I first heard of Patrick O'Brian when he died this past January and was movingly eulogized in George Will's column.  Now I don't normally read historical fiction, especially military historical fiction, but Will made such a strong case that I felt obliged to at least check O'Brian out.  I'm glad I did; Master and Commander is a well-written, powerful book that succeeds as a character study, an obsessively-researched recreation of early 19th-century life, and as an adventure.
 

" 'Identity?' said Jack, comfortably pouring out more coffee.  'Is not identity something you are born with?'
   'The identity I am thinking of is something that hovers between a man and the rest of the world: a mid-point between his view of himself and theirs of him - for each, of course, affects the other continually.  A reciprocal fluxion, sir.  There is nothing absolute about this identity of mine.' "
-- from Master and Commander
 

The novel, the first in a twenty-book series, opens with Jack Aubrey, a young lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy, being granted his long-awaited promotion to the rank of captain (or officially, "master and commander") and the command of the Sophie, a modest little vessel in the Mediterranean.  At a concert, Jack nearly comes to blows with the haughty intellectual Dr. Stephen Maturin, but the two quickly reconcile over breakfast and Jack, whose ship is desperately undermanned, offers the penniless Maturin a post as ship's surgeon.

The two men eventually become best friends, despite their being a sort of seaborne Odd Couple.  Aubrey, unlike most fictional heroes, is not a silent, craggy-jawed Adonis; he's fat, red-faced, good-humored, and a bit of a buffoon, the kind of person who laughs maniacally at his own jokes.  As his second-in-command says, "He can be a very agreeable companion, of course, but there are times when he shows that particular beefy English insensibility."  Aubrey's counterpart Stephen Maturin is a doctor, a natural philosopher whose idea of a good time is to obsessively catalog his lepidoptera...the very caricature of the effete intellectual.  As Master and Commander unfolds, though, O'Brian shows us that both men have hidden depths.  Aubrey, so clownish and naive on land, is a brilliant seaman and warrior, with an instinctual understanding of leadership and strategy.  And Maturin, treated by everyone as a harmless eccentric, is eventually shown to be a master spy, fluent in a dozen languages and a cold-blooded killer with sword and pistol.  Aubrey and Maturin are great characters, and they elevate this book to greatness with them.  Their conversations are witty and interesting, and we resent it when they're interrupted by another battle or momentary crisis.

That's why, though marketed as a historical adventure, Master and Commander is much more the story of these two: how they interact with one another and with the war-torn but genteel world around them.  The fighting is often incidental to the plot, dispensed with in a few sentences...though when he wants to, O'Brian can deliver a white-knuckled chase or a roaring battle as well as anyone.  His writing comes across as a sort of widescreen, modernized version of Jane Austen's formalism, combining gritty, bloody reality with arch diction and mordant wit.  Sometimes this leads to odd effects, such as when the word "damned" is written as "d---ed" in one paragraph and the words "fucking arsehole" are left untouched in another.  O'Brian's writing is certainly not without his faults--he glosses over or summarizes conversations and situations that would have been compelling had they been played out, and the book is far too episodic, moving from one incident to the next without enough direction--but it's still wonderfully good, especially once you get past the first hundred pages or so.

This book is a great introduction to a great series by a writer whose stature is only going to grow as time passes.  Do yourself a favor and pick it up now.