Only the faithful few who have been with us since the start can be aware that the editorial collective here at t&p are loyal fans of Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. You’re either on the boat or off it as far as these books go, and we are most definitely onboard. Those of you who man the larboard rail with us do not need preaching to: you would have shared with us the sense of melancholy that arrived when O’Brian died four years ago at the ripe age of 85.

There must be a word somewhere to express exactly that strain of melancholy: a loyal reader’s awareness that the death of a favorite author also means the death of his fictional creations; notwithstanding the fact that, in the parallel narrative universe that they inhabit, they are still in the prime of their seafaring lives (and if any language includes such a word I will lay odds that it is Japanese, where it might sometimes be found hanging out in sorrowful sentences with its like-minded emotional kin, words such as shibui, wabi sabi, and bimyou…)

Of course there are exceptions: Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the prime example of the extraordinary vitality that some fictional personalities exhibit post-mortem. James Bond was given an extension to his double-ought lifespan by several hired guns (Kingsley Amis among them). And Babar has had more posthumous jungle adventures than he did while his creator was still alive. So Aubrey and Maturin might yet defeat Napoleon; but I doubt that they will ever sail as surely without O’Brian at the helm.

In the meantime, though, there is one final, fragmentary voyage for us true fans. It is probably publisher’s greed — the Christmas buying season! — as much as anything else behind the recent release of The Final Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey (or 21 as the American edition prefers). I’d never bothered collecting the earlier volumes: the library was just fine as a reading-copy source, so I simply put in a reserve when I first heard of the book’s publication.

It came in at last a few days ago, on a 14-day loan; which means that there are others out their (im)patiently waiting for their turn. And yet despite the short loan period I found myself dithering for several days before diving in. This is because I know that, once this book is over, that will be it forever: no more overheard strains of cello and violin from the aftercabin, no more of Killick’s toasted cheese.

Reading another book from an ongoing series provides the reader with an odd juxtuposition of the familiar and the unknown: we set sail into the pages of new, never-before visited chapters in the company of well-known characters who still exhibit all the tics and quirks that had first brought them to life. I knew I’d miss them when it was finally over so I held off, reading around the text to whet my appetite instead.

In the Foreword William Waldegrave expresses his delight at the “unexpected adjectives” that caught his eye in 21: “improbable quantities of port”, a “shameless wombat”; he recalls an earlier adventure where the characters encountered oxen that are still his “favorite oxen in literature”. In the Afterword Richard Snow describes the world that O’Brian brought to life for modern readers in the course of the 20 previous books:

a world warmed and clouded by sea-coal fire, rationalized and tormented by the architects of the Enlightenment, fed salvers of steaming offal washed down with suicidal quantities of claret and port, and defended by hundreds of seaborne towns whose elders’ grasp of mathematics, physics, ballistics, and meteorology was all that stood between the residents and extinction.

There is one benefit to an unfinished manuscript: readers can speculate to their heart’s content about the way it might have ended. Waldegrave proposes in a lovely phrase that “perhaps Burmese adventures lie without too much anachronism to the east”. We’ll never know.