Read the Novels and Forget Everything Else

In 1998, Patrick O’Brian had reached the height of literary eminence. During the preceding decade, he had been elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to literature, and received the first Heywood Hill Literary Prize, for “a lifetime’s contribution to the enjoyment of books”—the prize having been presented by the playwright Tom Stoppard, himself a fan. He’d joined the exclusive London club Brooks’s, undertaken two sold-out tours of the United States, earned millions in royalties and become, in the words of editor Starling Lawrence, “a modern-day publishing phenomenon.” The Aubrey-Maturin novels—the twenty-book sequence (one unfinished) chronicling the adventures of Royal Navy captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, his ship’s surgeon—were hailed by the critic Richard Snow as “the best historical novels ever written.”