YOU are, perhaps, trying to pass on to a friend your enthusiasm for the stories of Patrick O'Brian. So what are they about? They are sea stories, you say, set at the time of Britain's wars with Napoleonic France. But more than that, much more. Umm. Well, at least you tried. It may be that one day your friend, finding himself desperate for something to read, will pick up “Master and Commander”, the opening book of Mr O'Brian's sea saga, and find himself enveloped in the story of Jack Aubrey as he sets sail in his first command, the tiny warship Sophie. The danger is that your friend will become an addict, devouring one after another all the 20 Aubrey novels with a fanaticism that excludes work, family life and other such humdrum matters, and then reading through the whole lot again. Why on earth did no one mention Patrick O'Brian before?
Under the O'Brian spell you move into an unfamiliar but entirely convincing world. Quite likely you start with no special interest in the British navy in the age of sail. But who could have predicted the appeal of Tolkien's fantasies? How many Londoners were lured to the first night of a play about a Dane who could not make up his mind? Mr O'Brian was among the illustrious line of writers who turned words into the nearest thing we have to a time machine.
The reader shares what Mr O'Brian called “the closed environment of a ship at sea, at sail, proceeding for months, perhaps for years, and its magnifying effect upon human relations”. Such ships were the deadly machines that made Britain the master of much of the world in the 19th century, but they were also complex societies whose smooth functioning depended on civility and friendship, and, an unlikely ingredient in adventure stories, music. Starling Lawrence, a writer who did much to introduce the stories to American readers, sees in Mr O'Brian's world an element of wish-fulfilment. Despite the hardship of navy life, you are in a place “where the sails are white and the air is clean”. Another writer, Amanda Foreman, one of the many women in thrall to the stories, says that in them, not far away from the fears in men's hearts, “is the vision of an ideal existence”.
An innocent deception
Patrick O'Brian not only re-created another time; he re-created himself. For years his acquaintances had no reason to doubt that he was what he said he was: an Irishman, born in Galway to a Roman Catholic family; educated at home by a governess; fluent in Irish and other languages, among them Latin. But when he became famous it emerged that his real name was Richard Patrick Russ, the son of an English doctor who specialised in the treatment of gonorrhoea; and who was the son of a successful Jewish furrier who had emigrated to England from Germany. Richard Russ had been educated at a minor boarding school in Devon.
If there was deception, it was of the most innocent kind. It is clear from his novels that Mr O'Brian was half in love with Ireland. He provided Captain Aubrey with a seagoing companion called Stephen Maturin, a partly Irish surgeon every bit as interesting as Aubrey himself. Maturin is an intellectual, a linguist, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, which, late in his life, gave Mr O'Brian an honorary degree. O'Brianologists, of which there are many, are convinced that, deep in his imaginings, Mr O'Brian saw himself as Maturin. They point to Maturin's real job as a spy; Mr O'Brian was said to have worked for British intelligence, although the details are obscure.
Like Maturin, he was interested in how battles, especially sea battles, had shaped history. Lepanto, in 1571, ended the Turkish threat to the West; the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 permanently damaged Spain's moral influence; Britain's victory over the French fleet on the Nile in 1798 ended Napoleon's plan to invade India. The raw vividness of the Aubrey novels owes much to Mr O'Brian's sources, the logbooks and other contemporary accounts of navy life that fired his imagination. He said that in writing about that time “it is difficult to avoid understatement”. Nelson, when the young captain of a small ship, boarded and captured two far more powerful enemy ships. “So very often the improbable reality outruns fiction.”
He denied he was a romantic, an unbelievable claim for a novelist to make. Still, in the routine of his life he was a realist. He lived for most of his working life in Collioure, in southern France, because it was cheap, at least in the early days when he was poor. Several pre-Aubrey novels sank without trace, and Mr O'Brian and his wife Mary lived on his earnings as a translator; he may not have known much Irish, but he had far more useful French.
The Aubrey novels were not immediate bestsellers. That most enduring source of publicity, personal recommendation, gave them a fair wind. The publication of each new story became an event. Well into his 80s Mr O'Brian was content to continue to be the obedient recorder, in fine handwriting, of the exploits of Aubrey, by now an admiral. He thought he had another 20 years or so of useful life, and was working on the 21st Aubrey novel. His death means that the saga is not finished. But no work of art ever is.
This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline "Patrick O’Brian"