SOURCE: “An Eighteenth-Century Voice,” in Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 276, July, 1995, pp. 92–96.

In the following mixed review, Powers argues that The Commodore is not as impressive as the earlier books in the Aubrey/Maturin series, but the novel is still better than most contemporary fiction.

The noise accompanying the publication this spring of The Commodore, the seventeenth novel in Patrick O'Brian's Napoleonic naval-war series, demonstrates that this ancient Irishman, long the object of reverence for a small, fanatically devoted sect, is now the center of a booming industry. And yet there remain cautious readers who would not consider taking up one of these volumes, believing them to be no more than deep-dish costume dramas.

“What I hadn't understood, when I began these things,” O'Brian says, “was what a depraved genre it is in the general mind. It had never occurred to me that to shift the scene of a novel...