The bumf at the front of this book explains that when Innes’ previous novel, The Lonely Skier, was made into a movie, Snowbound (1948), the income from that film gave him the financial freedom to fulfil his dream of travelling, ideally by yacht. One of his first destinations was Norway, where he travelled much of the territory which features in this novel. His first-hand knowledge is evident in the very detailed descriptions: of the yacht they sail in, the whaling station they stop at, of the glacier and mountains they climb and ski across in the long snow-bound chase which is the climax of the book.

A mystery

This is another first-person narration: ‘Big’ Bill Gansert has been for eight years Base Metals and Industry (BM&I)’s production chief at their alloy plant in Birmingham. During that time he had opened a nickel mine in Canada, and helped BM&I develop a new lightweight alloy from thorite although sources in the States were so meagre, he’d been forced to abandon it. The story opens as he’s quit BM&I to go sailing in the Mediterranean in his yacht, Diviner. But at the last minute he is persuaded by BM&I’s chairman, Sir Clinton Mann, to change his plans and go to Norway because of a mystery.

The mystery is that Sir Clinton has been sent a great chunk of thorite from Norway, wrapped in whale blubber with a note apparently signed by one George Farnell. Everyone thought Farnell was dead. He was a leading metallurgist before the war but in 1939 was convicted of defrauding his business partner for £10,000 in order, he said, to fund mineralogical expeditions to Norway. Convicted and sent to prison, Farnell managed to escape his escort and flee the country.

Now, recent Norwegian newspapers reveal that he fled to Norway where he adopted a new identity and became a hero in the anti-Nazi resistance but that his dead body has just been found as if fallen from a notorious glacier in the central mountains. Gansert had known Farnell from a spell working together in Rhodesia, and he knew Farnell knew those mountains better than any Norwegian. Could his death have been foul play? Why?

Hooked by this mystery – and tempted by the apparent discovery of a new source of thorite – Gansert then discovers Sir Clinton had cheekily put an advert in the papers saying he was sailing to Norway, before the decision was even finalised, asking anyone with information about Farnell to come and see him at the yacht’s berth by the Tower of London.

With the result that a motley crew of four strangers arrives on his yacht, each in their way curious about Farnell. To sort it all out Gansert, in cavalier fashion, simply casts off and sets sail for Norway with them all aboard, with no warning. They are allowed to cable their companies or hotels but most accept it meekly and settle down to the three-day sail to Norway. And along the way we get to know more about each of the characters, their (sometimes poisonous) relations among each other, and with the deceased Farnell.

These characters are described in the Dramatis personae below.

There is some drama caused by poisonous enmities aboard such a small yacht, but the real action starts when Gansert arrives at the whaling station, Bovaagen Hval, where Farnell’s message and sample of thorite appear to have been sent from. How could it have been sent on the 9th and yet his body discovered on a glacier miles away on the 10th? Is he actually dead or faking it somehow? But why?

The Innes voice

To be honest, Gansert’s voice is pretty much the same as every Innes hero, tough, resourceful, mature, well-travelled, but also puzzled, blocked, feeling his way in the dark, trying to formulate a plan, solve the problem. But always indomitable. Fundamentally unsinkable. He never gives up. We are safe in his hands, in the tense but ultimately comforting cradle of the narrative. Not least because all these narratives start out by explaining that they are being written after the successful conclusion of the case. We know the author survives. Because of this no amount of jeopardy really scares us; all the novels carry this underlying reassurance.

The plot thickens

Once the crew arrive in Norway more characters join the chase, notably the fat, jolly, untrustworthy whaling captain Lovaas. He it is who captures a a man trying to hide under a false identity on his whaling boat and turns round to return him to the whaling station where the other characters are waiting. They think he is Hans Schreuder, supposed witness to Farnell’s death.

But Schreuder eludes them all by jumping overboard then disappearing in thick fog. As they steam back after failing to find him, they notice a crew of divers operating from a boat not so far away and suspicion falls on them. So much so that it becomes a chase to track down the main diver, Sunde, down, and our heroes grab him at gunpoint from Lovaas’s crew, and whisk him off in the yacht to interrogate him: Who was Schreuder? Why was he so scared he jumped into the freezing sea? Why is Sunde so nervous? Did he have some arrangement to pick up and hide Schreuder? Where is Schreuder now?

