Eskişehir, Türkiye
Sunday 21 April 2024
“Greece and the islands of the Aegean Sea have given birth to many myths and legends of war and adventure.
And these once-proud stones, these ruined and shattered temples bear witness to the civilization that flourished and then died here and to the demigods and heroes who inspired those legends on this sea and these islands.
But, though the stage is the same, ours is a legend of our own times, and its heroes are not demigods, but ordinary people.
In 1943, so the story goes, 2,000 British soldiers lay marooned on the tiny island of Kheros, exhausted and helpless.
They had exactly one week to live, for in Berlin the Axis high command had determined on a show of strength in the Aegean Sea to bully neutral Turkey into coming into the war on their side.
The scene of that demonstration was to be Kheros, itself of no military value, but only a few miles off the coast of Turkey.
The cream of the German war machine, rested and ready, was to spearhead the attack, and the men on Kheros were doomed unless they could be evacuated before the blitz.
But the only passage to and from Kheros was guarded and blocked by two great, newly designed, radar-controlled guns on the nearby island of Navarone.
Guns too powerful and accurate for any allied ship then in the Aegean to challenge.
Allied intelligence learned of the projected blitz only one week before the appointed date.
What took place in the next six days became the legend of Navarone.”
(Alistair MacLean, The Guns of Navarone)
Above: Alistair MacLean
Alistair Stuart MacLean (21 April 1922 – 1987) was a Scottish novelist who wrote popular thrillers and adventure stories.
Many of his novels have been adapted to film, most notably The Guns of Navarone (1957) and Ice Station Zebra (1963).
In the late 1960s, encouraged by film producer Elliott Kastner, MacLean began to write original screenplays, concurrently with an accompanying novel.
The most successful was the first of these, the 1968 film Where Eagles Dare, which was also a bestselling novel.
MacLean also published two novels under the pseudonym Ian Stuart.
His books are estimated to have sold over 150 million copies, making him one of the best-selling fiction authors of all time.
According to one obituary:
“He never lost his love for the sea, his talent for portraying good Brits against bad Germans, or his penchant for high melodrama.
Critics deplored his cardboard characters and vapid females, but readers loved his combination of hot macho action, wartime commando sagas, and exotic settings that included Greek Islands and Alaskan oil fields.“
MacLean wrote books, but did he create Literature?
Admiral Garvey: Jim, just how much do you know about Ice Station Zebra?
Cmdr. Ferraday: Just what’s been in the papers, Sir.
Drift Ice Station Zebra:
British civilian weather station over the North Pole.
They’re in some sort of trouble, apparently.
Admiral Garvey: Trouble, yes.
They’ve been sending out distress signals; but, too weak and garbled to make much sense.
Something has gone wrong up there, that’s for sure.
Cmdr. Ferraday: Those men up there must be pretty important.
Admiral Garvey: They’re not the reason you’re going.
They’re just the excuse.
Cmdr. Ferraday: Well then, what is the reason, Sir?
Admiral Garvey: Oh, I can’t tell you that.
But I can tell you this: it is important – vitally.
(Alistair MacLean, Ice Station Zebra)
Alistair Stuart Maclean was born on 21 April 1922 in Shettleston, Glasgow, the third of four sons of a Church of Scotland minister, but spent much of his childhood and youth in Daviot, 10 miles (16 km) south of Inverness.
He spoke only Scottish Gaelic before attending school.
Above: Eastbank Parish Church, Shettleston, Glasgow, Scotland
“You think you’ve been getting away with it all this time, standing by.
Well, son…
Your bystanding days are over!
You’re in it now, up to your neck!
They told me that you’re a genius with explosives.
Start proving it!
[Gesturing with his pistol]
You got me in the mood to use this thing, and by God, if you don’t think of something, I’ll use it on you!
I mean it.“
(Alistair MacLean, The Guns of Navarone)
In 1941, at the age of 19, he was called up to fight in the Second World War with the Royal Navy, serving with the ranks of ordinary seaman, able seaman, and leading torpedo operator.
He was first assigned to PS Bournemouth Queen, a converted excursion ship fitted for antiaircraft guns, on duty off the coasts of England and Scotland.
Beginning in 1943, he served on HMS Royalist, a Dido-class light cruiser.
There, he saw action in 1943 in the Atlantic theatre, on two Arctic convoys and escorting aircraft carrier groups in operations against Tirpitz, and other targets off the Norwegian coast.
He took part in Convoy PQ 17 on Royalist.
In 1944, Royalist and he served in the Mediterranean theatre, as part of the invasion of southern France and in helping to sink blockade runners off Crete and bombard Milos in the Aegean.
During this time, MacLean may have been injured in a gunnery-practice accident.
In 1945, in the Far East theatre, MacLean and Royalist saw action escorting carrier groups in operations against Japanese targets in Burma, Malaya, and Sumatra.
(MacLean’s late-in-life claims that he was captured by the Japanese after blowing up bridges, and tortured by having his teeth pulled out, have been dismissed by both his son and his biographer as drunken ravings).
After the Japanese surrender, Royalist helped evacuate liberated POWs from Changi Prison in Singapore.
“[As the team prepares to leave, Miller comes stomping in]
Everybody stay exactly where you are!
The party’s over.
Somebody stepped on the cake!
[Opens his case]
Exhibit A: A clockwork fuse.
Elementary and archaic, but they work.
Only this one doesn’t work, you know why?
The clock’s okay, but the contact arm’s been broken off.
This clock could tick away until Christmas, and it wouldn’t set off a firecracker!
[Throws it in a corner]
Exhibit B: Exhibit B is missing!
All my slow-burning fuses are gone, disappeared, vanished!
Exhibit C: My time pencils.
[Holds one up]
Seventy-five grains of fulminate of mercury in every one of them, enough to blow off my hand.
And very unstable, very delicate.
[He smacks the one in his hand against the bundle of the rest, then violently crumples the whole mess together, and throws them in a corner]
Which means there is a traitor in this room.“
(Alistair MacLean, The Guns of Navarone)
MacLean was discharged from the Royal Navy in 1946.
He then studied English at the University of Glasgow, working at the post office and as a street sweeper.
He lived with his mother at 26 Carrington Street, at St Georges Cross, Glasgow while attending the university.
Above: Coat of arms of the University of Glasgow
He graduated with an MA (Hons.) in 1950, briefly worked as a hospital porter, and then worked as a schoolteacher at Gallowflat School (now Stonelaw High School) in Rutherglen.
“She is my friend, Anna.
She is one of us.
It’s bad that this happened to her.
Before the Germans came, she was a school teacher in Mandrakos.
Last year, she was caught.
They tortured her to make her betray us.
They whipped her until the white of her bones showed.
Some nights we could hear her screaming.
Then they took her to the fortress and they kept her there for six months.
When they let her go, she could not speak.
She has never spoken since, not even in her dreams.
Even I have never been allowed to see the scars on her back.
But she’s a good fighter – as good as any of you.
She is like a ghost.
She goes anywhere.
She got us these guns and she kills without mercy.
You are very lucky, brother.“
(Alistair MacLean, The Guns of Navarone)
Above: Marble caves on Palmaria Island, Liguria, Italy
Whilst a university student, MacLean began writing short stories for extra income, winning a competition in 1954 with the maritime story “Dileas“.
He sold stories to the Daily Mirror and The Evening News.
The wife of Ian Chapman, editor at the publishing company Collins, had been particularly moved by “Dileas” and the Chapmans arranged to meet with MacLean, suggesting he write a novel.
MacLean responded three months later with HMS Ulysses, based on his own war experiences and credited insight from his brother Ian, a master mariner.
“Maj. Franklin: [apologizing for involving Mallory in the Navarone mission]
No, I’m stupid sometimes.
Even when I was a kid, I always took it for granted people wanted to play the games I like, and I’d be furious when they didn’t.
Capt. Mallory: Well, now they have to, so why worry?”
(Alistair MacLean, The Guns of Navarone)
Above: Scene from The Guns of Navarone (1961)
MacLean later described his writing process:
I drew a cross square, lines down representing the characters, lines across representing chapters 1–15.
Most of the characters died, in fact only one survived the book, but when I came to the end the graph looked somewhat lopsided, there were too many people dying in the first, fifth and tenth chapters so I had to rewrite it, giving an even dying space throughout.
I suppose it sounds cold blooded and calculated, but that’s the way I did it.”
In a nutshell, this is my problem with MacLean:
His writing is formulaic.
But why does something become a formula in the first place?
Because it works.
Above: Scene from Good Will Hunting (1977)
Every MacLean hero is called to face and overcome a terrible and deadly personification of evil.
The villains are heartless, egocentric and seemingly all-powerful.
We first become aware of the villains from a distance.
The hero is summoned to confront it.
The hero prepares himself for battle.
The hero meets his villains and is frustrated by the imbalance of power between them.
The nightmare begins – the battle where the odds are unevenly on the side of the villains.
There is a reversal of fortune.
The hero escapes death and the villains meet their demise.
It has all been done before and MacLean did it all again and again and again.
Commodore Jensen: I should be very surprised if they get even halfway to Navarone.
Just a waste of six good men.
However, I suppose that doesn’t matter, considering how many have been wasted already.
I’m glad it’s not my decision.
I’m only the middleman…
Still, they may get there, and they may pull it off.
Anything can happen in a war.
Slap in the middle of absolute insanity people pull out the most extraordinary resources: ingenuity, courage, self-sacrifice.
Pity we can’t meet the problems of peace in the same way, isn’t it?
