[In the following essay, Edwards offers a positive assessment of the Aubrey/Maturin series, stating that the novels transcend mere genre writing.]

Admirers of Patrick O'Brian's historical novels sometimes think of the literate English-speaking world as divided into three parts: themselves, people who haven't yet read the books, and those—so few as to be negligible—who do know but don't like them. The second group may need to hear that there are now seventeen novels dealing with the adventures during the Napoleonic wars of Captain John Aubrey, R.N., and his shipmate and close friend Dr. Stephen Maturin, physician, naturalist, and intelligence agent.

Our sense of who we are includes memories of the reading that brought us pleasure and illumination at the right time; Keats on Chapman's Homer and King Lear is more candid about this than most writers have liked to be. The kind of pleasure and illumination naturally varies, and not all the books need be certifiably great. Nor does everyone remember and cherish the same ones, for the same reasons. I myself read C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower stories when young, and I still value what they had to say about history, the sea, and the devices of leadership. I don't recall them as being impressive otherwise, and a recent rereading of a few supports that view. It has been suggested that readers, particularly in America, where Forester settled after World War II, were slow to warm to O'Brian because he offered less action and harder historical material than Forester had taught them to expect. But the two series differ in more interesting ways than that.

The Hornblower books picture history through the lens of hero-worship, and they focus very closely on their hero, the only full-scale figure in view. Forester wrote largely for the Saturday Evening Post reader, who liked a good yarn, and he gave his audience serialized novels and connected short stories with shapely plots that kept Hornblower's thoughts and feelings in the foreground. The hero's personal oddities—laconic gruffness, physical and social uneasiness, a need to keep his purposes secret—replace any very hard negotiations between the character and the intelligence of the author, and the center is always Hornblower's mastering of a challenge or luckily escaping utter failure.

For O'Brian human events are denser and less amenable to composition. Consider the wonderful poetry contest in The Ionian Mission. Here, as always, the interest is largely in the digressions, in what happens between the happenings—battles, storms, and shipwrecks, the politics of ship and shore, love affairs, duels, spying, imprisonment, exotic ports of call—that are the popular novelist's main stock-in-trade. As Aubrey's frigate Surprise sails from Malta toward the coast of Epirus, on a mission to bribe the local pashas to resist the French, two of her officers compete in an after-dinner wardroom sweepstakes, based on their reading of their own poems on naval themes. Mr. Rowan's account of the grounding of HMS Courageux on the Anhalt reef aspires to a rough-hewn Pindaric grandeur (“Awful the grinding noise of keel and heel / With an unusual motion made the crew to reel …”), while Mr. Mowett packs maritime jargon into formal Popeian couplets (“The sheet and weather-brace they then stand by, / The lee clew-garnet and the buntlines ply …”). Then a newcomer to the company, the rubicund Captain Driver of the Royal Marines, enters the lists with some polished verses in praise of a young woman, which as Maturin delicately suggests are quite similar to John Pomfret's “To a Friend Inclined to Marry.” Astounded, Driver agrees that it is Pomfret's poem: “How could a man have been expected to guess that it was to be original poetry? Original poetry, for God's sake! He had supposed it was to be a prize for elegant delivery.” Captain Aubrey affably praises his elegant delivery and then splits the purse between Rowan, for “poetry in the classical manner,” and Mowett, for “poetry in the modern style.”

This very funny episode has nothing to do with the book's plot, if indeed it has one. If we imagine stories as lines, however squiggly, on a plane surface, then what O'Brian loves to do is move up, or out, into a third dimension that feels more like life, where what people do and say seldom has much bearing on what later transpires. Life no doubt consists largely of passing the time, and life at sea in the age of sail, with its protracted, repetitious, exhausting, dangerous work, would have made the interludes of eating and drinking, gaming, music-making, and conversing all the more precious. What O'Brian's sailors do on their own time, and how they talk about things, is his best subject and the point of his astonishing knowledge of how people unknown to history lived, at sea and ashore, in the age of Napoleon, Nelson, and George III.

