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Title: Not a pleasant experience
Review: While a more than adequate insight into everyday life in the England of George III, this book serves the uninitiated reader of O'Brian's work poorly. Nothing much takes place during the story, and what little as does, takes place offstage, as it were. Characters and events are introduced that lead no where and serve no purpose other than to fill the page. While the real world is often like that, works of art are not the real world, and novels are not documentaries. I was grossly disappointed in this book, as I had read such wonderful things about this series, and I will give O'Brian another chance, but I did not find any charcters other than Aubrey and Maturin to be given any definition, and their characters were more described than shown. Reading The Yellow Admiral (a pretentious title providing no insight into the plot nor encouragement to the reader) was not a pleasant experience.
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