It would be so much cheaper for everybody.
Cohn: I never thought of it in just that way, Sir.
You’re a philosopher, Sir.
Commodore Jensen: No. I’m just the man who has to send people out on jobs like this one.
(Alistair MacLean, The Guns of Navarone)
MacLean was paid a large advance of $50,000, which made the headlines.
Collins were rewarded when the book sold a quarter of a million copies in hardback in England in the first six months of publication.
It went on to sell millions more.
Film rights were sold to Robert Clark of Associated British for £30,000, though a film was never made.
This money meant MacLean was able to devote himself to writing full-time.
Above: Alistair MacLean
His next novel, The Guns of Navarone (1957), was about an attack on the fictitious island of Navarone (based on Milos).
The book was very successful, selling over 400,000 copies in its first six months.
In 1957, MacLean said:
“I’m not a literary person.
If someone offered me £100,000 tax free, I’d never write another word.“
MacLean knew how to write and sell blockbusters (at least in the first half of his writing career), but his writing does not encourage thought, just your attention.
A literary plot, Literature, is usually more about the inner life of a character than it is about fast-paced action.
A commercial plot is mostly about action, things happening to the characters from the outside.
My struggle is adding a good sense of pace to my writing, while connecting to the inner life of my readers.
The trouble with MacLean’s commercial fiction is that his characters feel as shallow as a pothole puddle, but the action distracts you from thinking to much about his writing’s deficiencies.
The Guns of Navarone is a 1957 novel about the Second World War that was made into the film The Guns of Navarone in 1961.
The story concerns the efforts of an Allied commando team to destroy a seemingly impregnable German fortress that threatens Allied naval ships in the Aegean Sea and prevents over 1,200 isolated British Army soldiers from being rescued.
The Greek island of Navarone does not exist and the plot is fictional, but the story takes place within the real historical context of the 1943 Dodecanese campaign.
The Guns of Navarone brings together elements that would characterise much of MacLean’s subsequent works:
- tough, competent, worldly men as main characters
- frequent but non-graphic violence
- betrayal of the hero(es) by a trusted associate
- extensive use of the sea and other dangerous environments as settings.
Its three principal characters – New Zealand mountaineer-turned-commando Keith Mallory, American demolitions expert “Dusty” Miller, and Greek resistance fighter Andrea – are among the most fully drawn in all of MacLean’s work.
The Greek island of Navarone does not exist and the plot is fictional, but the story takes place within the real historical context of the Dodecanese Campaign, the Allies’ campaign to capture the Italian-held Greek islands in the Aegean Sea in 1943.
In particular, the Battle of Leros and coastal artillery on the island of Leros provide inspiration for the novel.
Sited on the island were eleven 152mm / 6 inch (an intermediate calibre) coastal artillery guns, along with a number of smaller guns.
The guns had been manufactured and used by the Italians.
The guns were captured with the island after the surrender of the British and Italian defenders.
The guns were used by the Germans for the rest of the war.
The island of Navarone, off the Turkish coast, has been heavily fortified as the Germans attempt to stifle British naval activity in the Aegean.
A force of 1,200 British soldiers is now marooned on the nearby island of Kheros (another variation of the island Keros, which is situated to the west of Amorgos).
The Royal Navy is planning to send ships to rescue them.
The heavy radar-controlled guns command the only deepwater channel that ships can use and must be silenced at all costs.
Commando attacks have failed and after a bombardment by B-24 Liberator bombers fails to destroy the guns, Captain James Jensen RN, Chief of Operations for SOE in Cairo, decides to launch a desperate last-ditch attempt which he has already planned in case the bombing is unsuccessful.
He has drawn together a team of specialist saboteurs to infiltrate the island via the “unclimbable” south cliff and get into the fortress to destroy the guns.
They have less than one week.
The team travel via MTB (motor torpedo boat) and plane to Castelrosso, a British-held island.
Here, they discover an eavesdropper, Nicolai the base laundry boy, who allegedly speaks no English but is spying on them anyway.
They demand that he be arrested and held incommunicado, but the story implies that this does not happen.
In an ancient caïque they sail towards Navarone.
They carry papers identifying themselves as collaborators with, and couriers for, the German commandant of the island.
They are intercepted by a German patrol boat, which appears to be expecting them.
They sink it and kill all the crew.
They are wrecked in a storm but manage to land on the island, having lost much of their equipment.
They climb the ‘unclimbable‘ south cliff, but Stevens slips and is badly injured.
Evading German guards, they travel through heavy snow and rough terrain and are met by Louki, the steward of the exiled owner of the island, and Panayis, his enigmatic friend.
They bring much needed food.
By radio, Jensen tells the team that they have less time than was planned for.
The ships are coming through that very night.
But whilst resting in a cave, they are captured by a troop of German specialist mountain soldiers led by Oberlieutnant Turzig, who recognises Mallory as a famous climber.
They are taken to the town of Margaritha where they are ruthlessly interrogated by Hauptmann Skoda.
Thanks to Andrea’s diversionary behaviour, they turn the tables on them.
Skoda is shot.
With Turzig and the others securely tied up, they escape and make their way to the town of Navarone.
They are harassed by troops and planes who are also apparently expecting them.
With no medical facilities available, Stevens is clearly dying and beyond help.
He asks to be left behind and feels curiously at peace.
Miller discovers that much of his equipment has been damaged.
Suspicion falls on Panayis, who is also suspected of being a double agent.
He admits nothing, but the evidence (all but one of his injuries are fake) is damning.
Miller shoots him.
Mallory and Miller manage to enter the fortress housing the guns, whilst the others create a diversion.
They set the explosives and then get out to meet the others.
They steal a boat and rendezvous with the destroyer HMS Sirdar, which is leading two others through the deepwater channel.
Just in time, the explosives do their work, the guns are destroyed and the ships continue on their way to rescue the soldiers.
There is seldom a dull moment, as the tiny group is faced with seemingly insurmountable dangers at every turn.
It is a nicely varied group of protagonists that meshes well with each other while displaying realistic emotions.
The exploration of some leading characters and their motivations helps the reader understand and empathize with them.
Though the island is mythical, Maclean’s WWII experiences in that area, together with his knowledge of both land and sea warfare, give the story depth and believability.
While it is nice to have a motivated local on the Allied team, the unstoppable killing machine Andreas is a bit over the top.
No weaknesses, no uncertainties, no hope for the bad guys, there is just too much of a foregone conclusion.
(Contrast him with the similarly strong and capable Sandor from The Secret Ways, who just seems like a regular guy rather than a parody.)
His habit of calling the team leader “my Keith” is also annoying.
I never cared much for MacLean’s habit of turning private citizens with world-champion talents into secret agents.
In this book, it’s Keith Mallory, the world’s greatest mountaineer.
Other examples that come right to mind include the world’s greatest Grand Prix driver (The Way to Dusty Death) and uniquely skilled circus performers (Circus).
As believable as the book is in general, there’s a disconnect between MacLean’s description of the careful, highly trained German troops and the careless mistakes they make that repeatedly enable the good guys to escape certain doom.
Capt. Mallory: Can you do anything at all?
Cpl. Miller: I don’t know.
There’s always a way to blow up explosives.
The trick is not to be around when they go off.
But aren’t you forgetting something?
The lady.
As I see it we have three choices.
One, we can leave her here but there’s no guarantee she won’t be found, and in her case they won’t need a truth drug.
Two, we can take her with us, but that would make things worse than they are already.
And three…
Well, that’s Andrea’s choice, remember?
Capt. Mallory: You really want your pound of flesh, don’t you?
Cpl. Miller: Yes, I do.
You see, somehow I just couldn’t get to sleep.
Capt. Mallory: Well, if you’re so anxious to kill her, go ahead!
Cpl. Miller: I’m not anxious to kill her.
I’m not anxious to kill anyone.
You see, I’m not a born soldier.
I was trapped.
You may find me facetious from time to time, but if I didn’t make some rather bad jokes I’d go out of my mind.
No, I prefer to leave the killing to someone like you, an officer and a gentleman, a leader of men.
Capt. Mallory: If you think I wanted this, any of this, you’re out of your mind.
I was trapped like you, just like anyone who put on the uniform!
Cpl. Miller: Of course you wanted it, you’re an officer, aren’t you?
I never let them make me an officer!
I don’t want the responsibility!
Capt. Mallory: So you’ve had a free ride, all this time!
Someone’s got to take responsibility if the job’s going to get done!
You think that’s easy?
Cpl. Miller: [shouts]
I don’t know!
I’m not even sure who really is responsible any more.
(Alistair MacLean, The Guns of Navarone)
MacLean was unhappy at the tax paid on earnings for his first two novels, so he moved to Lake Lucerne in Switzerland, where he would pay less tax.
Above: Lake Lucerne (Vierwaldstattersee) seen from Mount Pilatus
He planned to write one novel a year.
“It’s all the market can stand,” he said, adding it took him three months to write it.
Above: Alistair MacLean
MacLean’s true talent was not the words he wrote, but the methods how he marketed what he wrote.
To sell stories, do three things:
- Study your markets.
- Get manuscripts in the mail.
- Keep them there.
And that’s all there is to it.
MacLean did these things in a financially successful way.
Above: Alistair MacLean
Cpl. Miller: Well, right now I say to hell with the job!
I’ve been on a hundred jobs and not one of them has altered the course of the war!
I don’t care about the war anymore.
I care about Roy!
Capt. Mallory: And if Turkey comes into the war on the wrong side?