Yet the poetry sweepstakes—and the books are full of comparable moments—is not some naive attempt to substitute “life” for art but a complex assemblage of perspectives. The reader is sympathetically amused by all the participants. If Driver is technically a plagiarist, he's an innocent one, and his error obliquely comments on the self-concerned competitiveness of Rowan and Mowett (and perhaps all poets?)—objectively speaking, “his” poem is far better than theirs. But they too are innocent; they are mariners by trade, and poetry is merely their hobby. (Later in the series Mowett manages to get published, whereupon, as if to punish him, he vanishes from the books.) And their hobby does them credit, remembering some of the other ways sailors pass the time. Yet a less innocent production of poetry underlies the incident. Driver is no more a plagiarist than O'Brian, who has already confessed to us, in a prefatory author's note, that he pinched the works of Rowan and Mowett from the poetical writings of actual Georgian sailors published in the monthly Naval Chronicle or preserved in manuscript memoirs. Although these thefts may fairly be called “research” and are duly acknowledged, a professional writer's motives are necessarily more suspect than his characters', and O'Brian's cheerful awareness of this is part of the whole effect.

Within the books he seldom if ever addresses his readers directly or even notices their presence, but reading him feels like getting to know someone personally, as we seem to do with Fielding, Austen, Dickens, or Trollope. The sophisticated of course know this to be an illusion of art, but even they can imagine what not knowing it might be like, despite all the obvious theoretical embarrassments. Reading O'Brian is like listening to the talk of a particularly interesting friend—but who is this person, or persona, and where did he come from?

O'Brian contributed a brief, reticent memoir to A. E. Cunningham's collection of essays and information about his works. He was born (in 1914) into apparently comfortable circumstances; he tells us that his mother died just after the Great War and that he was raised in Ireland and England, largely by relatives and family friends. He mentions recurrent childhood illness and endless reading, an irregular education in England and France, learning to sail for partly therapeutic reasons, adjusting to reduced economic expectations during the great depression, determining to be a writer and producing “an indifferent, derivative novel and many short stories” before World War II. In that war he was turned down for active service on medical grounds, but he drove an ambulance in London during the blitz and then served in British Intelligence.

After the war he and his wife moved briefly to rural Wales and then to a fishing village in the Rousillon near the Spanish border, where they still live. His first published novel, Testimonies (British title Three Bear Witness, 1952), like his second, The Catalans (in England The Frozen Flame, 1953) is modern in setting; they were praised by such as Delmore Schwartz, Stevie Smith, and Malcolm Cowley, but a subsequent novel and collections of stories were coolly reviewed or ignored, as were two less serious tales for young readers. No book by him was published or reprinted in the United States between 1957 and 1969, nor, apparently, was he widely read in Britain; for a decade or more he occupied himself mainly by translating French books, among them all the later works of Simone de Beauvoir. The first five Aubrey-Maturin books did appear in America in the 1970s, but none of their successors were issued here until the Norton reprints began in 1990.

Since then he has had more attention than he may quite welcome. All the Aubrey-Maturin books are in print and, more remarkably, actually in bookstores. Writings about his works, and about Nelson's navy generally, keep appearing. He makes American “book tours”; there is a Patrick O'Brian Newsletter; he is, I'm told, a hot topic on the internet. The uninitiated might reasonably take him to be, as F. R. Leavis said of the Sitwells, a phenomenon in the history of publicity rather than of literature, but this would be quite wrong. The question isn't “Is he really that good?” (Yes, he is) but “Why do intelligent readers love these stories so much?”—a matter I'll address later.

The republication of some of his earlier books allows glimpses into the origins of the series. In Testimonies, a strong, ambitious, discreetly Laurentian first novel, a repressed and rather priggish Oxford don settles in a remote Welsh village and falls in love with a farmer's young wife. The simple-sophisticated paradigm is explored later, in a lighter tone, in the struggles of the brainy Dr. Maturin to fathom the odd terminology and mores of the Royal Navy. The protagonist of Testimonies, Joseph Pugh, is writing a scholarly study of Isidore of Seville and the early bestiaries, a project that would appeal to Maturin and one that O'Brian himself was working on before the Second War. We hear that the maiden name of Pugh's mother was Aubrey and that he has a clerical cousin named Maturin; but Cunningham calls the British reissue of the novel (which I presume the American one follows) “revised,” and it's at least conceivable that the author has done some playful retouching.

