His speech had the fluency and precision of an educated man for whom English is not his native language. (p.86)
Bad
This is a bad, bad book. Why? Well, let’s start with the ludicrous plot, cardboard characters and almost unreadable style.
Plot
A muslim fanatic named Morro has concocted an evil conspiracy: he has kidnapped the top nuclear physicists in America along with half a dozen technicians, and been stealing or buying uranium on the black market. He and his gang are holed up in a Xanadu-style millionaire’s castle built high in the Sierra Nevadas. The final step in the setup is to break into the San Ruffino nuclear reactor, steal nuclear waste and kidnap half a dozen staff who are carried off to the remote castle.
One of the hostages is Susan, wife of renowned tough LA cop, Sergeant Ryder. Guess what, he’s a maverick who does thing his own way, rubs the authorities up the wrong way but always gets the job done. And his son, Jeff, is also a cop. When they hear their wife/mother has been kidnapped they tender their resignations to the corrupt chief of police they call Fatso, and go independent to track down the gang. Not that independent, as they acquire the grudging help of the FBI, although they go way outside the law, severely beating the aforementioned (it’s catching) corrupt police chief and then the local crooked judge (who they handcuff in bed naked with his ‘secretary’ and photograph).
It’s a two-track plot: on the one hand Ryder and his son are pursuing leads via his crooked boss, the corrupt judge, investigating the head of security at San Ruffino who turns out to have shady links, all the time trying to figure out where Susan is being held. Parallel to this we are shown the situation in the mountain hideout where the hostages are treated with the courtesy, fine wine and indulgent smiles of the psychopath baddie we’re familiar with from a thousand Bond movies and pale copies. ‘Ah, Professor Aachen, I am so glad you could join us’ etc. And shown the laboratory and workshop where the scientists and technicians have been tortured into building working hydrogen bombs.
Hydrogen bombs!
Morro’s plan is to detonate one off the California coast, causing most of it to fall into the sea and the rest to be submerged in a monster tsunami.
Can Ryder and his son track down and neutralise Morro and his gang before they can carry out this plan?
I didn’t care. I was surprised by how little I cared. Partly because I felt I was reading the novelisation of a really low-budget 1970s disaster movie, cross-bred with the terrible American TV series of the period like CHiPs (1977-83).
Styleless
But most of all because MacLean’s prose style has become insufferably opinionated, long-winded, unfunnily ironic and facetious.
About ten minutes before ten Jeff switched on the TV. The screen showed a bluish-tinged stretch of extremely unprepossessing desert, so unattractive a spectacle that the commentator was trying – and making extremely heavy weather of it – to compensate by an intense and breathless account of what was taking place, a gallant and foredoomed effort as nothing whatsoever was taking place. (p.301)
LeWinter was at home and had the look of a man who didn’t intend to leave it. If he was informed by the spirit of joie de vivre and goodwill towards his fellow man he was concealing it well. (p.326)
The police had made a record number of arrests of hoodlums whose greed in taking advantage of this unprecedented opportunity had quite overcome their sense of self-preservation and were still looting away with gay abandon when policemen with drawn guns had taken a rather less than paternal interest in their activities. (p.405)
Burnett began to swear, with a fervour and singular lack of repetition that showed clearly that a considerable part of his education must have been spent in fields other than the purely academic, remembered that he was in the presence of ladies, reached for the Glenfiddich and fell silent. (p.417)
It is impossible to really enter the spirit of a book, to enjoy it, let alone be gripped by it, when you are reminded on every page that the author is a twerp.
First or third person
The Wikipedia entry on Alistair MacLean divides his 30 or so novels into four groups: the fourth and by far the worst phase starts in 1973 with the terrible The Road To Dusty Death, and continues through the next 11 novels, including this one, to his death in 1987.
An obvious feature of all of them is they are all told in the third person – by an omniscient narrator. When MacLean’s lumpen jokiness and heavy irony was contained in the voice of the protagonist himself, being ironic at his own expense, it was generally shorter and more bearable: it genuinely lightened moments of stress. But when that heavy irony and facetiousness is deployed by the creator against his own creations, when the author lets you know that he finds his own story and characters laughable and predictable (‘it was, inevitably, x’, ‘he was, predictably, y’, ‘it took no great intelligence to realise z’), the believability of the whole text evaporates.
And a third-person narrator has the fatal opportunity to crap on at greater length, much greater length, than a first-person narrator. The first person narrators of his classic thrillers of the 1960s are generally in a tearing hurry. They are doing stuff. The switch to third part narrator accompanies a switch to a more leisurely approach, as the narrator now regards everything from a lofty, and loftily satirical, point of view.
MacLean’s would-be humour works OK in the first person, and in small doses, but becomes clumsy and crass when translated into the third person.
America, like England, has much more than its fair share of those people in the world who choose not to conform to the status quo. They are the individualists who pursue their own paths, their own beliefs, their own foibles and what are commonly regarded as their own irrational peculiarities with a splendid disregard, leavened only with a modicum of kindly pity and sorrow and benign resignation, for those unfortunates who are not as they are, the hordes of faceless conformists amongst whom they are forced to move and have their being. Some few of those individualists, confined principally to those who pursue the more esoteric forms of religions of their own inventions, try sporadically to lead the more gullible of the unenlightened along the road that leads to the ultimate revelation: but basically, however, they regard the unfortunate conformists as being sadly beyond redemption and are resigned to leaving them to wallow in the troughs of their ignorance while they follow the meandering highways and byways of their own chosen life-style, oblivious of the paralleling motorways that carry the vast majority of blinkered mankind. They are commonly known as eccentrics. (p.80)
If a character spouted this gibberish as his personal opinion, it might be a tad more acceptable, it could be taken as throwing light on the character, necessarily partial, and it would probably have been kept a lot shorter. But this lumpish, badly-written rubbish opens an early chapter, supposedly setting the scene and tone of the work. And because it is the narrator talking, he can write at whatever length he wants. There are numerous long, wearily facetious passages like this. It is the tone of the novel. It just makes you think the author is a berk.