Finding the answers to these questions takes Gansert further into the Norwegian coastline, up the mountains to the glacier of blue ice, deep into the treacherous legacy of the Nazi occupation of Norway which still casts a long shadow, and finally into a long agonising chase across icy mountain heights to track down the man who has the key to all the questions.

Thrillers carry wartime mentality into peacetime

These first post-War novels are heavy with its legacy: blackmailed deserters in Killer Mine; Nazi gold in Lonely Skier; Russian silver in Maddon’s Rock; the bitterness between Nazi collaborators and resistors in Blue Ice. Tending to confirm the theory I developed in reading Alistair MacLean, that the modern thriller carries the violence, tension, excitement and absurdity of wartime into peacetime situations. Thrillers are like the outbreaks of miniature wars, accompanied by all their corollaries – sudden violence, desperate situations, strangers thrown together, horrible deaths.

After shooting the man who had them at gunpoint in the high mountain saeter, Sunde, the diver who turns out to be a veteran of the Norwegian resistance, comments:

‘Anybody’d fink we was at war again.’… To Sunde this was just one more man killed up in these mountains. This was the sort of thing he’d been doing all through the war. (p.176)

Quite.

In the end of The Blue Ice there isn’t a direct clash between goodies and baddies, between collaborators and resistance. In the end different parties all with something at stake converge on a skiing-climbing chase of the missing man, for hours and hours, climbing snowy  mountainsides, skiing down them, blundering across glaciers, with shoot-outs in isolated mountain huts. When the climax comes it is tragi-comic, accidental, absurd, and the narrator struggles at the end of the book to make sense of Farnell’s obsession and achievement.

Love interest

And all the time Gansert, exactly like Innes’ previous heroes, is slowly falling in love with the only nubile woman in the drama, 26 year-old Jill Somers, tall, active, a proficient sailor. She had had a brief fling with Farnell, but adversity brings her and Garsent conveniently closer together.

She looked cold and remote and delicately lovely in her navy blue ski suit and red socks and scarf. Red woollen gloves lay on the floor at her feet. She was the sort of girl that never let up once she had decided on something. (p.195)

There are some amusingly sexist moments which would give a modern feminist fits, like when he despatches her to the galley to fix the meals, something all the rest of the crew and she herself take for granted. But in among the lovey-dovey stuff, there’s an interesting exchange about the difference between men and women:

‘You, for instance. Have you never been in love?’
‘Many times,’ I answered.
‘But not really. Not so that it was more important than anything else.?’
‘No,’ I said.
Her hands suddenly tightened on mine so that I could feel her nails biting into my palm. ‘Why?’ she cried softly. ‘Why? Tell me why? What is there more important?’
I didn’t know how to answer her. ‘Excitement,’ I said. ‘The excitement of living, of pitting one’s wits against everyone else.’
‘Meaning a wife is an encumbrance?’
‘For some men – yes.’ (p.132)

‘The excitement of living’. That’s not a bad summary of Innes’ thrillers. Far-fetched though most of the plots are, and a bit too reliant on madmen to provide the narrative drive, nonetheless the books are filled with plenty of incidental moments which convey the beauty of the natural world and the sheer joy of being alive in it, of swimming, sailing, skiing, rejoicing in the wonder of existence.

Mad Innes baddies

• The Trojan Horse  – Nazi spy Max Sedel
• Wreckers Must Breathe – the frothing Gestapo man
• The Killer Mine – old man Manack who kills almost everyone
• The Lonely Skier – the maniac who stole Gilbert Mayne’s identity and tries to kill everyone
• Maddon’s Rock – mad Captain Halsey kills one ship’s crew and most of another
• The Blue Ice – obsessed mineralogist George Farnell
• The White South – mad Erik Bland who rams our hero’s ship and mad Dr Howe who gets his revenge

In fact the women, the heroines of these stories, although clothed in 1940s/50s attitudes, stand out as pretty much as tough as the men (and a lot less bonkers). Maybe not physically as strong, but as skilled and brave and resolute.

Strong Innes women

• The Trojan Horse – Freya Schmidt, sailor.
• Wreckers Must Breathe – Maureen Craig, feisty journalist.
• The Killer Mine – Kitty Manack, strong swimmer.
• The Lonely Skier – the countess is a strong feisty woman, if not the love interest
• Maddon’s Rock – Jenny Sorrell
• The Blue Ice – Jill Somers

Jenny Sorrell in Maddon’s Rock and Jill Somers here are both very capable sailors (as is Freya Schmidt) and it is no accident that it is at sea, in the freedom of a boat on water, that these relationships blossom. Innes writes with tremendous gusto about physical activity. There is energy and vim in his descriptions of the natural world and especially of his favourite means of seeing it, from a sailing boat.