Cpl. Miller: So what?
Let the whole bloody world come in and blow itself to pieces.
That’s what it deserves!
(Alistair MacLean, The Guns of Navarone)
MacLean followed it with South by Java Head (1958), based on his experiences in the seas off Southeast Asia in WW2, and The Last Frontier (1959), a thriller about the Hungarian uprising of 1956.
Film rights for Java Head were sold, but no movie resulted.
South by Java Head
The story is set in February 1942, in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Singapore.
As the British stronghold of Singapore falls to the invading Imperial Japanese Army, a mixed collection of soldiers, nurses, fleeing civilians, a small boy, and at least one spy attempt to escape the burning city aboard the Kerry Dancer, a battered freighter crewed by a disreputable captain and sailors.
The Kerry Dancer is crippled by Japanese aircraft, and the refugees are rescued by the Viroma, a tanker also fleeing Singapore.
However, the Viroma is also sunk by the Japanese.
The survivors take to open boats on the open sea.
Led by stalwart First Officer John Nicholson, they attempt to flee to safety across the South China Sea, facing death by thirst and exposure, typhoons, and pursuit by the relentless Japanese.
As tensions mount in the small boat, Nicholson realizes that they are equally at risk from traitors in their midst.
MacLean’s intricate, unhurried prose paints detailed pictures of scenery, weather, and the protagonists’ psyches.
His knowledge of maritime topics shines through his descriptions of boats, nautical maneuvers, and the sometimes-cruel sea.
Hidden motives and relationships add some unexpected, welcome plot twists.
So many perils, so many life-or-death escapades …
The reader must suspend disbelief even more than usual to follow this unlikely series of escapes.
The characters spend so much time in boats that a less nautically inclined reader is likely to weary of fo’c’sles and bosuns and bilges.
Japanese are uniformly portrayed as evil, ugly sub-humans.
By contrast, the single German agent acts very honorably and says that his countrymen would do the same.
Due to his Pacific service, Alistair MacLean surely knew people who were treated savagely by the Japanese military, but his cruelly sterotypical descriptions of “those yellow devils” with their “tiny, porcine eyes” are jarring when seen in a modern light.
(Millions of civilians could testify [if they had survived] how barbaric the German forces often were in those same days.)
The romantic side story is forced and underdeveloped, seemingly laid in just to provide a distraction from the endless misery and a motivation for late heroics.
The Last Frontier
Michael Reynolds, MacLean’s protagonist, is a British secret agent on a wintertime mission inside Hungary at the height of the Cold War.
Reynolds must rescue Professor Jennings, an elderly British scientist who is held by the Communist government against his will.
Reynolds is no James Bond and does not have any fancy gadgets but he is highly resourceful.
His biggest advantages against the sometimes cruel and highly efficient Hungarian Secret Police are an ability to make commonsense on-the-spot decisions and the heroic help of friends in the Hungarian underground.
Reynolds hooks up with the mysterious Jansci and his friend “the Count”.
They strive to transport the Professor over the border and back to England.
The plot has the twists, turns, and betrayals in which MacLean specialized.
Reynolds realizes that he has only one chance to escape with Jennings before he is captured and killed by the Hungarian secret police.
MacLean spends time deepening and enriching the reader’s vision of the scenery, political climate, and desperate citizens in that evil time.
Good guys are a varied lot, from the classic MacLean physical superman to the master of disguise to the escaped political prisoner searching ceaselessly for his wife.
We even get to see many facets of the love interest, showing her as a flesh-and-blood woman rather than a stereotypical dainty dame or tough broad.
Action scenes are thrilling yet fresh.
For instance, the battle between the good and bad strongmen is a highlight of the book’s denouement, rather than a throwaway as in Circus.
The dark effects of Communism are shown and discussed in memorable ways.
Reynolds makes an interesting transition from simple tool to complex moral character.
The entire book is a well-drawn illustration of how an indomitable spirit can overcome seemingly impossible odds.
Now that Communism no longer dominates Eastern Europe, some characters’ (and hence MacLean’s) railing against it might become tiresome.
Smaller touches also reveal the book’s age; for instance, MacLean needs to explain what a Doberman Pinscher is, while modern readers probably are familiar with this dog breed.
Cpl. Miller: I’ve inspected this vessel, and I think you ought to know that, ah, I can’t swim.
Capt. Mallory: I’ll keep it in mind.
(Alistair MacLean, The Guns of Navarone)
His next novels were Night Without End (1959) and Fear Is the Key (1961).
Above: Alistair MacLean
Night Without End
A BOAC airplane crash-lands on the Greenland ice cap far from its usual route after flying in a seemingly erratic fashion.
An International Geophysical Year scientific research team based near the crash site rescues the surviving passengers and takes them to their station.
Most of the flight crew are dead.
The station’s only means of contact with the outside world, a radio set, is destroyed in a seemingly accidental manner.
With not enough food for everyone and no hope of rescue, the leader of the scientific research team, Dr Mason, decides that they must set out for the nearest settlement, some 300 kilometers away at the coast.
Meanwhile, the crew member who was found with massive brain injuries and who since has fallen into a coma is found to have been suffocated with a pillow.
Inspecting the plane, Dr Mason discovers that one of the pilots had been shot in the back.
The dead passenger is determined to be a military courier.
An attempt is also made on Mason’s life by stranding him in the Arctic night.
Soon after that the wreck goes up in flames.
The scientist’s suspicion falls on the stewardess but she is soon cleared.
Mason orders another scientist, Joss, to stay behind and try to repair the radio so that a field expedition can be contacted.
Mason leaves with the group along with the other scientist, Jackstraw, while remaining in touch with their station by means of a short range radio.
Meanwhile, the field expedition returns to the station and contacts Mason.
They inform him that a massive military mobilization has located the crashed plane and that it carried something very important.
The government, having refused to divulge anything, had tried to contact Mason’s station.
Finding the station to be non-responding, they have requested the expedition chief, Captain Hillcrest, to investigate.
Mason decides to go on with the journey since any attempt to return will induce the murderers to act.
He keeps this new development to himself and Jackstraw.
Hillcrest sets out after the group but soon finds that the petrol he picked up at the station has been tampered with.
Sugar has been added to the petrol disabling the engine and leading him to get bogged down.
A solution is found when one of the passengers, a chemist, suggests that the petrol be mixed with water and the top layer of the resultant mixture be siphoned off.
At almost the same time, the government relents and informs Mason through Hillcrest that the military courier carried a top secret missile guidance mechanism disguised as a tape recorder.
Mason realizes that one of the passengers picked up such a device at the crash site.
This precipitates the murderers into action.
They take over the group.
Finding that killing the entire group is not possible, the criminals initially take the survivors with them, but soon abandon all of them except for the stewardess, for whom Mason has developed a romantic attachment, and the father and manager of a passenger who is a boxer.
In the process, one of the passengers left behind is killed.
The group stumbles on in the Arctic blizzard guided by sled dogs.
Soon they come across an abandoned sled that contains rocket radiosondes, which they use to guide Hillcrest to them.
A chase ensues across the Arctic landscape to the shore where a trawler waits for the criminals.
But the intervention of the Navy, on information from Hillcrest, frightens off the trawler.
The criminals are surrounded and after a bitter hand-to-hand struggle, the secret device and surviving hostages are rescued.
The first criminal is killed, however the second is still on the go.
Having himself and the stewardess locked in a fast moving glacier,
Dr. Mason manages to rescue her, but the killer is left to die.
It is nice to have a protagonist who is not a highly trained intelligence agent, but rather a skilled scientist who happened to be in the right place at the wrong time.
The cast of supporting characters is drawn finely enough that the reader cares about their welfare — and is surprised by some of the twists MacLean throws in.
The quieter-than-usual action (without helicopters, bombs, sea chases, etc.) is gripping, as ordinary people are pushed to the edges of human endurance.
Readers will likely have made good guesses about the villains’ identities.
Of MacLean’s awkwardly formed and unrealistic love stories, this book contains one of the worst.
Fortunately, that weak link doesn’t occupy much of the tale.
Fear Is the Key
In the prologue, set in May 1958, John Talbot, owner of Trans Carib Air Charter Co, is at an airfield in British Honduras, awaiting radio contact with one of his aircraft en route to Tampa, Florida, which is being piloted by his twin brother and in which his wife and baby son are passengers.
Not long after he establishes contact, the aircraft is attacked by a P-51 Mustang, after which all contact is lost.
Two years later Talbot is on trial for robbing a bank.
At a point where his guilt is in doubt, new information comes to light implicating him in the death of a police officer.
Now desperate, he escapes by taking a young woman hostage from the court room and stealing a car.
However, he is tracked down by a private detective, Herman Jablonski, who reveals that the young woman is Mary Ruthven, daughter of oil millionaire General Ruthven.
Jablonski turns Talbot over to the General and his three business associates – Vyland, Royale and Larry (Vyland’s drug-addiced son) – who, instead of turning him over to the police, hire him for an unspecified task, retaining Jablonski to keep him under guard.
We discover that Talbot and Jablonski, a former police officer, have engineered the scenario, for reasons as yet unknown.
Talbot slips out of the General’s house and travels to an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico, searching it for signs of something out of the ordinary.
On his return he finds Royale and Larry burying something in the grounds of the General’s house.
After they have finished he discovers that they were burying Jablonski’s body.
Now needing another ally, he persuades Ruthven’s British chauffeur, Kennedy, to help him.
