Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin maintain their long-established characteristics in this novel, well known to readers of the series, and they continue to show the effects of age even though Patrick O'Brian has allowed them to live through the year 1812 several times over. Jack is a confident, experienced, and courageous naval commander more at home in a ship than at his estate or in Parliament; Stephen is a model practitioner of early nineteenth-century medicine who indulges his passion for natural history (especially birds) and coca leaves, who speaks numerous useful languages, and who volunteers his services to the naval intelligence department in order to bring down the hated tyrant Napoleon Bonaparte.

Jack Aubrey has risen in rank throughout the series (and been expelled from the service once, in The Reverse of the Medal, 1986) to the point that he is now appointed not just to the command of a...