The series is somewhat more clearly anticipated in The Golden Ocean (1956) and The Unknown Shore (1959), adventure stories for boys and his first historical novels. His first published volume had been A Book of Voyages (1947), an edition of early navigators' narratives, and the accounts of Dampier, Shelvocke, Woodes Rogers, and their ilk enrich the Aubrey-Maturin books. The Golden Ocean and The Unknown Shore are inspired by one of the important voyages of the eighteenth century, Commodore George Anson's east-to-west circumnavigation in 1740–44. Though they share a few characters, the second book is not a sequel but (by analogy to the barbaric “prequel”) a simulquel to the first. In The Golden Ocean young Peter Palafox, a clergyman's son from Connaught, sails as a midshipman on Anson's flagship Centurion around the Horn, across the Pacific to capture the immensely rich Manila galleon (Peter's share of the prize money is £1400), and home in triumph after nearly four years at sea. In The Unknown Shore an older youth, Jack Byron, serves in Anson's dowdy store-ship Wager, which is wrecked off the wild shores of southern Chile; Jack has a longer and harder time of it getting home.

The Unknown Shore is the more interesting story, and the one in which O'Brian's later transactions with history are more visibly foreshadowed. At its end, for example, Byron and his eccentric shipmate Tobias Barrow drop in at the grand London residence of Jack's sister and her husband Lord Carlisle. Guests are present, and Tobias is addressed by an unnamed figure: “‘No man will be a sailor who has contrivance to get himself into a jail,’ said the heavy gentleman, in a booming roar, ‘for being in a ship is being in a jail, with a chance of being drowned.’” The heavy gentleman is of course identifiable. Boswell reports Samuel Johnson speaking these very words on 31 August 1773, and the gentleman's earlier remark—“‘The grand object of travelling … is to see the shores of the Mediterranean'”—was said by Johnson on 21 April 1776.

The moment, however, is historically unstable. The historicity of Johnson himself is hardly in question, though he would never have made an awkward, ill-dressed boy the pretext and butt of his wit. But he did not say these things when O'Brian has him do so, in the mid-1740s when, though known to the literati for “London” and the Life of Savage, he was much too poor, odd, and unfamous to be a likely guest at an elegant establishment like the Carlisles'. It was in 1744 or '45, after all, that he chose to dine behind a screen at the house of his publisher, Edward Cave, lest the company see his shabby clothes.

But a broader historical truthfulness mitigates such unhistorical contrivances. A real John Byron (if not a Tobias Barrow) sailed with Anson as a seventeen-year-old midshipman and was wrecked in Wager; he survived a terrible ordeal and got home in 1746. Unlike Forester, O'Brian never peeps out at the modern reader from inside the historical frame, and he says nothing about Byron's future. But we can learn elsewhere that he led his own circumnavigation in HMS Dolphin two decades later, became a rear-admiral, served as governor of Newfoundland, commanded the West Indies fleet during the American Revolution, and as “Foul-weather Jack” was legendary in the navy of Jack Aubrey's day for his reckless courage. Though he never knew it, he would also be the grandfather of a famous poet, and O'Brian slyly portrays him as unusually literate for a sailor and an aspiring versifier himself.

All historical fiction obviously mixes invention with fact, but O'Brian's mix is unusually rich. Who do we imagine ourselves to be as we read these early tales? We are not just bookish youths who love Forester, Stevenson, and Captain Marryat, but also educated grown-ups who know Boswell and may recognize Anson and Byron as names from naval history. We also seem to be readers of Emma, who can spot something about the opening sentence of The Unknown Shore—“Mr. Edward Chaworth of Mendham was a well-disposed, good-natured man with an adequate fortune, an amiable wife, and a numerous family; he thought the world an excellent place …”—before the irony turns thinner and less Austenian: “… and he could suggest no way in which it could be improved, except for the poachers and the Whigs—they would be abolished in an ideal world, and the trout in his stream would be a trifle larger.”