Talbot returns to the house and next day is taken to the oil platform, where he finds that Ruthven and his associates need Talbot to operate a submersible.
Talbot carries out another reconnaissance of the platform, in the process killing Larry who had been suspicious of him.
Managing to avoid further discovery, he and the remaining two associates use the submersible to investigate the wreck of a DC-3.
Talbot turns the tables on his captors, revealing that the wrecked aircraft contains the bodies of his family.
The aircraft was shot down by Vyland’s associates in order to steal its cargo of gold.
They have been threatening the General and his family to force him to provide the necessary resources.
Talbot has been working for the authorities all along and convinces Vyland and Royale that, after temporarily disconnecting the submersible’s oxygen supply, he is now ready to die on the ocean floor beside his family, eliciting a terror-stricken confession from the two men, their fear of death being the key that unlocks the confession, which is relayed to witnesses on the oil platform.
Talbot then returns to the oil platform, where Vyland throws himself to his death from a ladder.
Royale survives to be tried and sentenced to death, Mary and Kennedy end up together and Talbot, politely turning down General Ruthven’s offer of any reward of his choosing, walks off alone.
This is vintage MacLean: good seemingly outmanned in its fight against savage and brilliant criminal forces.
His prose feels effortless yet sharp.
The reader can nearly see the gun protruding from the shadows, feel the tangible sense of doom, and smell the freshly dug grave.
Once the initial bizarre events are reconciled, the rest of the plot has a refreshingly simple linear progression.
Romantic matters are included but not overdone and they reach a surprising yet satisfying conclusion.
If you like picturing evildoers begging for mercy, this is the book for you.
The baffling opening sequence continues (unexplained) for so long that a reader may want to exchange this book for a more straightforward one (but don’t!).
It’s a matter of taste, but the drilling platform is one of those things that MacLean described in too much detail, not easy to slog through.
Furthermore, extended underwater scenes may make some people feel claustrophobic.
The Last Frontier was turned into a movie, The Secret Ways (1961), which was not very successful, while the film version of The Guns of Navarone (1961) was hugely successful.
Capt. Mallory: [about Stavrou]
He’s going to kill me when the war’s over.
Maj. Franklin: You’re not serious.
Capt. Mallory: Yes, I am.
So is he.
[Pause]
About a year ago, I gave a German patrol a safe passage to get some of their wounded into hospital.
I guess I still had some romantic notions about fighting a civilized war.
Anyway, they wanted Andrea pretty badly, even back then.
As soon as they got behind our lines, they shot their casualties, went over to his house, and blew it up.
He was out on a job at the time, but his wife and three children were in the house.
They were all killed.
I helped him to bury them.
And then he turned to me and said that as far as he was concerned, it wasn’t the Germans who were responsible, but me.
Me and my stupid Anglo-Saxon decency.
Then he told me what he was going to do, and when.
Maj. Franklin: You think he still means to do it?
Capt. Mallory: He’s from Crete.
Those people don’t make idle threats.
(Alistair MacLean, The Guns of Navarone)
In the early 1960s, MacLean published two novels under the pseudonym “Ian Stuart” to prove that the popularity of his books was due to their content rather than his name on the cover.
These were The Dark Crusader (1961) and The Satan Bug (1962).
The Dark Crusader
Eight top-level scientists and their wives disappear after responding to newspaper advertisements for specialists in different areas of modern technology, so when a 9th advertisement appears, Agent John Bentall is recalled to London from a mission in Turkey by his superior, Colonel Raine.
The advertisements offered high rates of pay to applicants who were married, had no children and were prepared for immediate travel.
Bentall, a physicist who specialized in solid rocket fuels and is presently working for the British government on counter espionage, is paired with Marie Hopeman, a secret agent posted in the same job as Bentall in Turkey, assigned to pose as his wife.
All eight scientists had disappeared in Australia or en route there.
Bentall and Hopeman find themselves kidnapped at a hotel in Fiji.
They escape from the kidnappers to the island of Vardu, a remote coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which is currently home to Professor Witherspoon, a noted archaeologist.
The island has no radio transmitter and the next boat is scheduled to arrive in three weeks.
Bentall finds Dr. Witherspoon somewhat sketchy.
Later, Bentall discovers Witherspoon is actually LeClerc, the mastermind behind a plot to steal a British missile, the Dark Crusader and send it to Australia for nefarious purposes.
Bentall’s character displays a stumbling, self-deprecating demeanour and makes mistakes that lead to the pair falling into the trap set by the villains.
The story becomes more complicated when Bentall and Hopeman find themselves falling in love as they try to defeat LeClerc.
Neither the female secret agent nor the situation are quite as they seem.
In the end Bentall chooses between saving Hopeman and preventing the theft of the missile, and finally unravels the last details of the plot with his boss, Colonel Raine back in London.
The reader is plunged directly into the action and it proceeds at nearly full throttle for the rest of the book, driven by Bentall’s harrowing escapades.
The couple of bad guys who have key roles in the story are memorable characters.
Even though the story’s focus is rocket science, MacLean presents just the necessary facts in easily digestible ways.
His sympathy toward members of the British military is given play here.
They are presented not as unbeatable, but as ready and able when given a chance to redeem themselves.
An important secondary character’s moral ambiguity provides some relief from the usual black-vs.-white world of spy thrillers.
An emotionally tense ending is followed by a surprising secondary ending that brings the story full circle.
The evil plot weaves together so many threads, it seems unlikely to have been executed as flawlessly as it was (up to the point where Bentall enters the picture).
Asians are once again set up as villains — both as foot soldiers and as the evil powers behind the entire plot.
MacLean’s war experiences gave him reason to mistrust some Asians, but too often, his books use them as a convenient foil.
The romantic touches strike an offkey note.
Strangers forced together in these desperate circumstances would have too much else on their minds.
The Satan Bug
The story revolves around the theft of two germ warfare agents, botulinum toxin and the indestructible “Satan Bug” (a laboratory-conceived derivative of poliovirus), from the Mordon Microbiological Research Establishment (similar to Porton Down).
There is no vaccine for the “Satan Bug” and it is so infectious that any release will rapidly destroy all human life on Earth.
With these phials of unstoppable power, a mad “environmentalist” threatens the country’s population unless Mordon is razed to the ground.
Like other of MacLean’s works, the plot involves layers of deception.
The first-person narrator, Pierre Cavell, is initially presented as an embittered figure who has been successively fired for insubordination from the British Army, the Metropolitan Police Service, and finally from Mordon.
Cavell is called in by former colleagues at Special Branch after being “tested” with a bribe to ensure that he is still honest.
The novel gradually reveals that for the past 16 years Cavell has in fact been working for “the General“, apparently a senior intelligence director and Cavell’s father-in-law, and that these thefts are the culmination of a series of security breaches at Mordon that Cavell and the General have been investigating for at least a year.
During the theft the current head of security is killed with a cyanide-laced sweet, presumably given to him by an insider he trusted.
A variety of scientists and support staff come under suspicion.
It emerges that several of them have been coerced by blackmail or kidnapping to help the principal villain, without knowing his identity.
The villain releases botulinum toxin over an evacuated area of East Anglia, killing hundreds of livestock and proving that his threat to use the Satan Bug should be taken seriously.
He takes Cavell’s wife, Mary, hostage and sets off to London to blackmail the British government by threatening to release the “Satan Bug” in the City of London’s financial district.
The villain uses his hostage to capture Cavell and several police officers and attempts to kill them with botulinum toxin.
Cavell escapes, though one constable is poisoned and dies rapidly.
(For dramatic purposes this is from convulsions like nerve agent or strychnine poisoning, rather than the slower paralysis and respiratory failure usually associated with botulism.)
Cavell uses Interpol to discover the villain’s true identity and infers that the villain’s London plan is really to cause the City of London to be evacuated, allowing a criminal gang time to break into and rob major banks and then escape by helicopter.
After losing a fight on board the aircraft, the villain explains his motives and jumps to his death, leaving the remaining phials of agent unbreached.
The intrigue and deception begins on the first page and doesn’t let up until the breathtaking conclusion.
Cavell is a fine example of MacLean’s almost endlessly cunning yet all-too-human heroes.
A small group of other “good guys” — a high official, a dogged inspector, and the inevitable Mary — are well developed, showing that it takes all types of people to overcome such a powerful menace.
MacLean also adds colour by including some distinctive and memorable characters in lesser roles.
Plenty of suspects and motives are shown.
It is entertaining to guess who was involved in the crimes, and to what degree.
Clues (some blatant, some less obvious) are provided to aid readers in unraveling the events.
Once all the detective work has produced a main suspect, MacLean changes gears nicely to chase / action scenes.
Just enough characters are presented as possible suspects but you may have trouble keeping them all straight.
The sheer complexity of the criminal plot, and the personal shortcomings of some scientists who should never have passed Mordon’s top-security clearances, made the book less than fully believable.
Think of it as entertainment rather than realism.
MacLean said he used the pen name Ian Stuart because:
“I usually write adventure stories, but this is a sort of Secret Service or private eye book.
I didn’t want to confuse my readers.“
Above: Alistair MacLean
Squadron Leader Barnsby: Bad?
It can’t be done, not from the air, anyway!
Commodore Jensen: You’re quite sure of that, Squadron Leader? This is important.
Squadron Leader Barnsby: So’s my life!
To me, anyway, and the lives of these jokers here, and the eighteen men we lost tonight!…
Squadron Leader Barnsby: First, you’ve got that bloody old fortress on top of that bloody cliff.