Sailing

Innes was a very experienced sailor and it shows. A large part of Maddon’s Rock describes in great detail the journey by yacht to the cursed rock. Here, about two-thirds of the text describe the journey of the Diviner from Tower Bridge, down the Thames and up the North Sea, along the Norwegian coast and then into the fjords.

Innes’ writing about sailing combines technical detail with poetic description. The combination of experience and deep feeling behind these passages goes a long way to help make the sometimes implausible plots seem much more realistic, urgent, convincing.

As soon as [Jill] had relieved Dick, I called to Carter and we got the mainsail up. The canvas cracked as the boom slatted to and fro in the weird red and green glow of the navigation lights on either side of the chartroom. As soon as peak and throat purchases were made fast and the weather back-stay set up I had the engine stopped and I ordered Jill Somers to steer up Barrow Deep on course north fifty-two east. The mainsail filled as the ship heeled and swung away. In an instant we had picked up way and the water was seething past the lee rail. By the time we had set jib, stays’l and mizzen the old boat was going like a train, rocking violently as she took the steep seas in a corkscrew movement that brought the water gurgling in the scuppers at each plunge. (p.36)

The machine of grab

Innes used this phrase in an earlier book and now again, here.

Nothing to Jorgensen was a man who had no power over other men. Power was what he loved more than anything. Power over men, possibly women, too. The sleek smoothness of the man! Even in borrowed clothes he achieved a kind of bourgeois respectability. And yet behind it all was this violent delight in power. It was there in his eyes, in the quick, down-drawn frown of his thick eyebrows. But never exposed, never revealed. The iron claw in the velvet gloves. I’d seen it all my life. This man belonged to the ranks of the controllers of the machine of grab. (p.65)

He is not a socialist as such: the world is full of corporations which his heroes work for with no qualms. He is not as overtly anti-Big Business as Ambler. But he dislikes the greed and power-lust which so often hide behind the veneer of bourgeois respectability.

And his heroes are regularly outsiders, lawbreakers. Jim Pryce in Killer Mine is a deserter; Jim Vardy in Maddon’s Rock is convicted of mutiny; George Farnell in this novel is an ‘ex-convict, swindler, forger, deserter, murderer’ and yet the hero of the story, a man whose artist’s passion for minerals redeems him.

Prolepsis/anticipation

As usual the text is sprinkled with ominous anticipations of doom, or at least bad events which the text foreshadows. To build tension and anticipation. To underpin the idea that this is a chronicle set down in peace and quiet after it is all over, ie the author knows what the final outcome will be.

The fat, jovial voice with the sing-song intonation of Eastern Norway had left me with the impression of a big man – a big man who enjoyed life and was also a rogue. I was to get to know that voice too well in the days that followed. But I was never to revise my first impression. (p.69)

These anticipations colour our perception – of the individuals or moments to which they’re attached – but also confirm the author’s authority as master of his narrative.

His air of command had taken me by surprise. Before the next few hours were out Alf Sunde was to give me several surprises. (p.160)

You English…

Most of Eric Ambler’s pre-War novels set, as they are, abroad and featuring, as they do, many foreign characters, also feature moments where the characters gently laugh at the Englishman’s political naiveté or emotional frigidity. This is also true of Innes’s novels. It happened at a couple of prominent moments in The Lonely Skier and happens in this novel, too. Does it reflect a general view the English held of themselves in the 1930s and 40s? Or is it a convention of the thriller genre that foreigners are allowed their little joke at our expense? Or is it simply inevitable that anyone concocting dialogue for foreigners will at some point slip in one or two jokes about us Brits?