But these books are not really for adults. They assume a world where fictive excitements and factual restraints are not deeply at odds. Like most children's stories they are in some way about growing up but with the worst miseries left out. Palafox and Byron gladly learn that they measure up to a hard and dangerous calling, but while they have to endure some violence and pain and witness death, they are spared smaller, seamier realities that the Aubrey-Maturin books confront more squarely than Forester ever dreamed of doing—serious obscenity, close-up flogging and battle wounds, hard and unfunny drinking, unsanctified sex (conventional or other), drug addiction, madness. O'Brian says that he wrote these early tales “for fun,” as no doubt he did, but in them an ambitious but stymied writer is also trying a different line, no doubt in hopes of making some money.

Clearly he had much of the history for the later series well in hand before he began to write it, in the late 1960s, at the suggestion of an American publisher, Lippincott. There are small but intriguing parallels between the two groups of books; Peter Palafox's childhood nurse, for example, was named O'Mara, and so is the governess of Aubrey's children (though in The Commodore she's forgetfully called O'Hara), while in the memoir O'Brian fondly recalls a “dear Miss O'Mara” who was his own governess. Byron and Aubrey share not only their first name but their tall, blue-eyed, yellow-haired persons (the latter's men affectionately call him “Goldilocks” out of his hearing), as well as their professional talents and dedication. Tobias Barrow is, like Stephen Maturin, a slight, dark, ill-kempt orphan with great gifts for medicine and zoology but limited social graces. Barrow's ambitious guardian gave him a thorough education in all the liberal arts in hope of producing “an even more admirable Crichton” (a name Aubrey will memorably misconceive as “Admiral Crichton”), but Barrow lacks his successor's interest in music, literature, and human nature, and his pedantic buffoonery is less like Maturin than like Jerry Lewis playing the Nutty Professor.

O'Brian was more in demand after the great series began in the early 1970s. He wrote lively and well-informed biographies of Picasso (1976) and Sir Joseph Banks (1987); he continued his translating and became a frequent reviewer in England, particularly of books on naval subjects. In 1974 he published Men-of-War, a brisk, handsomely illustrated volume on life in the navy of Nelson's day, which has now come out in America. It too seems to assume a young or at least green and lubberly readership, which it at times addresses with the bluff facetiousness of a familiar sort of schoolmaster:

Let us take a boy who wants to go to sea and follow him through his career as an officer from bottom to top; and let him be a courageous boy with a cast-iron digestion and lucky enough not to put his head in the way of a cannon-ball, so that he may stay the course.

(The boy's name is William Blockhead, and in time, like others of his clan, he becomes an admiral.) But even adult landsmen feel out of their element amidst sailor-talk; like Stephen Maturin, we may need all the help we can get, and Men-of-War is most helpful about sailing, gunnery, and daily life on a warship. And it holds nice surprises for readers of the series, like the striking 1800 portrait of Nelson (by Lemuel Francis Abbott) that shows him wearing the diamond-studded “chelyngk” or cockade the Turkish sultan awarded him after his victory at the Nile, from which we learn what the chelyngk Jack Aubrey also receives from the sultan looks like, and where O'Brian got the idea in the first place.

But none of these earlier books quite predicts the pleasures to follow, or shows why the series has won the hearts of readers who aren't otherwise drawn to historical novels or popular fiction generally. Not even the sophisticated, of course, are immune to the yearning for clearer standards and reduced angst that draws people who will never read Jane Austen to movies like Sense and Sensibility or Persuasion, and, in another community of taste, makes the Regency a decor of choice for modern gothic romances. O'Brian is not much more up-to-date than his characters, as his memoir happily acknowledges:

Obviously I have lived very much out of the world: I know little of present-day Dublin or London or Paris, even less of post-modernity, post-structuralism, hard rock or rap, and I cannot write with much conviction about the contemporary scene. Yet I do have some comments, some observations to offer on the condition humaine that may be sound or at least of some interest, and it seems to me that they are best made in the context of a world that I know as well as the reader does, a valid world so long as it is inhabited by human beings rather than by lay figures in period clothing.

Even “lay figures” is odd and dated: the OED gives 1795 for the sense jointed wooden figures of the human body used by artists in arranging draperies or poses, and 1835 for the figurative sense nonentities or unreal characters in a novel.

