The Wine-Dark Sea, by Patrick O’Brian (Norton, 272 pp., $22)
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.
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