‘You English – you are like bulldogs. You never let go. You can ignore anything and concentrate on the one thing that matters to you.’ [Dahler] (p.56)

Dramatis personae

• ‘Big’ Bill Gansert: for eight years BM&I’s production chief at their alloy plant in Birmingham, developed a nickel mine in Canada, worked with Farnell in southern Rhodesia. Packs it in to go sailing in the Mediterranean but at the last minute is persuaded by
• Sir Clinton Mann: Chairman of BM&I
• George Farnell: aka Bernt Olsen: the missing man, the McGuffin, the motor for the plot. Dark and short and convicted for defrauding his business partner, before escaping and assuming a Norwegian identity and becoming a war hero. BM&I come into possession of a lump of thorite sent wrapped in whale blubber with a quote from Rupert Brooke’s farewell sonnet, The Soldier. What does it mean?
• Bill’s crew
• Dick Everard: 28, tall, freckled, talented Navy captain, demobbed and at a loose end.
• Carter: the quintessential Scottish naval engineer, never happier than tinkering with the engines. ‘Ye dinna ha’ to fash yersel’ aboot the engine, Mr Gansert.’ (p.26)
• Wilson: other crew member
• Visitors
• Jill Somers: 26, tall, active, competent sailor. Daughter of Walter Somers, partner in Petersen and Somers.
• Major Curtis Wright: heavily built, red hair, regular Army. Farnell’s commander at the Malöy Raid, after which Farnell went deliberately awol.
• Dahler: Norwegian, half-paralysed, once owned a fleet of coastal steamers, bitterly hating Jorgensen who he accuses of collaborating with the Nazis. But then Jorgensen accuses Dahler of collaborating with the Nazis.
• Knut Jorgensen: powerful confident CEO of a Norwegian mining company, wants to do a deal with Gansert and BM&I.
• Norwegians
• Captain Lovaas: fat, jolly, untrustworthy whaling captain. Once he realises there’s big money involved he’s prepared to use his harpoon gun against the Diviner if he thinks it will gain advantage.
• Sunde: weak and scared salvage diver, who transforms in the second half of the book into super-capable ex-Resistance fighter, skiier and tracker.
• Kielland: manager of the Bovaagen Hval whaling station who gives our heroes an in-depth tour of the facilities and explanation of the whaling business.
• Hans Schreuder: Austrian Jew who escapes to Norway, collaborates with the Nazis. He enrolled as crew on Lovaas’s boat but was recognised, locked up and escaped just as Gansert came alongside, jumped overboard and disappeared.

Related links

• The Blue Ice on Amazon
• Hammond Innes Wikipedia article
• Independent obituary
• New York Times obituary
• Hammond Innes book covers on the Bear Alley website

Hammond Innes’ novels

1937 The Doppelganger
1937 Air Disaster
1938 Sabotage Broadcast
1939 All Roads Lead to Friday
1940 The Trojan Horse – Barrister Andrew Kilmartin gets involved with an Austrian Jewish refugee engineer whose discovery of a new lightweight alloy which will make lighter, more powerful aircraft engines leads to him being hunted by an extensive and sinister Nazi network which reaches to the highest places in the land. The book features a nailbiting chase through the sewers of London and a last-minute shootout on the Nazi ship.
1940 Wreckers Must Breathe – Journalist Walter Craig stumbles across a secret Nazi submarine base built into a ruined tin mine on the Cornwall coast and, along with local miners and a tough woman journalist, fights his way out of captivity and defeats the Nazis.
1941 Attack Alarm – Gripping thriller based on Innes’ own experience as a Battle of Britain anti-aircraft gunner. Ex-journalist Barry Hanson uncovers a dastardly plan by Nazi fifth columnists to take over his airfield ahead of the big German invasion.