Yet even disbelievers in a single condition humaine may find O'Brian's world closer to their own than he here lets on. I would guess that his own politics, if any, are mildly conservative, but Aubrey the Tory and Maturin the semi-reformed revolutionist take quite progressive views of social issues that still trouble the peace: racial and cultural difference, the independence of women, what the books always call “paederasty,” and so on. But their decent liberal-mindedness, while comforting, is not what makes the books so attractive. The appeal is in the details, our awareness that the life imagined in them is convincingly represented by the cogencies of the text. And we see that something larger is at stake than the social and political texture of one historical moment—what to make of a sense of the past, what to do with history, is the implicit issue.

At the beginning the series observes chronological sequence closely, even routinely. The first book, Master and Commander, opens in April 1800 with the edgy first meeting (it almost leads to a duel) between Aubrey and Maturin; it closes with them, now shipmates and fast friends, as prisoners of war witnessing the Battle of Algeciras, which was fought in July 1801. Early in the next book, Post Captain, they learn of the Peace of Amiens, which was signed in March 1802. When the war resumes (May 1803) they are in Toulon and must flee overland (with Aubrey disguised as a trained bear!) across the Pyrenees to then-neutral Spain. The finale of Post Captain, a battle between British frigates and a Spanish treasure fleet bound for Cadiz, took place on 5 October 1804 almost exactly as O'Brian describes it, though the captain of HMS Lively was named Hamond, not Aubrey.

Soon, however, time grows more erratic. The third book, HMS Surprise, follows directly from Post Captain and thus ought to begin in Autumn 1804; its action is not internally datable, but its conclusion, a naval action in the Indian Ocean, is based on a real engagement in February 1804, eight months before the book seemingly starts. The next one, The Mauritius Command, should begin several years later, to give Aubrey time to get home and get married and become the father of twin daughters. (O'Brian cunningly has Maturin ask their present age but never get an answer.) Since “the recent Spanish declaration of war upon France” is mentioned, the story seems to open in mid-1808, a little early though tolerably so for a book whose main action closely imitates a real campaign in 1810–11.

Then time goes all to pieces. Desolation Island opens as the War of 1812 is impending, but this is impossible. If Aubrey was fighting in the Mascarenes in 1810 and '11, he can't have returned home, begotten a son who's teething, taken command of Leopard and sailed her around the Cape, been wrecked on Desolation Island, refitted his ship and taken her to the East Indies, and (in The Fortune of War) got back to the South Atlantic in time to be aboard Java when she was taken by USS Constitution in December 1812. This is not a pedantic complaint that the author has messed up his chronology but a suggestion that we are no longer meant to think that the fiction observes chronology at all. Indeed, the eleven books that ensue would consume a decade or more in real time, yet if read “historically” they would all have to take place between the end of 1812 and Napoleon's abdication in 1814, which has not yet occurred when the latest installment, The Commodore, ends.

O'Brian sees the problem and faces it disarmingly in the Author's Note to The Far Side of the World, when the time-warp is farther advanced. He disclaims much “originality” for his historical tales but suggests that if they are to continue, “it is clear that the writer will soon have originality thrust upon him, for he is running short of history.” Had he known how many books were to follow, he adds, he would have made the series start well before 1800; as it is, he can only suppose (in 1984) that “he may be led to make use of hypothetical years, rather like those hypothetical moons used in the calculation of Easter: an 1812a as it were or even an 1812b.”

We must now be closer to 1812m or n, but in the meanwhile a difficulty has mutated into a strong new artistic effect. It is not that history in all senses of the word now disappears; as the Author's Note goes on to say, if “strict chronology” has to be sacrificed, he will try not to sacrifice other things of value:

[The author] will continue to respect historical accuracy and speak of the Royal Navy as it was, making use of contemporary documents: the reader will meet no basilisks that destroy with their eyes, no Hottentots without religion, polity, or articulate language, no Chinese perfectly polite, and completely skilled in all sciences, no wholly virtuous, ever-victorious or necessarily immortal heroes; and should any crocodiles appear, he undertakes that they shall devour their prey without tears.

