Patrick O'Brian, author of 33 books including the Aubrey-Maturin series, biography of Pablo Picasso and many more, dies in Dublin at age 85.

By Kitty Holland

Patrick O'Brian, author of some 33 books
including a celebrated Napoleonic
seafaring series, has died in Dublin, aged
85.

The British novelist-historian, whose real
name was Richard Patrick Russ, died
suddenly on Sunday evening in a hotel in
the city centre. He had been staying in
Trinity College over the winter. Mr
O'Brian had lived in a southern French
village, Collioure, with his second wife,
for almost 50 years.

Although best known for the
Aubrey-Maturin series of novels, based
around a collection of seafaring
characters, O'Brian's many novels also
include Testimonies, The Golden Ocean and
The Un- known Shore. He also wrote a
number of short story collections and
biographies of Pablo Picasso and Sir
Joseph Banks, and translated many works
from French.

The Aubrey-Maturin series comprised
some 20 novels and is about Capt Jack
Aubrey RN and the
physician-naturalist-spy Stephen
Maturin, his close friend in the long
struggle against Napoleon.

Though rarely on the bestseller lists, the
series has a devoted following. Mr Sean
McGowan of Waterstone's bookshop in
Dublin said O'Brian's books were very
popular.

O'Brian was born in Chalfont St Peter,
Buckinghamshire, in 1914. He was one of
nine children and his older brother,
Sidney Michael Russ, is thought to have
been the model for his Aubrey character.

Many readers of the series assumed the
half-Irish, half-Catalan Catholic
character, Maturin, was based on the
author himself, O'Brian being assumed by
most to have been half-Irish.

Russ invented his Irish persona. He was of
German origin, the grandson of a Leipzig
furrier.

O'Brian's body will be removed from
Massey's funeral home in the Coombe in
Dublin this morning before being flown
from Shannon to France. He is survived by
his son from his first marriage, Richard
Russ, his second wife, Ms Mary
Tolstoy-Miroslavska, and his stepson,
Nikolai Tolstoy Miroslavska.

He left questioners at sea asked about origins

Best known for his Aubrey-Maturin
seafaring novels, Patrick O'Brian was
in his 80s before critics and a wider
public finally recognised his
greatness, writes Kevin Myers

Patrick O'Brian was the second most
famous non-Irish Irishman this century
after Míchéal Mac Liammóir, and
an incomparably greater talent. Whereas
the latter cloaked his non-Irishness in a
complex web of bravado, fancy and
detailed falsehood, O'Brian hid his origins
behind a fiercely-guarded privacy.

His "Irishness" was alluded to only
vaguely but any question into an
apparently unguarded - but probably
deliberate - aside about, say, his
birthplace in Ballinasloe, would be met
with an often ferocious rebuke.
"Gentlemen do not pry. I do deplore this
modern obsession with questions as a
form of conversation."

His score of novels about the British navy
during the Napoleonic wars constitute
perhaps the mightiest serial literary
achievement of the century. His admirers
up until recently assumed that because
Stephen Maturin, the Irish physician
whose exploits as a naval surgeon,
intelligence agent and naturalist provided
one of the most captivating continuities in
the series, was so closely modelled on
O'Brian himself, the two must necessarily
share the same primary characteristics,
including nationality.

It was the impression that O'Brian sought
elliptically to promote: and it was an
artful deceit which survived intact for
decades.

Patrick O'Brian was as much as an
invention of the author as were the
glorious characters with which he filled
his 20 naval novels. Though he was
attached to all his literary creations, the
two characters who most engaged his
interest - and the book-buying public -
were Jack Aubrey, the English sea
captain, and Stephen Maturin.

It was not merely O'Brian's erudition and
his brilliant writing skills which make
these novels such a triumph: it was his
study of male friendship, through war,
financial disaster and even love for the
same woman, which early on began to
captivate a small but loyal band of
readers who for years assured him of a
modest income.

After service with the undercover British
Special Operations Executive during the
war - or so it appeared in his own
carefully elliptical conversational
allusions - Richard Patrick Russ, son of
an engineer, changed his name by deed
poll to Patrick O'Brian. He lived with his
second wife, Mary, for a while in Wales
before moving to Collioure in France. He
wrote artful but largely unread novels
and short stories and survived through his
translations of Henri Barbusson's Papillon
and the works of Simone de Beauvoir.

Even with the publication of of the first of
the Aubrey-Maturin novels, Master and
Commander, in 1970, his income was
small.

His writing style was unique. He would
write one page with one hand, the next
with the other, in immaculate
fountain-pen calligraphy. He and Mary
would discuss the resulting text over
lunch and under her supervision he would
produce the compromise draft in the
afternoon. In the evening, they would
drink their own wine and listen to music,
of which, like Aubrey and Maturin, he had
a prodigious knowledge.

He had not intended Master and
Commander to be the start of a series;
but at least he had not performed a
Reichenbach Falls on either of his two
characters, so that, prompted by a small
critical success, he could quite plausibly
write a second, Post Captain, and then a
third, HMS Surprise - this last standing
alone as one of the great works of fiction
in the past half century.

As the series unfolded over the decades,
he was ignored both by serious critics
and by the broader reading public,
presumably because both groups assumed
he was no more than a highbrow C.S.
Forester. It is true his novels are
intensely and technically nautical, often
involving thrilling sea chases and battles,
but of far greater importance are their
other ingredients: marvellous humour,
astonishing scholarship and wise
observations about the human condition.

He also wrote two substantial but largely
ignored biographies of Picasso and the
naturalist and intelligence agent Joseph
Banks.

Finally, in his 80s, his greatness as a
novelist was generally accepted by critic
and public alike. He was truly a born
storyteller, and Patrick O'Brian was the
greatest of all his literary creations.

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