A short life of the author
Patrick O’Brian (12 December 1914 – 2 January 2000), born Richard Patrick Russ, was a British novelist and translator who wrote the Aubrey-Maturin series — twenty completed novels and one unfinished, beginning with Master and Commander (1969) and ending with Blue at the Mizzen (1999) — which is widely regarded as the greatest sequence of historical novels in the English language. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, the novels follow Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his friend Dr. Stephen Maturin, an Irish-Catalan physician, naturalist, and intelligence agent, through the naval campaigns, voyages, battles, personal crises, and domestic entanglements of the period 1800–1815. The series has been compared — not idly — to the work of Austen, Dickens, and Tolstoy, and its devoted readership includes many who consider it the finest sustained achievement in English-language fiction of the second half of the twentieth century.
Life
O’Brian was born Richard Patrick Russ in Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire. He changed his name legally to Patrick O’Brian and constructed an elaborate personal mythology that concealed his English origins behind a claimed Irish-French identity. The deception was maintained for decades and was not fully exposed until after his death. His early life — an unhappy childhood, a failed first marriage, service in British intelligence during World War II — was largely suppressed.
He settled in Collioure, a small fishing village in the French Pyrenees, in 1949, with his second wife Mary. He lived there for the rest of his life, writing in a small room overlooking the Mediterranean. He was a distinguished translator from the French — his translations of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Henri Charrière’s Papillon are standard — and he wrote several novels and a biography of Picasso before beginning the Aubrey-Maturin series at fifty-four.
The Aubrey-Maturin Series
The novels centre on the friendship between two utterly different men: Jack Aubrey, large, bluff, courageous, musically gifted, financially improvident, and supremely competent at sea; and Stephen Maturin, small, ugly, brilliant, secretive, a physician of skill and a natural philosopher of wide learning who also serves as an intelligence agent for the Admiralty.
Their friendship — one of the great literary friendships — is the emotional heart of the series. Aubrey and Maturin are complementary opposites: Aubrey understands the physical world (weather, tides, the behaviour of ships under sail) with an instinctive mastery; Maturin understands the human world (politics, psychology, the behaviour of organisms) with an intellectual precision. Together they form a complete consciousness.
The novels are set at sea and on shore across the entire globe: the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, South America, the Baltic, the coast of Africa. O’Brian’s knowledge of the Napoleonic-era Royal Navy — its technology, its hierarchy, its language, its food, its medicine, its social structure — is comprehensive and deeply absorbed. He does not explain; he places the reader inside the world and expects them to learn it, as one learns a foreign language by immersion.
The prose is distinguished by a dry wit, a refusal to sentimentalise, and a deep sympathy for human frailty. The sea battles — which are frequent and extraordinarily vivid — are rendered with a technical precision and narrative excitement that have no equal in English fiction.
Key Novels
Master and Commander (1969) introduces Aubrey and Maturin and establishes the pattern of the series. Post Captain (1972) is the most Austenian of the novels — a comedy of manners on shore that is also a portrait of financial desperation. HMS Surprise (1973) sends the pair to the Indian Ocean. The Far Side of the World (1984) — the basis for the Peter Weir film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) — is a chase narrative across the Pacific. The Reverse of the Medal (1986) is the darkest novel, in which Aubrey is convicted of fraud and struck off the Navy list.
The Identity Question
O’Brian’s elaborate self-invention — the false Irish-French biography, the suppression of his English origins, the erasure of his first wife and children — was exposed in a 1998 biography by Dean King. The revelation was devastating to O’Brian, who refused to discuss it, and it remains the central puzzle of his life. Some readers view the deception as pathological; others see it as of a piece with his fiction — the creation of a self as a work of art. O’Brian was, in this reading, his own greatest fictional character: a man who became the person he wanted to be and sustained the performance for half a century.
The biographical controversy has not diminished his literary reputation. If anything, the gap between the private, secretive, emotionally guarded man and the warmth and generosity of the novels — particularly the Aubrey-Maturin friendship — makes the achievement more remarkable.
Critical Standing
O’Brian was largely unknown until the 1990s, when a campaign by American critics — particularly Richard Snow in American Heritage — brought him to a broad American readership. The Peter Weir film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), starring Russell Crowe as Aubrey and Paul Bettany as Maturin, introduced the series to millions who had never read the novels. His reputation has grown steadily since his death, and he is now firmly established as one of the major English-language novelists of the twentieth century.
Collecting O’Brian
The early Aubrey-Maturin novels in first edition are extremely valuable. Master and Commander (1969, Collins) in first edition with dust jacket brings $5,000–$15,000. Post Captain (1972) and HMS Surprise (1973) bring $2,000–$6,000 each. The later novels in first edition bring $50–$300. The entire series in matched first editions is one of the most desirable sets in modern book collecting.