Ahoy! Patrick O'Brian sails again.

The enormous success of Patrick O'Brian's historical novels defies any simple explanation. Perhaps the current interest in film adaptations of Jane Austen's works offer some explanatory clue. Indeed, the two authors share a loving devotion to the Royal Navy at the time of the Napoleonic campaigns, but O'Brian sails with hindsight into waters which Miss Austen could only imagine, landlocked as she was ashore. Norton, O'Brian's publishers, certainly cannot be at sea when they regard the enormous sales figures; their best-selling author can even be found smiling quizzically from his own spot on their internet home page. Perhaps he wonders about the on-line links to a chat group and a list-serv which allow, well, a little ebb and flow of conversation for his readers after the novels are read and reread.

Whatever the case may be, the good news in the Patrick O'Brian home port is that the eighteenth Aubrey/Maturin novel The Yellow Admiral (Norton, $24,262 pp.), has just been published. The bad news lies in the fact that the master storyteller is over eighty and the likelihood of many more novels in the series is surely fading away. O'Brian's books have been justly called the best historical novels ever written, and no less a critic than Oxford's John Bayley admires their subtlety of characterization and talks of their Jamesian "felt life." To wonder about the fuss which O'Brian has created is to pose implicitly a question about genre. Can historical fiction really be worth the bother? Suffice it to say, O'Brian is not Melville nor does he choose to be. A Homer, perhaps, and it is of Homer that the redoubtable O'Brian asks readers to think when they judge his fiction. And it is to Homer we have to return to consider the nature of O'Brian's achievement. But first let an admirer open the log.

"Lucky Jack" Aubrey is O'Brian's hero. As a young man Aubrey was known as "Goldilocks" for his flowing blond hair, and he cannonaded his way in Mediterranean combat up the ladder of promotion, weighting his pockets with prize money and his shoulders with increasing burdens of responsibility. He sails in Nelson's navy accompanied in battle and in the playing of string duets by his fellow musician, the surgeon/secret agent, Stephen Maturin. (O'Brian himself is a former member of British intelligence.) Stephen has encyclopedic knowledge of the world's flora and fauna; he also has a cool ferocity in espionage which must relate to his dueling days at Trinity College in Dublin.

Whatever their pedigrees and special talents, the structural advantages which derive from the pairing of these two heroes are many. A Watson can be a foil to Holmes or follow separate adventures. Jack is of good eccentric, patrician stock, and never happier than when driving his favorite ship, H.M.S. Surprise, hull down in pursuit of a fleeing Frenchman. Stephen is an Irish/Catalonian doctor (a "good Catholic" one might add) with a fluency in the classics matched only by his clumsiness at sea and his unfailing ability to forget important dining engagements - generally because he is in pursuit of some rare specimen of flora or fauna. In one novel, The Thirteen-Gun Salute, Stephen tracks an orangutan up a mountain to a Buddhist monastery while Jack...what was Jack doing then?

That question might have you "flogged round the fleet" in O'Brian circles. And if you want to know what makes that punishment dire, there are squadrons of reference books on the O'Brian series to help you fight off ignorance and, in the case of the intricacies of sailing a square-rigged ship, condemn you to much more. "Getting to know the ropes" is part of the appeal of the series - and for some of us part of the mystery.

Yes, many of us do possess all of the books in paper and covet the hard-cover set; we rationalize that although each volume can be read as a novel on its own, the series as a whole builds into one great work and is best read end to end, more than once. (The first book, Master and Commander, is a particular favorite as is Desolation Island which features the eerie battle in the Antarctic with the Dutch ship, Waakzaamheid.) In all likelihood, O'Brian enthusiasts spent their adolescence reading C.S. Forester's Hornblower series and find in O'Brian (this disclaimer always appears in some form when the two are compared) "with no condescension to Forester," an adult equivalent. His appeal is surprisingly gender neutral. The lively list-serv group (computer subscribers are collectively known as list-swains) is in its own way an "enabling metaphor" which helps to explain the O'Brian phenomenon. The on-line postings are frequently couched in the language of the two heroes and often concern the technicalities of seamanship or naval tactics. O'Brian offers his readers (pace Groucho) membership in that longed-for club which they want to join and which will have them.

