Patrick O'Brian - The Wine-Dark Sea

Rating: 5/5

Review:
The sixteenth in a brilliant series

This is now my third time reading through this brilliant series and I am reminded again how beautifully written and how wonderfully, addictively enjoyable they are.

The Wine-Dark Sea follows Jack, Steven and The Surprise to the second part of their long, long mission in Peru and Chile where Steven’s intelligence work becomes very involved and he also has a very lengthy journey through the Andes. There is also a lot of seagoing action, of course, and yet another superb character study – possibly O’Brian’s finest – of Nathaniel Martin. It is complex and subtle, perhaps very slightly reminiscent in some ways of William Golding’s Rites Of Passage, and one of the satisfying joys of O’Brian’s writing.

Patrick O'Brian is steeped in the period of the early 19th Century and his knowledge of the language, manners, politics, social mores and naval matters of the time is deep and wide. Combined with a magnificent gift for both prose and storytelling, it makes something very special indeed. The books are so perfectly paced, with some calmer, quieter but still engrossing passages and some quite thrilling action sequences. O'Brian's handling of language is masterly, with the dialogue being especially brilliant, but also things like the way his sentences become shorter and more staccato in the action passages, making them heart-poundingly exciting. There are also laugh-out-loud moments and an overall sense of sheer involvement and pleasure in reading.

I cannot recommend these books too highly. They are that rare thing; fine literature which are also books which I can't wait to read more of. Wonderful stuff.