From Kirkus Reviews
Aubrey and Maturin (The Thirteen Gun Salute, p. 496; The Surgeon's Mate--see below) sail again. This time it's to The Med to blockade the French fleet in Toulon. Fickle westerlies, however, blow them to the Aegean, and political currents put them in the middle of Ottoman affairs. Sinking into debt (thanks to his idiotic investments) and out of favor with their Lords of the Admiralty (thanks to his politically rash father), Captain Jack Aubrey misses the chance for a top-rate new ship and has to settle for H.M.S. Worcester, an ancient, leaky man-of-war. Undignified as the assignment may be, Aubrey is quite pleased to be able to sail away from Britain. He can't get things right on shore, but he is quick enough to put Worcester to trim, taking slack out of the sails and the crew until Worcester is the ablest ship in the line bottling up Napoleon's navy in Toulon. Meanwhile, of course, Aubrey's old friend Stephen Maturin, at last married to the woman he has followed to numerous hemispheres, is with him. The French toy with the English, trying to sneak through the blockade, but there are no conclusive actions. Maturin is eventually assigned a little espionage duty, and there is a hair-raising infiltration of the enemy coast. When Worcester at last gives up the ghost after one too many skirmishes, Aubrey transfers his pennant to the smaller, swifter Surprise and follows orders to sail to the Greek islands to tinker with the balance of power at the fringes of the Turkish empire. Splendid adventures at a stately pace. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"I haven’t read novels [in the past ten years] except for all of the Patrick O’Brian series. It was, unfortunately, like tripping on heroin. I started on those books and couldn’t stop."
― E. O. Wilson, Boston Globe
"O'Brian's books are as atypical of conventional sea stories as Conrad's. Like John LeCarré, he has erased the boundary separating a debased genre from 'serious' fiction. O'Brian is a novelist, pure and simple, one of the best we have."
― Mark Horowitz, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"They're funny, they're exciting, they're informative...There are legions of us who gladly ship out time and time again under Captain Aubrey."
― The New Yorker
"The best historical novels ever written… On every page Mr. O’Brian reminds us with subtle artistry of the most important of all historical lessons: that times change but people don’t, that the griefs and follies and victories of the men and women who were here before us are in fact the maps of our own lives."
― Richard Snow, New York Times Book Review
"It has been something of a shock to find myself―an inveterate reader of girl books―obsessed with Patrick O’Brian’s Napoleonic-era historical novels… What keeps me hooked are the evolving relationships between Jack and Stephen and the women they love."
― Tamar Lewin, New York Times
"I devoured Patrick O’Brian’s 20-volume masterpiece as if it had been so many tots of Jamaica grog."
― Christopher Hitchens, Slate
"I fell in love with his writing straightaway, at first with Master and Commander. It wasn’t primarily the Nelson and Napoleonic period, more the human relationships. …And of course having characters isolated in the middle of the goddamn sea gives more scope. …It’s about friendship, camaraderie. Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin always remind me a bit of Mick and me."
― Keith Richards
"[O’Brian’s] Aubrey-Maturin series, 20 novels of the Royal Navy in the Napoleonic Wars, is a masterpiece. It will outlive most of today’s putative literary gems as Sherlock Holmes has outlived Bulwer-Lytton, as Mark Twain has outlived Charles Reade."
― David Mamet, New York Times
"The Aubrey-Maturin series… far beyond any episodic chronicle, ebbs and flows with the timeless tide of character and the human heart."
― Ken Ringle, Washington Post
"O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin volumes actually constitute a single 6,443-page novel, one that should have been on those lists of the greatest novels of the 20th century."
― George Will
"Gripping and vivid… a whole, solidly living world for the imagination to inhabit."
― A. S. Byatt
"There is not a writer alive whose work I value over his."
― Stephen Becker, Chicago Sun-Times
"Patrick O’Brian is unquestionably the Homer of the Napoleonic wars."
― James Hamilton-Paterson, New Republic
About the Author
One of our greatest contemporary novelists, Patrick O’Brian is the author of the twenty volumes of the best-selling Aubrey/Maturin series, as well as many other books, including Testimonies, The Golden Ocean, The Unknown Shore, and biographies of Joseph Banks and Picasso.