The experience of reading O'Brian is that of gracious acceptance at one of the banquets of life's feast. As Jack says, "A glass of wine with you, sir - or madam." And we do thank him as we go with him and Stephen into staterooms, lowly inns, Polynesian palaces, and French prisons. Jack's appetites are immense; his weight is perpetually increasing. Only the inevitable catastrophe can starve him into a more reasonable form. Stephen, alas, no trencherman, must combat a different appetite, for the narcotic tincture of opium, laudanum. And then there is the dialogue. To listen in on such accomplished people, gimballing over the ocean on impossible missions, making erudite remarks on sea birds, on navigation, or on the intricacies of foreign policy, is to experience the "felt life." I suppose only some of us can translate all the Latin or understand the technicalities of sailing trim, but we are content to read ourselves into the company of these people.

Jack is a warrior eager for glory and spoil. He loves battle, and follows Nelson's adage, "Never mind maneuvers, always go at them." Jack's extraordinary skills as a sailor are played off his equally great skills as a tactician and gunner. His physical courage and his excitement in battle court much wish-fulfillment with each stroke of his "heavy cavalry saber." Stephen as secret agent toils in the labyrinths of the admiralty's plots to undermine Napoleon's quest for world dominion. Since the influence of both Britain and France extends to the ends of the earth, O'Brian has the globe on which to trace the exotic assignments of his naturalist-cryptographer. At one stage Stephen has the peculiar delight of combining both his vocations; he dissects the corpses of two traitorous double agents. In Java no less!

Both heroes have significant others, Sophie, Jack's wife, and Diana, Stephen's (and Jack's) impossible mistress and latterly his spouse. Romance and domestic friction push our heroes onward - together.

We have to ask, can serious reading be so much fun? To answer invokes a schizoid response requiring a double-take on O'Brian's skill in taking us so disarmingly into the past. There is no question that the work immerses us in the wooden world of sailing ships and, in so far as the heroes venture onto dry land, into nineteenth-century domestic arrangements and geopolitical machinations. And it does this brilliantly. (Authorities in naval architecture and history speak with reverence of O'Brian's deep knowledge.) One could argue that the series is melodrama; in most cases the good and the evil are clearly defined, Jack is a professional sailor and Stephen needs no more justification than his love of national independence and his hatred of Napoleon's tyranny to fight his way into ascendancy. Jack does suffer loss of faith in his beloved navy, but his and its redemption come about rather by keeping on keeping on. Nelson's adage again. These novels are stories, good stories; they don't take us to the heart of any metaphysical mystery like that of Melville's white whale, nor do they give us an epic revaluation of a culture through the tragedy of the heroes. But the demands of the genre are compelling enough: to write a novel eighteen volumes in length and to tie it to a specific period is to write a sort of salvation history, the author as god working out his purposes in and on his chosen heroes; Jack and Stephen simply cannot be seen to suffer tragic loss or change, at least in the experience of those who read the books. If in volume five there appears to be no escape from the snares of the enemy, the testimony of about a foot of shelf space occupied by the remaining novels in the series has an oddly corrective effect: it will work out.

Obviously, this is not the same understanding a reader has in The Odyssey or The Iliad when the perspective is that of the gods. The great design worked out here is not eternity's but the novelist's; where his novels most invite and most fulfill wishes, they challenge least. Still, these are not negligible reading pleasures. Let O'Brian comment himself: "A narrative set in the past may have its particular, time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for two thousand years and more."

Patrick O'Brian is not a blind epic singer nor does his work hold up an unsettling mirror to an audience hanging rapt upon his tale; he has a very wary eye cocked to gauge the effects of what he says and writes. His coy warning about drawing "preposterous comparisons" is not the sort of humility which disarms reproof. The Homeric simile is one indication of the source of his success: he rather cannon-balls us over and gives himself a few millennia's leeway to assess the impact. O'Brian's vivid recreation of the Napoleonic wars works out a remarkably reassuring sense of the past. It's hard not to find him irresistible.

Edward T. Wheeler, a frequent Commonweal contributor, is dean of the faculty at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut.