It wasn’t all that many years ago that Patrick O’Brian’s novels were unknown in this country: Richard Snow’s 1991 review of the “The Far Side of the World” is generally credited with creating the U.S. market from nothing. The later novels ended up bestsellers, and the series as a whole is a profit-machine for publishers. Each Father’s Day and Christmas brings a new companion or illustrated volume to be coveted and make the shelves groan.

This season will be particularly expensive for O’Brian fans. Not only has the typescript of the three chapters of his unfinished 21st novel been published with a facsimile of the manuscript, but all 20 of the Aubrey/Maturin novels have been bound into a uniform five-volume edition (W.W. Norton, 6,540 pages, $150 – though the price will rise to $175 after December 31). The set – which includes the three chapters of “21” as well as Mr. Snow’s afterword – comes in a slipcase and is handsomely decorated with Geoff Hunt’s painting of Horatio Nelson’s first flagship, the HMS Agamemnon, leading a squadron in the Mediterranean.

This is the sort of treatment befitting a Fitzgerald, a Hemingway, a Proust, and some readers may feel it more than the O’Brian oeuvre can bear. I think not. The Aubrey/Maturin novels may be dismissable as mere historical fictions, but then the two finest novels in English of the 19th century were both “historical” novels: “Middlemarch” and “Vanity Fair.” Any form of literature can rise to the level of art through great craft, and this transformation is what O’Brian managed with the historical novel of the Napoleonic Wars.

To bring in a more accurate literary parallel, the Aubrey/Maturin novels are the reverse of the Austen coin. The Wentworth, Crofts, and Eliots of “Persuasion” would be at home in any O’Brian novel, and Aubrey and Maturin visit their share of Kellynch Halls, Uppercross Cottages, and Lyme Regises. When I first read the 20 novels, I waited in vain for Frederick Wentworth and his HMS Laconia to make an appearance. The Austen family was intimately involved with the Navy – two of Jane’s brothers rose to become admirals – and O’Brian give us a sense of the naval life that is in the background of Austen’s novels. He also had an artful style that I am in no way ashamed to liken to Jane the Great’s. The joy of the Aubrey/Maturin books is not just the accuracy of the depiction of naval life or the thrilling ship actions, but the slow drama of shipboard life and courtship on land, the doses of natural history and chamber music, the intricacy of the workings of naval intelligence, the travelogue of the 19th-century world, the descriptions of all manner of food and all types of manners. In the end, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin are too of the most-rounded characters I know in literature, akin to the greatest figures of “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina.”

Over the years, I’ve come to think of all the Aubrey/Maturin books as a single long novel. I can’t quite remember in exactly which volume any event took place. O’Brian’s habit was to leave the story finished but unsettled at the end of each book; the next would pick up with the details that followed the dramatic denouement. To have them flowing from one to the next in the bound set seems right.

The new Norton volumes are neat and trim and can comfortably be taken on train, plane, or shipboard. The text has been reset in a typeface that reads well. The volumes remind me decidedly of the Library of America – same trim size; similar light, opaque paper; matching boards and spine markings.

I’ve just shelved this fabulous quintet, and not amongst my books of naval history – where my old, worn paperbacks reside. The uniform Aubrey/Maturin sits perfectly near my Chapman edition of the Austen novels, matching sets of the Barsetshire and Palliser novels, and editions of Kilvert, Woodforde, and Evelyn. Four years after his death, Patrick O’Brian has found his home waters.