(As William C. Dowling points out to me, O'Brian, while confessing to unoriginality, here tacitly “borrows” these remarks about basilisks, Hottentots, Chinese, and crocodiles almost word for word from Johnson's preface to his translation (1735) of Father Jerome Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia; in the Life Boswell quotes Johnson's passage, saying that Burke particularly admired it.) But while any one of the later books could have happened in 1812, the feel of experience has altered. Action is more and more internalized, “unreal,” outside of time, like Maturin's dreamlike ascent of “The Thousand Steps” in the Malay state of Pulo Prabang, to the Buddhist temple of Kumai and a naturalist's heaven of rhinos, orangutans, and other fabled creatures (The Thirteen-Gun Salute), or his wondrous journey through the biota of the Andean altiplano in The Wine-Dark Sea.

The astonishing conclusion of The Letter of Marque pictures even more fantastic transcendence. Maturin has been yearning for his lost wife, the free-spirited Diana Villiers, now reportedly occupying herself as a professional balloonist in Sweden. He finds her there, falls from a tower while inspecting her balloon, and is gravely injured. But as his body recuperates, so does their love, and at book's end they come to Stockholm to board Surprise with Aubrey and other true friends, all of them singing with “melodious full-throated ease” the great finale of forgiveness and hope from The Marriage of Figaro, “Ah tutti contenti saremo cosi,” which has been running through Stephen's head since he heard the opera in London earlier in the book. This surreal fusion of Mozart with Keats's Nightingale ode—projecting human desire beyond temporal limits, figuring beauty and happiness as imperishable even against all the reports that they are mutable—is O'Brian's modest version of the late romances of Shakespeare, Beethoven's last quartets, or the operas of Verdi's old age, where the terms of a genre and of common sense itself, while not discredited, for a wondrous moment cease to apply, and something stranger, richer, and wiser seems to look at us through time or aesthetic form.

But though O'Brian can strike the lofty note powerfully, it would misrepresent things to separate such “seriousness” from the more characteristic tones and effects of his writing. In the tradition of other Irish expatriate polymaths—Shaw, Joyce, Beckett—his forte is comedy, and a main source of his humor, like theirs, is the English language itself, which the Irish write and speak so well because they can't quite forget that it's at least genetically foreign to them. Jack Aubrey is a true-born Englishman, not least so in his utter incomprehension of alien tongues. When he means to greet a Frenchman politely he says “domestique,” supposing it to mean “your servant.” When boarding French ships he demands surrender by bellowing “rendez-vous.” And he's often quite at sea with his own language, as when he refers to an unpleasant woman as a “ptarmigan” and explains himself thus when cautiously questioned by Dr. Maturin, the Hiberno-Catalan ornithologist with degrees from Dublin and Paris:

“In England, I find,” said Stephen after a while, “cranes are called herons; and there are many other differences. As an Englishman, pray how would you define a ptarmigan, now?”

“Why, ptarmigans are those contentious froward cross over-bearing women you come across only too often. … They are called after Mahomet's wife, I believe; or at least that was what my old father told me when I was a boy.”

Aubrey's favorite writer, whom he really has read, is Shakespeare, and there's something Shakespearian (as well as Wodehousian) in his conflating of “ptarmigan” with “termagant” and (evidently) “Fatima,” though we can trust both Jack and his deplorable father not to know that the latter was in fact the Prophet's daughter. (Intriguingly, “Termagant” was originally the name of the blustering, violent stage-Muslim of the Morality plays, and it may be Eastern in derivation.) Jack's malapropian genius shines through his literary and biblical allusions—“a palm in Gilead,” “Pompous Pilate,” “Damon and Pythagoras”—and his mangling of English proverbs. He's quite ready to believe that, as one of his midshipmen insists, the motto of the American Revolution was “No reproduction without copulation,” even though Maturin assures him that “At that time the mass of Americans were in favour of copulation.”

Aubrey's humor is low indeed, but his innocent delight in his own jests and puns is irresistible. When he mentions to Maturin the composer Johann Melchior Molter, his wit endearingly overpowers him: “‘Yes. You know, Molter Vivace. You must have heard of Molter Vivace. Oh ha, ha, ha!’ When at last he had had his laugh out, he wiped his eyes and wheezed, ‘It came to me in a flash, a brilliant illumination, like when you fire off blue lights.’” When Maturin, the prudent, Chesterfieldian spy who never laughs at anything, trepans the fractured skull of a seaman and inserts a plate of hammered coins, Aubrey's jocularity leads the text to a sour but unexpectedly valid recognition:

“Well, Plaice [says Aubrey], at least some good has come out of this: at least nobody will ever be able to say, ‘Poor old Plaice is down to his last shilling.’”

