When I was a boy and wanted to read a book that I suspected would become one of my favorites (joining The Bounty Trilogy, Wind In the Willows, Treasure Island, and Call of the Wild, among many others), I would lift a hatch cover in a planked deck near a big steering wheel, and drop into a small compartment called the lazaret. For I lived aboard a two-masted schooner, a true windjammer, built in the shipyards of south 'Frisco in 1893, and now, at this time in both our lives, being readied to make a long voyage toward the South Seas.
The lazaret held bundles of spare sailcloth and balls of rope yarn and thread and beeswax, linseed oil and tarred hemp twine, sheets of oilskin, coils of the best Manila rope, and much else: all critically necessary to the life of a ship and her crew. It was also my special hideout: a kind of harbor within, where I went to disappear into worlds not yet known, or not known well enough. Surrounded by the hull, water faintly lapping below (the sound still closer to my heart than any music yet heard), my imagination cast free and made passages unfettered by routine.
And I have wondered at times if my reading since (the schooner gone long ago, wrecked on a coral atoll some thirty-five years past; the boy's gait now mostly that of a landsman, no longer rolling in unconscious time to the dance of a deck under sail) has been a kind of attempt to find those writers, those stories, that will help me return to that life and the lazaret.
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Patrick O'Brian, a reclusive eighty-one year-old Anglo-Irish gentle- man living in the mountains of southern France, has spent a quarter-century composing a novel that, with the publication of its latest segment, The Yellow Admiral, will consist of eighteen volumes and some 6,000 pages. Begun in 1969, following the publication of a handsome number of novels and short-story collections, a biography of Picasso, and translations of Lacouture and de Beauvoir, the work in its entirety - often referred to as the Aubrey-Maturin Narrative - is set in the very early nineteenth century. Jack Aubrey, a brave and bluff man of great presence and far-flung reputation, serves in England's navy during its long and relentless war against the fleets of Napoleon Bonaparte and his allies. Through a rather charming turn of events, Aubrey's life becomes intertwined with that of Stephen Maturin, a small saturnine Irish physician, whose medical skills are matched only by his hidden abilities as a freelance intelligence agent, and it is the remarkable range of events large and small, and the most intense emotions, that holds the Narrative together. Battle - long deepwater voyages - marriage and family - spying - drug addiction - wealth and poverty: all appear, vanish, and reappear over the course of two decades.
O'Brian's precise observation and use of historical detail is unex- celled by any other novelist I've encountered; his characters are fully-realized individuals, and his reflections on life are acute and humane (and, often, wickedly funny). The cumulative effect immerses the reader in a world both familiar and mysterious, a world so compelling that they will return to it again and again.
The first open and unqualified expression of friendship between Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin occurs in the first volume of the Narrative, Master and Commander, when Stephen learns that Jack has received a promotion, one of a number critically needed that the young officer might make the long and perilous ascent (as dangerous, in its way, as going aloft in a full gale) through the levels of command in his chosen profession. "I wish you joy of it with all my heart, sure," Stephen says.
For those fortunate readers about to begin their acquaintance with Patrick O'Brian,, and with the wonderful story he has given us: I wish you joy of the extraordinary passage ahead.
