Jack's more physical presence." After a nod to the story, they conclude that "the ultimate appeal of the Aubrey/Maturin adventures lies in O'Brian's delicious old-fashioned prose, the wonderfully complex sentences that capture the feel of the sea and the culture of the great warships, all the while sketching with apparent accuracy and truth the early 19th-century world."Publishers Weekly notes that Aubrey is once again a captain in the Royal Navy and "even a rotten-borough M.P." Maturin's stay in the valley "where he blissfully encounters and studies a variety of tame exotic beasts" is called "charming". They mention that the author's writing style has been compared to that of Jane Austen, and praise the wit of guests at "the dinners (in country house, London, ship's mess, sultan's palace, Buddhist monastery)". Thomas Flanagan, writing in the New York Times Books was pleased to have discovered the series of novels by virtue of an essay by Richard Snow, "who roundly and with polemical extravagance declared them to be "the best historical novels ever written." Not quite, perhaps." adding that delayed appreciation of the series of novels "is not exclusively American. The British critic Peter Wishart has described the neglect of Patrick O'Brian as a literary wonder of the age, "as baffling as the Inca inability to invent the wheel." Why all the fuss?" The writing style, structure, and plot are remarked favorably, including many incidents of The Thirteen Gun Salute: "The novels display a dazzling receptiveness to language, an understanding of period speech so entire that it never needs to preen itself -- although here and there it does. There is a recklessness with plot that is intentionally subversive of the genre. Climactic scenes are deliberately thrown away, revealed in casual conversation. The narrative pauses to digress on orangutans in Borneo, the cuisine of Portugal, a Mozart quartet. The twists of plot are swift, drastic, on occasion comic, on occasion grotesque: in this novel, Maturin's way of dealing with two English traitors at the Malay court of Pulo Prabang draws casually and lethally on his knowledge of zoology and his skill as an anatomist." Flanagan concludes that "It is a pleasure to read a contemporary historical novel written not by machine but by hand. Regarding the re-issue of the entire series after publisher W W Norton became interested for the US market, Richard Snow wrote in 1991 that he had read the novels