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1946 Dead and Alive – David Cunningham, ex-Navy captain, hooks up with another demobbed naval officer to revamp a ship-wrecked landing craft. But their very first commercial trip to Italy goes disastrously wrong when his colleague, McCrae, offends the local mafia while Cunningham is off tracking down a girl who went missing during the war. A short but atmospheric and compelling thriller.
1947 The Killer Mine Army deserter Jim Pryce discovers dark family secrets at a ruined Cornish mine which is being used as a base by a father-and-son team of smugglers who blackmail him into doing some submarine rock blasting, with catastrophic results.
1947 The Lonely Skier Writer Neil Blair is hired to visit the Dolomite mountains in Italy, supposedly to write a script for film producer Derek Engles, in reality to tip him off when key players in a hunt for Nazi gold arrive at the ski hut in the mountains where – they all think – the missing treasure is buried.
1947 Maddon’s Rock Corporal Jim Vardin, convicted of mutiny at sea and imprisoned in Dartmoor, breaks out to clear his name and seek revenge on the captain and crew who pretended to sink their ship, the Trikkala, but in fact hid it at a remote island in the Arctic circle in order to steal its cargo of silver bullion.
1948 The Blue Ice Mineralogist and industrialist Bill Gansert sails to Norway to discover the truth about the disappearance of George Farnell, a friend of his who knew something about the discovery of a rare metal ore – an investigation which revives complex enmities forged in Norway’s war-time Nazi occupation.
1949 The White South Narrator Duncan Craig becomes mixed up in the disaster of the whaling ship Southern Star, witnessing at first hand the poisonous feuds and disagreements which lead a couple of its small whalecatcher boats to get caught in pack ice, fatally luring the vast factory ship to come to their rescue and also becoming trapped. It then has to evacuate over 400 men, women and children onto the pitiless Antarctic ice where Craig has to lead his strife-torn crew to safety.
1950 The Angry Mountain – Engineering salesman Dick Farrell’s wartime experiences come back to haunt him as he is caught up in a melodramatic yarn about a Czech spy smuggling industrial secrets to the West, with various people from his past pursuing him across Italy towards Naples and Mount Vesuvius, which erupts to form the dramatic climax to the story.
1951 Air Bridge – Bomber pilot fallen on hard times, Neil Fraser, gets mixed up with Bill Saeton and his obsession with building a new type of diesel aero-engine based on a prototype looted from wartime Germany. Saeton is helped by partner Tubby Carter, hindered by Tubby’s sex-mad wife Diana, and spied on by Else, the embittered daughter of the German who originated the designs. The story moves to Germany and the Berlin airlift where Saeton’s obsession crosses the line into betrayal and murder.
1952 Campbell’s Kingdom – Bruce Campbell, given only months to live by his doctors, packs in his boring job in London and emigrates to Canada to fulfil the dream of his eccentric grandfather, to find oil in the barren patch of the Canadian Rockies known as ‘Campbell’s Kingdom’.
1954 The Strange Land – Missionary Philip Latham is forced to conceal the identity of the man who replies to an advert to come and be doctor to a poor community in the south of Morocco. Instead of curing the sick, he finds himself caught up in a quest for an ancient silver mine, a quest which brings disaster to the impoverished community where it is set.
1956 The Wreck of the Mary Deare – Yacht skipper John Sands stumbles across the wreck of the decrepit steamer Mary Deare and into the life of its haggard, obsessive captain, Patch, who is determined to clear his reputation by revealing the owners’ conspiracy to sink his ship and claim the insurance.
1958 The Land God Gave To Cain – Engineer Ian Ferguson responds to a radio plea for help received by his amateur radio enthusiast father, and sets off to the wilds of Labrador, north-east Canada, to see if the survivors of a plane crash in this barren country are still alive – and what lies behind the conspiracy to try and hush the incident up.
1960 The Doomed Oasis – Solicitor George Grant helps young tearaway David Thomas travel to Arabia to find his biological father, the legendary adventurer and oilman Colonel Charles Whitaker, and becomes embroiled in a small Arab war which leads to a siege in an ancient fortress where the rivalry between father and son reaches a tragic conclusion.
1962 Atlantic Fury – Painter Duncan Ross is eyewitness to an appalling naval disaster on an island of the Outer Hebrides. But intertwined with this tragedy is the fraught story of his long-lost brother who has stolen another man’s identity. Both plotlines lead inexorably to the bleak windswept island of Laerg.
1965 The Strode Venturer – Ex-Merchant Navy captain Geoffrey Bailey finds himself drawn into the affairs of the Strode shipping company which aggressively took over his father’s shipping line, thereby ruining his family and driving his father to suicide. Now, 30 years later, he is hired to track down the rogue son of the family, Peter Strode, who has developed an obsession with a new volcanic atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean, whose mineral wealth might be able to help the Maldive Islanders whose quest for independence he is championing.