Then you’ve got the bloody cliff overhang.
You can’t even see the bloody cave, let alone the bloody guns.
And anyway, we haven’t got a bloody bomb big enough to smash that bloody rock.
And that’s the bloody truth, sir.
Alistair MacLean, The Guns of Navarone)
The Ian Stuart books sold well and MacLean made no attempt to change his writing style.
He also continued to publish novels under his own name such as The Golden Rendezvous (1962) and Ice Station Zebra (1963).
Above: Alistair MacLean
“I’m not a novelist“, he once said.
“That’s too pretentious a claim.
I’m a storyteller, that’s all.
I’m a professional and a craftsman.
I will make that claim for myself.“
Above: Alistair MacLean
Only 4% of those who set words to paper actually sell their material on a regular basis.
The other 96% only dream about the rewards of being a published author.
Seldom, if ever, do they see their names in print.
What does it take to join the ranks of that productive 4%?
Raw talent?
Yes.
A certain degree of talent for writing is necessary for success.
But that is not quite enough.
No, you still need to sell the material.
What separates the published from the promising?
The first is a passion for the craft.
It is a determination that you are willing to pay the price for success.
You will spend valuable time alone – even on holidays and anniversaries – sitting in front of your computer stringing words together.
It is a willingness to handle rejection without falling apart or losing momentum, because that will happen.
Methodically continue to pound the keyboard.
And second, as aforementioned, the key to success after simple determination and patience is to know how to market your material.
MacLean also claimed he wrote very fast (35 days for a novel) because he disliked writing and the “sooner he finished, the better.“
He never reread a book after it was finished.
Above: Alistair MacLean
“Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.
A modern stoic knows that the surest way to discipline passion is to discipline time.
Decide what you want or ought to do during the day, then always do it at exactly the same moment every day.
Passion will give you no trouble.“
(W. H. Auden)
Above: British American poet Wystan Hugh Auden (1907 – 1973)
Maclean’s novels were notable for their lack of sex.
“I like girls“, he said.
“I just don’t write them well.
Everyone knows that men and women make love, laddie – there is no need to show it.“
Above: Alistair MacLean signing books
Couldn’t composers create something apart from love (dependency) songs?
Couldn’t writers give up their romantic novels and love (dependency) poems and try to write literature?
Can painters and photographers only produce nudes and profiles of women?
What would the world and art and music and literature be like if men really used their intelligence and imagination instead of wasting it on trying to please the perpetually dissatisfied and unsatisfying women in their lives?
I certainly don’t need yet another description of the mechanics of sex nor the exhausting exposition of the necessity of women in a story of conflict – when in reality most women choose to avoid real combat situations of the type that MacLean espoused.
If we exercised our minds as much as we desire to exercise our genitalia then the grip of sexual urge would cease to be as obsessive and empty as it is.
The Golden Rendezvous
Aboard the cargo vessel converted into a luxury cruise ship SS Campari somewhere in the Caribbean, all is not well.
For Johnny Carter, the Chief Officer, the voyage has already begun badly:
- A revolution in the small Caribbean nation where the Campari lies in port
- A tragedy that causes some passengers to be summoned home, while their places are taken by mysterious newcomers
- The disappearance of a tactical nuclear missile from an area the ship had just visited.
In addition, he suffers from a moody captain and unwanted attention from beautiful young Susan Beresford, traveling with her immensely wealthy family.
However, when the Campari sails after a succession of delays attributable to sabotage, he realizes something is seriously wrong.
A member of the crew is suddenly missing and the unsuccessful stem-to-stern search only increases tension.
Then violence erupts and suddenly the whole ship is endangered by a master criminal whose intention is not a simple hijacking and ransoming of the wealthy hostages on board.
The exact nature of his goal forms part of the mystery.
MacLean’s skill in depicting both quiet scenes and desperate action is on full display.
When he writes about boats, his love of the sea is infectious, and — unlike some of his other books — The Golden Rendezvous doesn’t require the reader to master and memorize many points of naval architecture and nautical theory.
Plenty of unanticipated plot twists and ingenious good-guy strategies retain the reader’s interest.
For several reasons, you may have little trouble figuring out who the evildoers are.
Their plan is so convoluted and unlikely to work that the reader really has to suspend disbelief.
We have met some of these supporting elements too many times before:
- the world’s richest man
- the Scottish warrior who claims the gift of foresight
- the powerful storm that rises up to complicate the action
- the whiskey that can seemingly cure all ills ….
Here’s yet another unlikely romance, in which the couple all too quickly (and clumsily) moves from disdain to rapture.
Ice Station Zebra
Drift ice Station Zebra, a British meteorological station built on an ice floe in the Arctic Sea, suffers a catastrophic oil fire.
Several of its men die.
Their shelter and supplies are destroyed.
The survivors take refuge in one hut with little food and heat.
The (fictional) American nuclear-powered submarine USS Dolphin is dispatched on a rescue mission.
Just before she departs, Dr. Carpenter, the narrator, is sent to accompany her.
Carpenter’s background is unknown, but he claims that he is an expert in dealing with frostbite and other deep-cold medical conditions.
He carries orders from the Chief of Naval Operations of the United States Navy.
Commander Swanson, the Dolphin submarine captain, is suspicious of Carpenter, and calls in his superior Admiral Garvie.
Garvie refuses to allow Carpenter on board without knowing his mission.
Under duress, Carpenter finally reveals that the ice station is actually a highly equipped listening post, keeping watch for nuclear missile launches from the Soviet Union, a statement which convinces the commander and the admiral.
Dolphin reaches the Arctic ice-pack and dives under it.
She surfaces in a break in the ice and succeeds in making tenuous radio contact with Ice Station Zebra.
Carpenter confides to the Captain that the commander of the station is his brother.
Having obtained a bearing on the station, Dolphin dives again and succeeds in finding a lead 8 kilometres (5 mi) from the station and breaks through a crack in the ice above.
Carpenter, Executive Officer Hansen, and two crewmen are put above on the icepack and make the journey to the station through an Arctic storm on foot, taking with them as many supplies as they can.
They reach Zebra after a near-impossible trek.
They find that eight of the men on the station are dead, while the 11 others are barely alive.
Investigating the corpses, Carpenter finds that one of them has been shot.
They find that their radio has been damaged.
Carpenter and Hansen return to Dolphin.
The US submarine moves close to the station, and finding no open water, blows a hole in the ice using a torpedo.
The sick men are cared for by Dolphin.
Carpenter does some more investigating, and finds that the fire was no accident.
It was a cover to hide that three of the dead men, one of whom was his brother, were murdered.
He also discovers several unburned supplies hidden in the bottom of a hut, while Swanson finds a gun hidden in a petrol tank.
The surviving members of Zebra are brought on board the Dolphin, and the station is abandoned.
While still under the ice, a fire breaks out in the engine room and the sub is forced to shut down its nuclear reactor.
The crew succeeds in saving the ship, after several hours of hard labour, and thanks to Swanson’s ingenuity.
Carpenter calls a meeting of the survivors, and announces that the fire was no accident.
He reveals that he is an MI6 officer, and that his real mission was to retrieve photographic film from a reconnaissance satellite that has photographed every missile base in the US.
The film had been ejected from the satellite so that Soviet agents operating under cover at Zebra could retrieve it.
Carpenter’s brother had been sent to the station to prevent this.
Carpenter reveals the identity of the Soviet agents, and arrests them.
The film of the US bases is recovered, but Carpenter has switched the film on the Soviets.
The film they successfully sent to the Soviet surface ships is actually photographs of cartoon characters on the walls of the submarine’s sick bay.
The plot develops slowly but surely, with long dramatic passages being interrupted unpredictably by enemy action.
The protagonist/narrator repeatedly cautions that we don’t know the real story behind the events leading up to the deadly fire and urgent rescue.
MacLean takes his own sweet time laying out red herrings before filling us in at the last moment.
MacLean clearly put tremendous effort into drawing the fine details of every scene, from submarine operations to Arctic climatic challenges.
While it’s a bit of a slog getting through some of those descriptions, they provide a realistic background for the desperate events.
The protagonist is no superhero — merely a highly trained intelligence operative.
Also, he is all business.
We are spared the type of thinly penciled love story that can detract from MacLean’s narratives.
The climactic scene in which the protagonist gathers all the main characters together to reveal which of them is the murderer harkens back to classic English drawing-room mysteries.
Any regular MacLean reader will have a good guess about the criminal whose identity is revealed in the above-mentioned scene.
(Is he the only one, though?)
If you’re claustrophobic or bothered by icy weather, you may not enjoy a tale that takes place almost entirely aboard a submarine or in the harsh Arctic climate.
Cpl. Miller: To tell you the truth, I didn’t think we could do it.
Capt. Mallory: To tell you the truth, neither did I.
(Alistair MacLean, The Guns of Navarone)
In 1963, MacLean decided to retire from writing, saying he never enjoyed it and only did it to make money.
He decided to become a hotelier and bought the Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor and then bought two more hotels, the Bank House near Worcester and the Beambridge at Wellington in Somerset.
Above: Jamaica Inn, Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, England
MacLean focused on his hotel career for three years.
Above: Bank House Hotel Spa, Worcester, England
It was not a success, and by 1976, he had sold all three hotels.
Above: Beambridge Inn, Wellington, Somerset, England
During this time, a film was made of The Satan Bug.
MacLean returned to writing with When Eight Bells Toll (1966).
Five cargo ships have been hijacked in the Irish Sea – ships carrying vast quantities of precious stones and gold bullion.