When the first person narrator of his classic thrillers was piecing the jigsaw together we shared his burning urgency, lives were at stake, think, man, think! I’ve never read novels which grip you so tight by the throat and don’t let go. But the transition to the third person narrator destroys the tension, because the narrator airily transports you to the baddies hideout, taking you round the setup, explaining how it’s all been done and what the plan is – and making poor Ryder’s investigations seem pathetic and pointless. Destroying the tension, erasing interest.
Characters
In a related problem, the last phase novels all have large casts. When events are seen from one person’s point of view they tend to have a narrow focus of friends (one or two key allies) and foes. This novel has over forty named characters and I was frequently confused about who was who. The maverick cop. His wife held hostage by the evil baddies (think Die Hard without the style). His daughter pops up for a scene. His son. His corrupt boss. The rotten judge. The local sheriff who gets assassinated. The overworked FBI man. The pal on the local newspaper. The unflappable, civilised, psychopath baddie. His 6-foot-6 man-mountain number two. Some good cops. Some bad cops. Harassed head of nuclear reactor. Five kidnapped nuclear scientists. Six kidnapped technicians. Morro’s hired psycho who enjoys torturing them. And so on…
America
Like Breakheart Pass, The Golden Gate and Seawitch this is another book set in America, and the trans-Atlantic move is somehow, along with the other factors listed above, connected with the collapse of MacLean’s writing. America was where the audience, the money, the movies were, so… that’s where MacLean set his novels.
America in the 1970s had a taste for cheap disaster movies (1974 alone saw The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Hurricane, Trapped Beneath the Sea etc), so… MacLean bent to prevailing fashion and wrote a nuclear blast-catastrophic earthquake-tsunami disaster novel…
And it’s a stinker.
Related links
The first 22 Alistair MacLean novels
1955 HMS Ulysses – war story about a doomed Arctic convoy.
1957 The Guns of Navarone – war story about commandos who blow up superguns on a Greek island.
1957 South by Java Head – a motley crew of soldiers, sailors, nurses and civilians endure a series of terrible ordeals in their bid to escape the pursuing Japanese forces.
1959 The Last Frontier – secret agent Michael Reynolds rescues a British scientist from communists in Hungary.
1959 Night Without End – Arctic scientist Mason saves plane crash survivors from baddies who have stolen a secret missile guidance system.
1961 Fear is the Key – government agent John Talbot defeats a gang seeking treasure in a crashed plane off Florida.
1961 The Dark Crusader – counter-espionage agent John Bentall defeats a gang who plan to hold the world to ransom with a new intercontinental missile.
1962 The Golden Rendezvous – first officer John Carter defeats a gang who hijack his ship with a nuclear weapon.
1962 The Satan Bug – agent Pierre Cavell defeats an attempt to blackmail the government using a new supervirus.
1963 Ice Station Zebra – MI6 agent Dr John Carpenter defeats spies who have secured Russian satellite photos of US missile bases, destroyed the Arctic research base of the title and nearly sink the nuclear sub sent to rescue them.
1966 When Eight Bells Toll – British Treasury secret agent Philip Calvert defeats a gang who have been hijacking ships carrying bullion off the Scottish coast.
1967 Where Eagles Dare
1968 Force 10 From Navarone The three heroes from Guns of Navarone parachute into Yugoslavia to blow up a dam and destroy two German armoured divisions.
1969 Puppet on a Chain – Interpol agent Paul Sherman battles a grotesquely sadistic heroin-smuggling gang in Amsterdam.
1970 Caravan to Vaccarès – British agent Neil Bowman foils a gang of gypsies who are smuggling Russian nuclear scientists via the south of France to China.
1971 Bear Island – Doctor Marlowe deals with a spate of murders aboard a ship full of movie stars and crew heading into the Arctic Circle.
1973 The Way to Dusty Death – World number one racing driver Johnny Harlow acts drunk and disgraced in order to foil a gang of heroin smugglers and kidnappers.
1974 Breakheart Pass – The Wild West, 1873. Government agent John Deakin poses as a wanted criminal in order to foil a gang smuggling guns to Injuns in the Rockies and planning to steal government gold in return.
1975 Circus – The CIA ask trapeze genius Bruno Wildermann to travel to an unnamed East European country, along with his circus, and use his skills to break into a secret weapons laboratory.
1976 The Golden Gate – FBI agent Paul Revson is with the President’s convoy when it is hijacked on the Golden Gate bridge by a sophisticated gang of crooks who demand an outrageous ransom. Only he – and the doughty doctor he recruits and the pretty woman journalist -can save the President!
1977 – Seawitch – Oil executives hire an unhinged oil engineer, Cronkite, to wreak havoc on the oil rig of their rival, Lord Worth, who is saved by his beautiful daughter’s boyfriend, an ex-cop and superhero.
1977 – Goodbye California – Deranged muslim fanatic, Morro, kidnaps nuclear physicists and technicians in order to build atomic bombs which he detonates a) in the desert b) off coastal California, in order to demand a huge ransom. Luckily, he has also irritated maverick California cop, Ryder – by kidnapping his wife – so Ryder tracks him down, disarms his gang and kills him.
Books & Boots 