1971 Levkas Man – Merchant seaman Paul goes to find his father, eccentric archaeologist Pieter Van der Voort, another typical Innes obsessive, this one convinced he can prove his eccentric and garbled theories about the origin of Man, changing Ice Age sea levels, the destruction of Atlantis and so on. Much sailing around the Aegean, feelingly described by Innes, before the climax in a vast subterranean cavern covered in prehistoric rock paintings, in an atmosphere heavy with timeless evil, where his father admits to being a murderer.
1973 Golden Soak – Alec Falls’ mining business in Cornwall goes bust so he fakes his own death and smuggles himself out to Australia to take up an invitation to visit a rancher’s daughter he’d met in England. He finds himself plunged into the mystery and intrigue which surrounds the struggling Jarra Jarra ranch and its failed mine, Golden Soak, a mystery which leads him on a wild chase out into the desolate hell of the Gibson desert where Alec discovers the truth about the mine and the rumours of a vast hill of copper, and witnesses archetypal tragedies of guilt and expiation, of revenge and parricide.
1974 North Star – One-time political agitator and seaman Michael Randall tries and fails to escape his treacherous past as he finds himself embroiled in a plot to blow up a North Sea oil rig, a plot which is led by the father he thought had died decades earlier.
1977 The Big Footprints – TV director Colin Tait finds himself caught up in the one-man war of grizzled African hunter and legendary bushman Cornelius van Delden against his old friend, Alex Kirby-Smith, who is now leading the Kenyan government’s drive to cull the country’s wildlife, especially its elephants, to feed a starving population and clear the way for farmers and their cattle. It’s all mixed up with Tait’s obsessive quest to find a remote mountain where neolithic man was said to have built the first city in the world.
1980 Solomon’s Seal – Property valuer Roy Slingsby prices the contents of an old farmhouse in the Essex countryside and is intrigued by two albums of stamps from the Solomon Islands. He takes up the offer of a valuing job in Australia and finds himself drawn into the tragic history of the colonial Holland family, whose last surviving son is running machine guns to be used in the coup and bid for independence of Bougainville Island. Though so much of the detail is calm, rational and business-like, the final impression is of an accursed family and a fated ancestral house which burns down at the novel’s climax.
1982 The Black Tide – When his wife dies blowing up an oil tanker which has hit the rocks near their Cornwall home, ex-merchant seaman Trevor Rodin goes searching for the crew he thinks deliberately ran her aground. His search takes him to Lloyds of London, to the Nantes home of the lead suspect and then on to the Persian Gulf, where he discovers several ‘missing’ tankers are in fact being repurposed by terrorists planning to create a devastating environmental disaster somewhere on the coast of Europe. With no money or resources behind him, and nobody believing his far-fetched tale, can Rodin prevent the catastrophe?
1985 The High Stand – When gold millionaire Tom Halliday and his wife Miriam go missing, their staid Sussex solicitor Philip Redfern finds himself drawn to the old gold mine in the Canadian Rockies which is the basis of the Halliday fortune, and discovers that the illegal felling of the timber planted around the mine is being used as a front for a gang of international drug smugglers, with violent consequences.
1988 Medusa – Former smuggler turned respectable ex-pat businessman, Mike Steele, finds his idyllic life on the pretty Mediterranean island of Minorca turning very nasty when he gets mixed up with mercenaries running guns onto the island to support a violent separatist movement and military coup.
1991 Isvik – Wood restorer Peter Kettil gets caught up in a crazy scheme to find an old Victorian frigate allegedly spotted locked in the Antarctic ice by a glaciologist before his death in a flying accident. His partners are the nymphomaniac Latino wife of the dead glaciologist, Iris Sunderby, a bizarre Scottish cripple, Iain Ward, and a mysterious Argentine who may or may not have been involved in atrocities under the military junta.
1993 Target Antarctica Sequel to Isvik. Booted out of the RAF for his maverick behaviour, pilot Michael ‘Ed’ Cruse is hired by Iain Ward, the larger-than-life character at the heart of the previous novel, Isvik, to fly a C-130 Hercules plane off a damaged runway on the Antarctic ice shelf. There are many twists, not least with a beautiful Thai woman who is pursued by the Khmer Rouge (!), before in the last few pages we realise the whole thing is Ward’s scheme to extract diamonds from the shallow seabed, whose existence was discovered by the sole survivor of the frigate found in the previous novel.
1996 Delta Connection An astonishing dog’s dinner of a novel, which starts out reasonably realistically following the adventures of Paul Cartwright, scrap metal consultant, in Romania on the very days that communist ruler Nicolae Ceaușescu is overthrown, before moving on to Pakistan and the Khyber Pass where things develop into a violent thriller, before jettisoning any attempt at realism and turning into a sort of homage to Rider Haggard’s adventure stories for boys as Cruse and his gay, ex-Army mentor, battle their way through blizzards into the idyllic valley of Nirvana, where they meet the secret underground descendants of Vikings who long ago settled this land, before almost immediately participating in the palace coup which overthrows the brutal ruler and puts on the throne the young woman who Paul fell in love with as a boy back in Romania, where the narrative started. A convoluted, compelling and bizarre finale to Innes’ long career.