The crews later turn up, but the ships have disappeared.
Clearly, the hijackers are getting impeccable intelligence.
The British Secret Service, under Rear-Admiral Sir Arthur Arnford-Jason (known as “Uncle Arthur“) has planted agents on the ships – but only the ship’s masters know of their presence.
When no word is received from the agents, Phillip Calvert (who narrates the story) and Hunslett are sent to investigate.
They manage to track the latest hijacked ship – the Nantesville, carrying £8 million in gold bullion – to the Scottish Highlands and the sleepy port town of Torbay on the Island of Torbay (patterned after Tobermory, on the Isle of Mull).
Under cover of being marine biologists on a UNESCO project, they travel in the Firecrest, an outwardly normal but very specially equipped motor launch.
Calvert boards the ship under cover of night and finds that the two agents planted aboard have been murdered.
His chief suspect is Cypriot shipping magnate Sir Anthony Skouras, whose luxury yacht, Shangri-La, is also anchored in Torbay.
Calvert barely escapes the murderous hijackers and returns to his boat.
But late at night, they are boarded by local police and plain-clothes men claiming to be customs officers seeking information on stolen chemicals.
After the search and their departure, he finds the boat’s well-concealed powerful radio to have been sabotaged.
While searching the surrounding area in a Fleet Air Arm Helicopter, Calvert meets the occupants of a castle, Lord Kirkside and his teenage daughter Susan, who both clearly want him well away from the castle, and a fierce gun-toting local on his private island.
As the helicopter brings Calvert back to Torbay, it comes under attack from the shore by machine-gun.
The pilot, Lieutenant Williams, is killed.
The helicopter crashes, explodes and plummets into the sea.
Calvert escapes from the helicopter after it sinks to the bottom.
When he returns to Firecrest, he finds Hunslett is missing.
Not having received any further communications from his agents, Uncle Arthur arrives himself by commandeered RAF launch.
Together, they combat boarders and make ready for sea.
On trying to use a concealed radio, they find it has been stolen and Hunslett’s body left in its place.
They are joined by Skouras’s second wife, Charlotte, who claims to have escaped from his physical and psychological abuse of her.
When a pirate speedboat approaches, Calvert rams it, shoots the occupants and blows up the boat in vengeance for Hunslett’s death.
On the promise of a share of the insurance reward, Calvert recruits the assistance of Tim Hutchinson, a shark fisherman who has unrivalled knowledge of local water conditions and boat handling.
Guessing that the missing bullion ships are being sunk to allow the gold to be offloaded invisibly, Calvert, formerly a marine salvage expert, dives into the bay and finds the Nantesville.
He fights and kills Quinn, one of the divers, whom he has previously encountered and who he suspects killed Hunslett.
He then penetrates Kirkside’s castle, disabling the guards, and questions Susan.
He discovers a powerful radio transmitter and caches of gold bullion.
He concludes that the castle’s occupants are working under duress with the hijackers, as is the local police sergeant, whose son is being held hostage.
At midnight (eight bells) the shark fishermen ram the gates of the underground dock with their boat.
The pirates are expecting them because, in a final twist, Charlotte has been transmitting Calvert’s plans to them.
Calvert, held at gunpoint and expecting to be killed, asks that the real story be explained to him, which Charlotte does.
It emerges that Skouras is also an innocent victim of the pirates – one of several who are working under duress.
His real wife is not dead, as is widely believed, but in a French nursing home – Charlotte Meiner is her cousin and also under threat.
The standoff is broken by the sudden but pre-planned arrival of a detachment of Royal Marine Commandos.
The pirates are disarmed and the several hostages are freed.
Calvert tells Charlotte that he didn’t believe her story and that he knew from the beginning that she was faking, with information received from Uncle Arthur.
Calvert is a typical MacLean hero, world-weary and sometimes cynical, yet ultimately honorable, who must battle bureaucracy as well as the bad guys to solve the crime.
Calvert’s frantic search for the hijackers and for the hostages they hold takes him over the remote isles and sea lochs and forces him to make allies of some unlikely locals.
As is usual with MacLean, the plot twists and turns, not all characters are as they seem to be at first introduction, and the double-crosses continue to the very last page.
MacLean’s ability to paint word pictures was flourishing at this stage of his career.
His affection for boats and Scotland makes this story feel like a labour of love.
Peppered heavily with unforeseen actions and plot twists, the book is a genuine hard-to-put-down page-turner.
Readers are kept well in the dark regarding the sympathies and motives of some of the main characters, increasing the aura of suspense.
The reader is expected to know a lot of nautical jargon and to keep straight the connections, depths, navigation hazards, etc., of a series of Scottish waterways.
A first-person narrative has pluses and minuses.
The protagonist isn’t an omniscient observer, but the reader does expect to find out everything that the protagonist knows.
So it is annoying when MacLean chooses to blot out bits of conversation, to keep us in suspense.
For instance:
“So I poured him another whisky, a large one, and told him what had happened, what I knew and as much of what I thought I knew as seemed advisable to tell him.”
This way, he skips part of the middle of a crucial conversation, and that happens multiple times in this book.
Some of what actually transpired during those skipped parts is revealed in the how-we-solved-the-mystery monologue near the end.
(That monologue extends for seven or eight pages …
An awkward and tiresome way to wrap up an action story.)
It is highly unlikely that the type of people behind this book’s crimes would really tolerate, much less encourage, the ruthless violence and terror used in carrying them out.
Some humanitarian touches are thrown in, but still, the masterminds’ personas don’t match their underlings’ actions.
Cinema producer Elliott Kastner admired MacLean and asked him if he would be interested in writing an original screenplay.
MacLean agreed to the proposition.
Kastner sent the writer two scripts, one by William Goldman and one by Robert and Jane Howard-Carrington, to familiarize himself with the format.
Kastner said he wanted a WW2 story with a group of men on a mission to rescue someone, with a “ticking clock” and some female characters.
MacLean agreed to write it for an initial $10,000 with $100,000 to come later.
This script was Where Eagles Dare.
In July 1966, Kastner and his producing partner Jerry Gershwin announced they had purchased five screenplays from MacLean:
Where Eagles Dare, When Eight Bells Toll and three other unnamed ones.
(Kastner made four MacLean movies.)
Above: American film producer Elliott Kastner (1930 – 2010)
MacLean also wrote a novel for Where Eagles Dare, after the screenplay, which was published in 1967 before the film came out.
The book was a bestseller, and the 1968 film version was a huge hit.
“MacLean is a natural storyteller“, said Kastner.
“He is a master of adventure.
All his books are conceived in cinematic terms.
They hardly need to be adapted for the screen.
When you read them, the screen is in front of your mind.“
No, the screen is not in front of your mind, for no thinking is demanded of it.
In the cinema or in front of your TV or computer screen it is not only necessary to shut off your cell phone, it is also necessary to shut down your mind.
With your feet on the air and your head on the ground
Try this trick and spin it, yeah (Yeah)
Your head will collapse, and there’s nothing in it
And you’ll ask yourself
Where is my mind?
Where is my mind?
Where is my mind?
Way out in the water, see it swimmin’
I was swimmin’ in the Caribbean
Animals were hiding behind the rocks
Except the little fish
Bumped into me, I swear he was trying to talk to me, koi-koi
Where is my mind?
Where is my mind?
Where is my mind?
Way out in the water, see it swimmin’
With your feet on the air and your head on the ground
Try this trick and spin it, yeah
Your head will collapse, and there’s nothing in it
And you’ll ask yourself
Where is my mind?
Where is my mind?
Where is my mind?
Way out in the water, see it swimmin’
With your feet on the air and your head on the ground
Try this trick and spin it, yeah
Where Eagles Dare
In the winter of 1943 – 1944, MI6 officers Colonel Turner and Admiral Rolland assign Major John Smith, five other commandos of the Special Operations Executive, and US Army Ranger Lieutenant Morris Schaffer of the OSS to rescue US Army Brigadier General George Carnaby, a chief planner for the Western Front.
Carnaby was captured by the Germans and taken to the Schloß Adler, a mountaintop fortress in the Bavarian alpine village of Werfen, which is accessible only by cable car.
Disguised as German troops, Smith and his team are to parachute in, infiltrate the castle, and rescue General Carnaby before the Germans can interrogate him.
After a Ju 52 transport plane drops the team into Germany, agent Mary Ellison is dropped separately in secret, her presence known only to Smith.
Though two commandos are mysteriously killed, Smith continues the operation.
He keeps Schaffer as a close ally, and helps Mary to meet local agent Heidi Schmidt, who arranges for Mary to be employed as a maid at the castle.
In Werfen, the Germans eventually surround the commandos in a tavern, forcing them to surrender.
Smith and Schaffer (being officers) are separated from the remaining three operatives: Thomas, Berkeley, and Christiansen.
Smith and Schaffer kill their captors, blow up a supply depot, and prepare an escape route for later use.
They ride on the roof of a cable car up to the castle, and then climb inside when Mary lowers a rope.
German General Rosemeyer and Standartenführer Kramer are interrogating Carnaby when the three new prisoners arrive, who reveal themselves as German double agents.
Smith and Schaffer intrude, weapons drawn, but Smith forces Schaffer to disarm, identifying himself as Sturmbannführer Johann Schmidt of the Schutzstaffel’s SD intelligence branch.
He conveys proof of his identity, which includes showing the name of Germany’s top spy in Britain to Kramer, who silently affirms it.
