The Yellow Admiral (Volume Book 18) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)

Starred review from October 14, 1996
As befits a popular and enduring fictional hero, Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy is besieged on all sides in the 18th installment of O'Brian's splendid 19th-century historical adventure series (The Commodore, etc.). Jack is fighting expensive, possibly ruinous, legal battles with slavers, as well as with rich landowners trying to enclose common lands around his family estate. He must also deal with a Navy superior with a financial interest in the enclosure, who is trying to wreck Jack's career. (If a captain becomes an admiral without a command he is "in the cant phrase... yellowed"). Jack, on blockade duty off Brittany, frets that the impending peace will indeed yellow him; and he's also in for some rough marital weather with his wife, Sophie. Meanwhile, the series' other hero, Irish-Catalan physician Stephen Maturin, who's Jack's best friend, connects in "the dark of the moon" with Chilean independence leaders who may hire Jack to head their own young navy. O'Brian is at the top of his elegant form here. He offers a wealth of sly humor (Navy officers' talk is "really not fit for mixed company because of its profoundly nautical character"), some splendid set pieces (a bare-knuckle boxing match, lively sea actions), characters who are palpably real and, as always, lapidary prose. This is splendid storytelling from a true master. Major ad/promo.

June 15, 1996
In this sequel to The Commodore, Jack Aubrey gratefully leaves behind his messy life ashore to pursue Napoleon, who has escaped from Gibraltar.

September 15, 1996
In this intriguing sequel to his best-seller "The Commodore," O'Brian once again reunites Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend, surgeon Stephen Maturin. As the novel opens, Maturin returns from the Continent on an intelligence mission to find Aubrey in trouble on several fronts. Now a member of Parliament, Aubrey is resented by former friends who have been disappointed with votes he has cast. Debts and a land squabble nag at him. But his worst difficulties concern a possible promotion. Past exploits have made him a sailor of note, but naval politics and the threat of imminent peace may work to make him a dreaded "yellowed" admiral: he'll hold the rank but won't actually command a ship. Meanwhile, he and Maturin are sent out to battle the French, at which point a new round of personal and professional troubles descends. Fans of O'Brian's previous novels will find themselves well rewarded. ((Reviewed Sept. 15, 1996))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1996, American Library Association.)