Having survived a long and desperate adventure in the Great South Sea,
Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin return to England to very
different circumstances. For Jack it is a happy homecoming, at least
initially, but for Stephen it is disastrous: his little daughter appears
to be autistic, incapable of speech or contact, while his wife, Diana,
unable to bear this situation, has disappeared, her house being looked
after by the widowed Clarissa Oakes.
Much of The Commodore takes place on land, in sitting rooms and in
drafty castles, but the roar of the great guns is never far from our
hearing. Aubrey and Maturin are sent on a bizarre decoy mission to the
fever-ridden lagoons of the Gulf of Guinea to suppress the slave trade.
But their ultimate destination is Ireland, where the French are mounting
an invasion that will test Aubrey's seamanship and Maturin's
resourcefulness as a secret intelligence agent.
The subtle interweaving of these disparate themes is an achievement of
pure storytelling by one of our greatest living novelists.