“How do you make that out, sir?” asked Plaice, closing one eye and smiling in anticipation.

“Why, because there are three of 'em screwed to your head, ha, ha, ha!” said his Captain.

“You are not unlike Shakespeare,” observed Stephen, as they walked back to the cabin.

“So I am often told by those who read my letters and dispatches,” said Jack, “but what makes you say so at this particular moment?”

“Because his clowns make quips of that bludgeoning, knock-me-down nature. You have only to add marry, come up, or go to, with a pox on it, and it is pure Gammon, or Bacon, or what you will.”

“That is only your jealousy,” said Jack.

Maturin the cosmopolitan rationalist is in no danger of overrating the Shakespearian, but his friend's jokes do often show a touch of the esemplastic power, as well as more than a touch of what Johnson called the Bard's fatal attraction to “the idle conceit, or contemptible equivocation.”

Maturin's wit is quicker and subtler but not inevitably higher in the scale. When the naming of the bosun's new pet is under discussion, he calmly remarks that “The only possible name for a bosun's cat is Scourge,” which is funny only if you know that miscreant seamen were flogged by the bosun or his mates. In the same vein is his response when the voluble Mr. Lydgate, a ship's chaplain (and the Perpetual Curate of Wool when he's ashore), asks why the two short watches of a nautical day are called dogwatches: “‘Why,’ said Stephen, ‘it is because they are curtailed, of course.’” After a long silence a midshipman gets it: “‘He said, cur-tailed: the dog-watch is cur-tailed. Do you twig?’” So prompted, even Aubrey twigs:

Jack leaned back in his chair, wiping the tears from his scarlet face, and cried, “Oh, it is the best thing—the best thing. Bless you, Stephen—a glass of wine with you. Mr. Simmons, if we dine with the Admiral, you must ask me, and I will say, ‘Why, it is because they have been docked, of course.’ No, no. I am out. Curtailed—cur-tailed. But I doubt I should ever be able to get it out gravely enough.”

The narrative calls this “the sort of wretched clench perfectly suited to the company,” but the narrator's own humor is often too broad to support any claim to higher standards. He invents two blockading ships called “the Nymph [and] her frequent companion the Bacchante.” In Boston he has Maturin be rescued from French assailants by “pleasantly named” British prisoners of war, Lieutenants Keyne and Abel. When escorting Maturin to an official dinner he would rather skip, Aubrey smiles at his irate friend and says “lead on, Macbeth,” whereupon a Scottish seaman springs to attention:

Standing before his Captain with his huge bare red bony splay feet brought neatly together he plucked off his blue bonnet and asked, “Wheer tu, sirr?”

“No, no, Macbeth,” said Jack. “I did not mean you; and in any case I should have said Macduff. …”

“Macduff, Macduff,” the cry went through the ship. “Sawney Macduff to the quarterdeck at the double.”

“Belay there,” cried Jack. “Scrub it. No, no. …”

As Shakespeare knew too, “descending” to the level of one's characters and their culture is an excellent way of imaginatively entering history. O'Brian's comedy does tend to grow subtler as the series progresses, but never so subtle as to lose the link of sympathetic generosity between author and characters. And like all comedy, his mocks our absurd wishes to live at the highest conceivable level of dignity and universal importance even as it holds out the comfort of knowing that, as Leopold Bloom reflects—perhaps with a smile, perhaps not—as his day ends, no one is ever the first or last at anything, however bad.

In the end, O'Brian's books attract serious readers simply because they ask for, and reward, serious reading. The harder you consider what they say, the further you see into the imagined life they depict, and into the remarkable imagination that is depicting it. That they are “historical” is a kind of bonus. Just now, history itself seems in some danger, from the normal arrogance of hindsight and the less forgivable arrogance of treating all history as a form of publicity—asking of any human act that it be memorable (if at all) for only the proverbial fifteen minutes, or remembering it only as it advances your own program or leaves your limited comprehension unthreatened. Whether Patrick O'Brian's writings be called genre novels, high entertainment, or (my own choice) literature, they encourage a hope that the past still can remain vividly and instructively alive for those who will trouble to look into it.