Article 84917 in rec.arts.books:
From: fzimmerm@ciesin.org (Fred Zimmerman)
Subject: REVIEW--Patrick O'Brian "The Wine-Dark Sea" (Fred's Books #2)
Date: 9 Feb 1994 14:57:09 GMT
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Fred's Books #2

The Wine-Dark Sea, by Patrick O'Brian (W.W. Norton)

Patrick O'Brian's The Wine-Dark Sea is the sixteenth in
the series of novels set in the Napoleonic era that chronicle the
adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his "particular
friend," Dr. Stephen Maturin, surgeon, natural philosopher, advocate of
Catalan independence, and agent for British naval intelligence.  I had
never read any of O'Brian's books until this year.  At first I resisted
the wave of publicity that greeted The Wine-Dark Sea, feeling in an
unexamined way that a novel set in the world of "wooden ships and iron
men" was likely to be nothing more than a cut-rate derivative of C.S.
Forester's Hornblower novels (which I dearly loved). As anyone acquainted with
O'Brian's work knows, I was very wrong.

The Aubrey and Maturin novels stand on a level of their own.  If anything,
they are a greater accomplishment than the Hornblower novels.  They mine
the same romantic vein of seagoing adventure in exotic waters, beautiful
passengers, politico-military intrigue, daring single-ship encounters, and
glorious prizes, but O'Brian's is a more gifted, a more polyphonic voice
than Forester's.  I would hazard that O'Brian will speak more directly to
many modern readers than Forester, whose style, although beautiful, is a
bit too simple and unaffected for many modern tastes, raised, IMHO, to
turn to film and video for pure story telling, and to the novel for insight
into the minutiae of character.  To put it another way:  O'Brian is on a
par with Updike.

I read most of the preceding novels in the series before reading The
Wine-Dark Sea.  (BTW, apropos of the perennial discussion in
r.a.sf.written:  I read the novels out of order.  I read the first one
first, to decide whether I liked the series, and liked it so much that I
was unwilling to wait for the volumes to cycle back into the Ann Arbor
Public Library.)  With that perspective, I must say that The Wine-Dark Sea
is not the best of the series.  It shows a few of the signs of an aging
formula: familiar characters persisting in familiar settings, despite
internal logic that it would be time for them to move on; extreme
situations recurring a little too often for credibility; and a hint of St.
Elsewhere's Syndrome, in which the creator turns against and torments his
creations.  That being said, however, The Wine Dark Sea is still an
outstanding novel by a great novelist. I recommend, however, that
you begin with O'Brian's earlier novels--"Master and Commander" and "Post
Captain" are first and second in the sequence.    