It's dry in the sense the same sense Jane Austen's fiction is dry: it spends a lot of time chronicling the everyday minutiae of a bygone era. But whereas Austen

It's dry in the sense the same sense Jane Austen's fiction is dry: it spends a lot of time chronicling the everyday minutiae of a bygone era. But whereas Austen was writing about her contemporaries, O'Brian does so at a remove of two centuries. As a literary and research achievement it's just .. stunning. I re-read this series at least once every decade, and each time my awe over what he has managed to accomplish in these books somehow increases. There is an old NYT book review (https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/06/books/an-author-i-d-walk-the-plank-for.html https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/06/books/an-author-i-d-walk-...) that expresses it better than I can.