He then reveals that “General Carnaby” is actually Corporal Cartwright Jones, an impersonator who volunteered to be captured.
Claiming that the double agents are British impostors, Smith proposes that they prove themselves by writing down the names of their fellow agents in Britain, to be compared to his own list in his pocket.
After the three finish their lists, Smith takes them and reveals that he was bluffing, and that the lists were the British mission’s true objective all along.
Meanwhile, Mary is visited by Sturmbannführer von Hapen, a Gestapo officer who is attracted to her, but he becomes suspicious of flaws in her cover story.
Leaving her, he happens upon the scene of Carnaby’s interrogation just as Smith finishes his explanation.
Von Hapen puts everyone under arrest but is distracted when Mary arrives.
Schaffer kills von Hapen and the other German officers with his silenced pistol.
The group then makes its escape, taking the three double agents as prisoners.
Schaffer sets explosives to create diversions around the castle, while Smith uses the radio room to inform Rolland of their success.
From there they head to the cable car station, sacrificing Thomas as a decoy.
Berkeley and Christiansen break free and attempt their own escape in a cable car.
Both are thwarted and killed by Smith.
The group reunites with Heidi on the ground, boarding a bus they prepared earlier as an escape vehicle.
They battle their way onto an airfield and escape via their Ju 52 transport, where Turner is waiting.
As Turner debriefs Smith, he reveals that Kramer confirmed Turner as Germany’s top spy in Britain.
Rolland lured Turner and the other double agents into the mission to expose them.
Smith’s trusted partner Mary and the American Schaffer (who had no connection to MI6) were assigned to the mission to ensure its success.
Turner attempts to kill Smith with a Sten gun, but Rolland anticipated such a move and removed its firing pin.
To avoid a humiliating court martial and execution, Turner is permitted to jump from the aircraft without a parachute.
As the exhausted operatives fly home, Schaffer humorously tells Smith to keep his next operation “all-British“.
MacLean wrote a sequel to Guns of Navarone, Force 10 from Navarone (1968).
A film version was announced in 1967, but did not result for another decade.
Force 10 From Navarone begins immediately after the events portrayed in The Guns of Navarone, with Mallory and Miller assigned on a new mission code-named “Force 10“.
Mallory and Miller return to Navarone to recruit their comrade Stavros (who stayed behind in the film, but not in the book).
They are joined by three young British Royal Marine Commandos, and are parachuted into Nazi-occupied, frozen, war-torn Yugoslavia.
There they attempt to aid the Yugoslav Partisans in their battle against the Nazi German occupiers and their Chetnik collaborators.
As with all MacLean novels, the true mission is secret.
Everyone, including the Marine Commandos, is misled.
The real mission (known only to Mallory, Miller, Andrea and a Partisan General) is to rescue captured British agents.
As usual with MacLean, not all things are quite what they seem, and like The Guns of Navarone one of the missions is to try to save a significant number of partisans from a certain death in a German offensive.
In the melee of double-crosses and triple-crosses, things do not go as planned.
Distrust is rife among allies and enemies alike.
Mallory and Miller are aboard the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Sirdar, on its way to the island of Kheros.
Captain Jensen, the Chief of Allied Intelligence in the Mediterranean, orders them to collect Andrea Stavros from his wedding to a resistance fighter, Maria.
After persuading Andrea, the three board a Wellington Bomber to take them to Termoli in Italy, where Captain Jensen awaits them.
Jensen congratulates Mallory’s team and introduces them to a “back-up team” of three Royal Marine sergeants – Reynolds, Groves and Saunders.
They are to go to the Neretva area of Bosnia to discover why, in recent weeks, every Allied agent parachuted into that area has been captured.
Jensen introduces Mallory to a Partisan General Vukalovic who commands the Partisans in the Neretva valley, who are trapped in “the Zenica Cage“.
The next day, they parachute in and meet up with what they believe to be a group of Partisans led by Captain Droshny.
At the camp, they are shocked to be greeted by a German Army Captain Neufeld, who explains that Droshny’s men are not Partisans but Chetniks (German collaborators).
Captured, Mallory says they are deserters, and when Neufeld’s men discover the crashed plane, from which Mallory deliberately jettisoned the spare fuel, it seems to support his claim that they had run out of fuel.
Amongst the Chetniks is a female guerrilla fighter named Maria, who accompanies her blind and mute brother Petar, as he wanders the area playing his guitar.
People see Petar as “cursed” and will turn him away from their door.
Meanwhile, General Vukalovic, who was parachuted into the Zenica Cage by a different plane, meets his various commanders one by one.
The General meets Major Stefan, who explains to the General that the Germans have moved units of their 11th Army Corps to attack through the gap.
Neufeld contacts General Zimmerman and sends Mallory’s team to a nearby Partisan encampment to acquire information.
The Chetniks escort Mallory’s team through the towering forests in an ancient truck to near Partisan territory.
Mallory instructs Andrea and Miller to kill two Chetniks who have been trying to follow them.
Droshny is also following the two Chetniks.
Arriving at the Partisan camp, Mallory meets Major Broznik and both go to the HQ hut, the rest to a communal rest hut.
Saunders goes to another hut to send a radio message for Mallory.
Reynolds suspects Mallory of betrayal.
A short while later, they discover Saunders murdered and his radio smashed.
While Mallory, Andrea and Miller are sure it was Droshny, Reynolds believes the murderer to be Mallory.
Mallory continues their mission while keeping the two remaining disgruntled Marines in check.
Mallory’s team travel back to the Chetnik camp, before taking Neufeld and Droshny as hostages when they rescue the captured British spies.
After releasing the British agents from a remote concrete block-house, Mallory’s team leave Neufeld, Droshny and the guards imprisoned there.
Neufeld and Droshny escape just in time to witness Mallory’s team boarding an Allied bomber to fly off to Italy.
Mallory and company have not left, but five Partisans and the agents have.
While returning to the Neretva valley, Mallory, with the help of Reynolds, realises that he must now rescue Maria and Petar from Droshny.
Neufeld contacts Zimmerman by radio and tells him that Mallory said the Partisans expect the attack to come from across the Western Gap.
Zimmerman orders his two armoured divisions around the bridge for their attack in a few hours’ time.
Having returned to the block-house, Neufeld and Droshny are astonished to be confronted by Mallory, Miller and Andrea while interrogating Maria.
Freeing Maria and her brother, Mallory returns to Neufeld’s camp and destroys his radio.
After a ride on a railway engine, the group descends into the Neretva gorge, near the dam.
Mysteries, frequent conflicts, and high-caliber MacLean prose drive the reader steadily along.
Seeing the continued development, or at least actions, of familiar characters is an unusual pleasure for MacLean readers.
Showing the perspectives of people away from the main events — the British supervisor, the German commander — adds new flavors to the tale.
A female fills a major role well without getting mushy with the main protagonist.
While he doesn’t do a bad job of mining familiar character types, MacLean’s faithful readers can anticipate what will happen to some of those characters, based on the plots of other books.
This reduces the story’s tension.
Some fans probably dote on MacLean’s hyper-detailed descriptions of structures and environments where actions take place.
Just when events are humming along, though, he deflates the excitement a bit by going on at length about the features of this guardhouse or that dam.
As in The Guns of Navarone, Andrea’s unstoppable heroics — the way he was always a “fox among hens” — are just too much to believe.
The same year, an expensive film based on Ice Station Zebra was released.
In 1967, MacLean formed a partnership with Geoffrey Reeve and Lewis Jenkins to make films for MacLean to write and Reeves to direct.
They planned to make a sequel to Guns of Navarone, only to discover that Carl Foreman, producer of the original film, had registered the title After Navarone.
This led to a falling-out with Foreman, and a delay in the Navarone sequel.
Above: American film producer Carl Foreman (1914 – 1984)
Maclean wrote a thriller about narcotics, Puppet on a Chain (1969), and Caravan to Vaccarès (1970).
These books all began as screenplays for Kastner.
Maclean said Puppet was “a change of style from the earlier books.
If I went on writing the same stuff, I’d be guying myself.“
When Puppet on a Chain was made, Maclean said:
“I’ve been connected with it for three years and it’s too much for me.
All those entrepreneurs and promoters who aren’t creative.
All that time wasted.“
“There is nobody to touch him,” said Ian Chapman.
“But he is a storyteller, not a film man.“
To be fair, screenwriting can be lucrative.
An average screenwriter earns far more than all but the most famous and highly rewarded novelists do.
Screenwriting is also a medium where talent, once spotted, can be promoted quickly into the mainstream.
I cannot really blame MacLean for being drawn into screenwriting for its potential for having your work seen by millions.
It is also a medium that is voracious in its demand for stories, a large market hungry for fresh innovative material.
MacLean excelled in creating strong characters (albeit two-dimensional), fast moving plots and (usually) realistic witty dialogue.
Screenwriting (whether cinematic or TV) is an exercise in minimalism.
If you adapt a 120,000 word novel into a 1-hour (actually 55 minutes or less) TV episode or a 2-hour screenplay, you will have to retell the story in less than 15,000 words for TV and less than 30,000 words for the big screen movie.
This is because TV and cinema is a visual medium.
The pictures tell the story.
There is normally no opportunity (nor need) to describe what is happening inside a character’s head so it is more important than ever to show the audience what is happening.
An agonized facial expression on screen might be the equivalent of a page of description in a novel in which the character’s thoughts are spilled out for the reader.
The screen does not allow the luxury of long conversations that are frequently found in novels.
The dialogue must be crisp and punchy.
