The Wine-Dark Sea.

PATRICK O'BRIAN is a 79-year-old Irishman who has lived in the south of France for four decades. In addition to translating all of Simone de Beauvoir, a bit of Colette, and Jean Lacouture's recent biography of de Gaulle, he has written well-received biographies of Picasso and Joseph Banks, and many other novels. In 1969 he began publishing a series of sea stories set in the Napoleonic period. The series relates the adventures of a British sea captain, Jack Aubrey, and his friend Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and British intelligence agent. Five of these tales were published in the United States in the early 1970s, but poor sales led the publisher to drop them, and for over a decade Mr. O'Brian's books were almost unavailable in this country.

And then--Boom! In the last three years Patrick O'brian has become a phenomenon, racking up ecstatic reviews, sales in the hundreds of thousands, and celebrity status. His book-signings are mobbed, and when he was invited to read from his works at the National Archives an overflow crowd filled two auditoriums.

The O'Brian craze started in 1991. The last bad old review came in the New York Times in 1990, when its mystery/thriller reviewer, Newgate Callendar, referred to Mr. O'brian's "long-winded, even turgid prose." It has been smooth sailing since then, however, and a front-page piece in the Times Book Review in January 1991 called Mr. O'brian's books "the best historical novels ever written." It would perhaps be unkind to suggest that the Times reviewer was unfamiliar with War and Peace, but that is the league into which some reviewers are throwing Mr. O'brian. How anyone can think these stories to be fiction of the very first rank remains inexplicable.

Taken on their own terms, however, they are marvelous novels. Their most singular quality is the extraordinary, meticulous detail about life on a ship. Mr. O'brian reports on the diseases and accidents by which men were plagued. Limbs are amputated liberally. Evenings with the ladies in port are duly followed by venereal disease. Lack of fresh water means that clothes must be cleaned in sea water, and undergarments chafe like sandpaper. The lack of privacy is oppressive. Then there are the ships themselves. The setting of sails for various weather patterns is described with absolute accuracy, and to a degree of detail that some readers may find tedious. For the uninitiated, each volume includes a diagram of a ship of the line showing everything from main topgallant to mizzen staysail.

All the stories are about the same two characters. Aubrey is a bluff seaman, while Maturin is an intellectual--a physician and naturalist. (Indeed, the books also show a brilliant eye for the flora and fauna of captivating locales.) Mr. O'brian portrays something of the inner life of each man, and this is an achievement in the case of the less introspective Aubrey. They reflect on life and love, loneliness and courage, religion and politics. In this 16th novel in the series, both have begun to age. While being led through the Andes, Maturin reflects that whenever his guide "found that he had drawn more than a few yards ahead he paused to cough or blow his nose; and this was the first time Stephen had ever known consideration for his age to cause a young man to check his pace." (It is worth noting that to clear his mind and help his body, Maturin emulates the natives in chewing a ball of coca leaves.) And of Aubrey, steering his ship through frigid waters from the crow's nest, we learn that "several times the high-perched Jack Aubrey trembled . . . --literally trembled with extreme cold, weariness, and the grave tension of guiding his ship through this potentially mortal maze: he was no longer a young man."

There are few other key figures, though some very deft portraits appear in each volume: usually, crew members drawn briefly but with enormous skill. Like most sea stories, these are tales of men's lives, and women appear only very occasionally. In The Wine-Dark Sea, they are nearly absent. Aubrey and Maturin share the stage, but in these stories the focus is on what they do, not what they think.

These are not psychological studies, and it is not the examination of character that makes them popular. Nor is it some trendy reading of today's politics into the early nineteenth century. Indeed, such politics as is put into Aubrey's and Maturin's mouths is deeply conservative. When we encounter a French revolutionary called Monsieur Dutourd, Aubrey comments: "I disliked him from the start--disliked everything I heard of him. Enthusiasm, democracy, universal benevolence--a pretty state of affairs."

Lest this be thought Mr. O'brian's caricature of conservative sentiments, Maturin later reflects on Rousseau and the French Revolution: "The confident system of his youth--universal reform, universal changes, universal happiness and freedom--had ended in something very like universal tyranny and oppression. The ancient generations were not to be despised; and the seaman's firm belief that Friday was unlucky was perhaps less foolish than the philosophe's conviction that all the days of the week could be rendered happy by the application of an enlightened system of laws." Not only the characters' views but Mr. O'Brian's own reject the enthusiasms of the day. Mr. O'brian has said of himself and his writing, "Obviously I have lived very much out of the world: I know little of present-day Dublin or London or Paris, even less of post-modernity, post-structuralism, hard rock or rap, and I cannot write with much conviction about the contemporary scene."

What Mr. O'brian can write is adventure stories. Consider the plot line of The Wine-Dark Sea. No mystery here, for the very first page of the novel tells us that the ship Surprise, commanded by Jack Aubrey, "had set out on her voyage with the purpose of carrying her surgeon, Stephen Maturin, to South America, there to enter into contact with those leading inhabitants who wished to make Chile and Peru independent of Spain; for Maturin, as well as being a doctor of medicine, was an intelligence agent." From this plot line follow dangerous schemes and narrow escapes, sea chases and battles, a trek across the Andes, a ship hit by lightning and nearly destroyed.

It is all reminiscent of C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series, which similarly is set during the Napoleonic wars and presents a series of adventure tales tracing the career of a British sea captain. There are important differences, though: while we first meet Aubrey and Maturin as fully formed adults, we meet Hornblower as a sea-sick young midshipman aged 17 and follow him through a Nelson-like career. We find Aubrey and Maturin engaging, but we come to love Hornblower. The heart of O'brian's books is plot; the heart of Forester's is Hornblower.

And here indeed may be the key to understanding the immense popularity of Mr. O'brian's series: its lack of romance. For if the Hornblower series, begun in the 1940s, is quintessentially romantic, the Aubrey/Maturin books are emotionally sparse. They are adventure stories for the reader who wishes to believe he is perusing something a bit more modern and up-market. This may explain the constant emphasis, in reviews and articles about O'brian, on the incredible detail about sailing, as if it were a necessary excuse for reading an otherwise indefensible genre.

But no excuse is needed, either for the genre or for this series of stories about the adventures of a sea captain and a spy. If this series is not as engaging as Forester's, the production of these 16 highly readable and entertaining tales is still an achievement worth celebrating. Why not start at the beginning, with the paperback of Master and Commander, and see if it impels you forward? It very well may. If not, then avoid guilt, forget about maintopmast staysails, and go back to Mr. Midshipman Hornblower.

Mr. Abrams is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.