Sailing Off to the Past

By Paul Gray

Some readers have zero tolerance for the genre of seagoing adventures. To such landlubbers, nautical language all sounds distressingly like shiver-me- mizzenmast or belay-the-taffrail or somesuch, and they quickly jump ship in search of books written in more accessible prose. Too bad for them, because they have therefore missed the high-sailing novels of Patrick O'Brian.

And there are plenty of them to be missed. The Wine-Dark Sea (Norton; 261 pages; $22) is the 16th installment of what devotees call the Aubrey/Maturin novels. All are set in the early 19th century, during the period of the Napoleonic Wars, and all feature the same two heroes: Jack Aubrey, a blunt, brave captain in the British Royal Navy, and Stephen Maturin, a ship's surgeon, amateur naturalist and sometimes spy for His Majesty's government.

And yes, like all its predecessors, The Wine-Dark Sea sometimes tacks into some pretty choppy stretches of technicalities: "upper-tree, side-trees, heel-pieces, side-fishes, cheeks, front-fish and cant-pieces, all scarfed, coaked, bolted, hooped and woolded together." But such passages are there for atmospherics rather than information, and they sometimes seem to be delivered with an authorial wink. In one of the running jokes in the series, Maturin, far more comfortable on land than on sea, frequently doesn't understand what his shipmates are saying. Occasionally he feigns ignorance. When Aubrey uses the term "shaped the mast," Maturin replies, "Before this it was amorphous, I collect? Shapeless?" Aubrey misses the tease in the question: "What a fellow you are, Stephen. Shaping a mast means getting it ready to be struck."

This time out, these two old friends are sailing east across the Pacific Ocean toward the coast of South America. In his role as an undercover agent, Maturin hopes to encourage nascent nationalists in Peru and Chile to declare independence from Spain. Success in this mission would achieve two goals that Maturin, half-Irish, half-Catalan, passionately desires: a blow to the Spanish oppressors of Catalonia and a setback for Napoleon, since the newly liberated countries would presumably owe allegiance to Britain rather than France for their freedom.

The Aubrey/Maturin voyage is typically tempestuous. Their ship, the Surprise, is rocked by an underwater volcanic eruption. They capture the Franklin, a privateer sailing under American colors and carrying a Frenchman who may be a spy for Napoleon. Next comes a full-fledged pirate ship, then a whaler ripe for the taking, and then a particularly nasty storm called a wind- gall. Aubrey sustains some serious injuries. Maturin is kept busy cleaning up after various forms of carnage; the duty includes performing amputations without anesthesia. "This will hurt for a moment," he tells one patient, "but it will not last. Hold steady."

Plot, however, is well down the list of charms offered by The Wine-Dark Sea and, indeed, by the whole Aubrey/Maturin series. The eruptions of violence merely punctuate O'Brian's meticulous re-creations of long-ago lives, of 18th century manners and mores that are about to sink under the tides of Romanticism and other excesses leading to the horrors of the 20th century. Both Jack and Stephen see the dangers to their beliefs and way of life posed by the French Revolution. "Enthusiasm, democracy, universal benevolence," fumes Aubrey, "a pretty state of affairs." As a young man Maturin had been enticed by the sirens of 1789 but later came to his senses: "The confident system of his youth -- universal reform, universal changes, universal happiness -- had ended in something very like universal tyranny and oppression." If Jane Austen had written rousing sea yarns, she would have produced something very close to the prose of Patrick O'Brian.

The trompe l'oeil verisimilitude of these books may be their chief attraction. They provide escape into a world that is both soothing and stimulating. They adhere to old verities. Wars, Aubrey sternly informs a conquered foe, "are not wild riots in which anyone may join and seize whatever he can overpower." They also reflect the excitement of an age of discovery. After dissecting a trophy, Maturin triumphantly announces, "In the frigate-bird the symphysis of the furcula coalesces with the carina and the upper end of each ramus with the caracoid, while in its turn each caracoid coalesces with the proximal end of the scapula!" and then explains that the frigate bird flies so well because it has a rigid breastbone.

Perhaps the oddest thing about the Aubrey/Maturin saga is that four years ago, it was essentially unavailable in the U.S. Two American publishers had previously issued books in the series, which has now been translated into some 20 languages, with scant commercial success. In 1990 W.W. Norton took up O'Brian's cause, and that of Jack and Stephen, publishing new installments of their exploits in hardback and previous works in a uniform paperback edition. The gamble worked. Half a million copies of the books are in print, selling briskly; O'Brian has tipped from culthood toward mainstream popularity.

All of which bemuses the Irish-born author, 79, who has lived in the south of France since the late 1940s, written 28 books so far, including a widely acclaimed biography of Picasso, and done numerous translations from the French, including many of the works of Simone de Beauvoir and the popular novel Papillon. O'Brian professes himself "quite astonished" that his success with the Aubrey/Maturin project did not come earlier and has arrived now, "since they are exactly the same books. It pleases me very much, and I'd much rather be rich than poor, you know."

In person, O'Brian manifests all the politesse and reserve of an 18th century gentleman, qualities that will be put to the test as he submits to a publicity tour in the U.S. to mark the appearance of The Wine-Dark Sea. Autographing books -- a pretty state of affairs. O'Brian seems happily out of touch with the contemporary world, much more at home with the authors he read as a child: Samuel Richardson, Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen. "Oh dear, oh dear," he says about events that distress him, such as the decline of the 19th century into Victorianism, "with its antimacassars and genteel ways." He is about to become famous. Oh dear, oh dear.

With reporting by Barry Hillenbrand/London