialogue sinks under this weight of undigested information.

While the information is dense, characterization is primitive. Aubrey and Maturin scarcely exist except to voice knowledge and exhibit wearying abilities. As well as being founts of data, both are Regency versions of Renaissance men. Aubrey is a brilliant sailor, campaigning politician, self-educated bibliophile, expert musician, freer of slaves, and one of his country's leading mathematicians.

Maturin, as well as being a pioneering surgeon and inspired diagnostician, is a brilliant linguist, expert botanist, successful secret agent, outstanding ornithologist, wine buff and, as the head of naval intelligence observes, “one of our best authorities on comparative anatomy.” “In more liberal company Sir Joseph might have spoken of the paper on pottos, with particular reference to their anomalous phalanges, that Dr. Maturin had read to the Royal Society and the sensation it had caused.” As they sail off Brest in the blockade of the French fleet, the two shipmates entertain themselves by playing Mozart duets.

The female characters are even less imaginable. Much of The Yellow Admiral is purportedly given over to the life of seamen ashore, so there are often women and children about. One of them, Maturin's wife, Diana, is all too clearly designed to be a woman of spirit. We know this because she is often described driving carriages very fast around Dorset. When not doing so, she tirelessly talks about carriage driving (more historical knowledge). Aubrey's wife is, in predictable contrast, a limp domestic whinger who is not even allowed any proper indignation when she finds out, half-way through the book, that her heroic husband is an adulterer. He does, after all, apologize (once, briefly) for fathering a child by another woman. She must be left to stew in silence for a few chapters until she recognizes the error of her ways and begs to be forgiven for her intolerance.

The treatment of a hero's adultery is regrettable not just because of the narrator's embarrassing idea of masculinity (“a welcoming bed,” far from home, being irresistible to a “full-blooded man”) or rudimentary psychology (his hero must be thought to love his wife deeply, yet bluffly feel “no particular guilt”). More importantly, it is the one part of the book that promises some sense of plot—swiftly extinguished. What is remarkable about this novel is that it has no story. Nothing has to be worked out, except how to prepare the reader for the next in the series.

But then it is a novel for fans, who will presumably take character on trust from O'Brian's earlier books and be happy enough to be moved to the beginning of the next one. The peculiarity of its facts will sufficiently distinguish it, and Scrabble players will love it. Remember “xebec.”