[In the following positive review, Jacques praises the writing and sense of history in The Hundred Days.]

Historical novels are an extraordinary genre. They have the ability to convey the feel, the detail, the language, the etiquette, the technology of the time like no conventional history book can ever do. While historical works are strong on explanation and fact, only historical novels can transport your soul and your senses back to the period in question. Their only rival is a good television historical drama, or its big screen equivalent, but the experience is somehow less total. The historical novel is a three-dimensional experience, four if you allow for your own imagination, while the screen is strictly two.

Of course, much depends on the quality of the telling and it is here that Patrick O'Brian scores in The Hundred Days. First, he knows his subject through and through. Even if you know nothing about men-of-war in 1815 and are baffled by talk of fore-topsails and mizzen topgallants, the naturalness of the detail, the assumption that the ship in all its finery is second-nature, draws one page by page into feeling that somehow this is not an alien world but in fact your very own.

O'Brian has a fine command of the language. There is something effortless about his style which allows the story to tack this way and that. Many historical novels depend on two main ingredients—the plot and the description. The quality of O'Brian's writing allows him to wander off course without loosening the reader's attention. The narrative line is weaker than in much of the genre, but the storytelling is far richer.

His discourses on women on ships, ornithology, the natural life of the Atlas mountains, Algiers in the early 1800s, and much else besides, constantly stimulate. And he paints his characters in gentle but revealing pastel shades. Indeed, at times the words feel more like a painting than a book, such is the ease with which O'Brian writes. His subject may be war, but the story, using period dialogue, is told with beguiling ease.

Napoleon has escaped from Elba on 1 March, 1815 and Britain is seeking to rally a grand European alliance to scupper his attempt at a comeback. Napoleon is anxious to prevent the Russian and Austrian armies joining forces and marching westward towards the British and Prussians by persuading the Bosnian Muslims to act as a spoiling force. For this, Napoleon needs to hire a large number of mercenaries with the money coming from a Muslim state on the confines of Morocco. The gold ingots are to be taken by sea through the Straits of Gibraltar and across the Mediterranean to Durazzo.

The two central characters are Jack Aubrey, the commander of the operation, and Stephen Maturin, the ship's doctor and intelligence agent. Maturin is a particularly engaging character with plenty of interests and a thoroughly human side. Normally with books of this kind, the reader can feel the pulse of the book perceptibly quicken as the author assembles the various elements of the book for the final tension-ridden crescendo. The Hundred Days does indeed have a final chase but it is no traditional kind of climax. If you like your historical novel in the style of a whodunit, then this is not the book for you. But if you like fine writing and a sense of history, then you will not be disappointed.