If the average length of a speech is more than two lines, then your script is in trouble.
One page of script is about a minute of screen time, so that the number of pages you need to write is the same as the number of minutes on screen.
120 minutes should be no more than 120 pages of script.
Trim scenes, characters and especially dialogue by as much as 80% in order to convert your book into a standard-length screenplay.
This process will highlight sections of the novel that are mere padding or scenes that head off fom the main story at a tangent without contributing to the core plot.
You might then be able to redraft your novel as a much leaner, tighter and fitter book, which will increase its readability.
This process wii teach you a great deal about what is really important, because it is possible to tell the same story with a fraction of the original words.
Puppet on a Chain
Paul Sherman is a veteran Interpol Narcotics Bureau agent, used to independent action and blunt force tactics.
He is assisted by two attractive female agents, one an experienced operative, the other a rookie.
Sherman is in the Netherlands after receiving word about a vicious heroin smuggling ring from a friend.
However, the narco-criminals will kill ruthlessly to protect its operation and even before Sherman can leave Schiphol Airport he has already witnessed the gunning down of his key contact, been knocked half-unconscious by an assassin, and tangled with local authorities.
Puppet on a Chain has the standard twisting plot, local atmospherics and sardonic dialogue that were Maclean’s trademarks as a storyteller.
Maclean allows his protagonist to have a bantering sarcastic relationship with his assistants that provides a streak of humor as the plot unfolds.
Unfortunately, Sherman’s relationship with his assistants is used against him.
As his investigation is undermined by betrayal, leaving him constantly a half-step behind his adversaries, Sherman must resort to increasingly violent action to turn the tables.
The story culminates in a violent struggle above the streets of Amsterdam to save the life of his surviving female operative, not knowing whether anyone they meet can really be trusted.
MacLean’s lively and sometimes humorous writing keeps the reader enthralled.
You never have to wait long for action.
It leaps out from almost every page.
Sherman’s resourceful strategies, which help him oppose a massive conspiracy almost single-handed, are mostly believable.
As the story moves along, many pieces of the conspiracy are exposed in shocking fashion.
If you like seeing evildoers get their comeuppance, this tale will suit you.
You just know they will pay for their crimes, and their punishments are commensurate with the scale of their sins.
The baddies’ scheme is unrealistically convoluted.
Too many people taking too many steps to get the process from point A to point B.
The baddies sometimes have Sherman under their control — but they never eliminate him.
Sure, you want to see him stick around … but after the first couple of escapes, as he continues to unravel their schemes, you’d think they would learn.
Instead, some of the more psychopathic criminals try to get pleasure from his predicaments.
Hard to believe the big boss wouldn’t simply order him to be terminated.
Too often, MacLean portrays intelligent females as naive doe-eyed little girls where the male protagonist is concerned.
In the midst of this mission’s death and danger, he shows Sherman’s Interpol gal pals flouncing about in nightgowns and absurdly cooing over him.
An intended romantic note clangs sourly on the very last page.
He could write about women and romance more deftly.
Too bad that was usually a weakness in his works.
Caravan to Vaccarès
From all over Europe, even from behind the Iron Curtain, Gypsies make an annual pilgrimage to the holy shrine of their patron saint, Saint Sarah, in the Provence region of southern France.
But something is different about this year’s gathering, with many suspicious deaths.
Cecile Dubois and Neil Bowman, a British agent, decide to investigate.
Eavesdropping, Bowman discovers that a man named Gaiuse Strome is financing the gypsies, and his suspicions on the real identity of Strome centre on a highly wealthy aristocrat, distinguished folklorist and gastronome, Le Grand Duc Charles de Croytor, whose girlfriend Lila Delafont is a friend of Cecile.
As they follow the caravan, Bowman and Cecile find that their lives are in danger many times in an effort to uncover the secret the gypsies are so determined to hide, and before long they are running for their lives.
Action and more action!
One of MacLean’s better ruthless-yet-sardonic protagonists, tossing off bons mot as he unravels the baddies’ schemes.
Good twists: help from unexpected sources.
A great bullfighting scene, with far more psychological terror than animal cruelty.
Ancillary characters — the Duc and the ladies — enhance the tale, lifting it above a more typical solitary-agent-as-hero plotline.
Any successful thriller requires some suspension of disbelief.
However, in this case, the protagonists’ survival is almost literally unbelievable.
Lots of good fortune and several doses of fantastically poor judgment by the bad guys.
Reflects poorly (and stereotypically) on gypsy culture (though not nearly as poorly as some of his earlier books reflect on Japanese people).
A few of the scenes involving Bowman’s object of affection are a bit overdone — young women would be unlikely to act in some of those ways.
MacLean then wrote Bear Island (1971), the last of his first-person narratives.
Bear Island
A converted fishing trawler, Morning Rose carries a movie-making crew across the Barents Sea to isolated Bear Island, well above the Arctic Circle, for some on-location filming, but the script is a secret known only to the producer and screenwriter.
En route, members of the movie crew and ship’s company begin to die under mysterious circumstances.
The crew’s doctor, Marlowe, finds himself enmeshed in a violent, multi-layered plot in which very few of the persons aboard are whom they claim to be.
Marlowe’s efforts to unravel the plot become even more complicated once the movie crew is deposited ashore on Bear Island, beyond the reach of the law or outside help.
The murders continue ashore.
Marlowe, who is not what he seems to be either, discovers they may be related to some forgotten events of the Second World War.
A growing string of murders, in a situation (boat) from which nobody can escape, and needless to say the weather makes everything worse … good setting for suspense.
A protagonist with whom the reader can empathize:
Someone with superb training and immense knowledge, but still not omnipotent or omniscient.
(In other words, occasionally mistake-prone like the rest of us.)
His usual painting-with-words descriptions of the physical environment adds texture.
Enough twists, and lack of obvious clues, to keep the reader uncertain of which characters are on the wrong side of the law.
By far the largest complaint about this book is the way he wraps up all the intrigue in one huge monologue.
The good guy rambles on and on about all the interconnections among the suspects …
How Person A was blackmailing Person B, Person C was secretly related to Person D, Person E had a strong motive to kill Person F, etc.
Most of these facts weren’t known to the reader.
It’s just too much backstory to toss into what was otherwise a pretty successful yarn.
For that matter, the sheer number of tangled connections and relationships among the passengers burdens the story.
Most of MacLean’s works are mainly based on action and perhaps one large secret, explaining why the bad guys do what they do.
This felt more like a drawing-room mystery where everyone is made to appear suspicious.
That type of ending can work well, but here it is handled far more clumsily.
It is typical for a MacLean protagonist to speak in subtle allusions, literary references, and other overtly clever statements.
No great harm done there.
In Bear Island, though, too many characters converse with him in that same manner.
It is a bit too Noel Coward-ish or Oscar Wilde-ish.
The two Marys’ mannerisms are occasionally odd.
MacLean moved to Switzerland in 1970 as a tax exile.
Above: Flag of Switzerland
That year, he said, “there’s Harold Robbins, Agatha Christie, Georges Simenon and me.“
Above: American writer Harold Robbins (1916 – 1997)
Above: English writer Agatha Christie (1890 – 1976)
Above: Belgian writer Georges Simenon (1903 – 1989)
He added:
“I’m a storyteller, that’s all.
There’s no art in it, no mystique.
It’s a job like any other.
The secret, if there is one, is speed.
That’s why there’s so little sex in my books – it holds up the action.”
He said he enjoyed the plotting “but the rest is a pain“.
Above: Alistair MacLean
In 1970, MacLean, whose hero was Raymond Chandler, said:
“Give me ten years, a few more books, and maybe, maybe I’ll be half as good as Chandler.“
Above: American writer Raymond Chandler (1888 – 1959)
Kastner produced a film version of When Eight Bells Toll (1971), based on a script by MacLean, and Fear Is the Key (1972), adapted by another writer.
Another producer made Puppet on a Chain (1971), directed by Reeves, from a script by MacLean.
None performed particularly strongly at the box office.
In 1972, MacLean married his second wife, Mary Georgius.
She planned to produce three films based on his books, but the box-office failure of the last three MacLean adaptations put these on hold.
Above: Alistair and Mary MacLean
One of these proposed films was The Way to Dusty Death, which was to star Jackie Stewart.
It ended up being a 1973 novel and a 1995 film.
The Way to Dusty Death
The protagonist, Johnny Harlow, a world champion Formula 1 racing driver, was in a devastating accident during the French Grand Prix, which caused the death of his best friend, a Californian driver and Isaac Jethou, along with maiming his girlfriend.
It is only one of a series of crashes which have dogged the Grand Prix circuit in the past season, one of which led to the death of Harlow’s younger brother.
The crash appears to have completely destroyed Harlow’s nerve, and the boss of the Coronado team, MacAlpine, for which he drives, is torn between wanting to keep his star driver, and concerns that Harlow has turned into an alcoholic.
However, Harlow is playing a role, as he suspects that there is more behind these “accidents” than “acts of God”.
He soon finds out that a few people will do anything to prevent him from discovering the truth.
If you like auto racing, you’ll enjoy some of the scenes and references to the Grand Prix circuit.
As with a turbocharged engine, once the action starts, it revs along at high RPMs.
He adds some interesting looks at family dynamics, among the owner, his daughter, and her brother.
The best MacLeans are subtle, nuanced, psychological thrillers.
This one works in broad, almost cartoonish brush strokes.
The characters are largely stereotyped.
The plot is occasionally clumsy and generally unrealistic.
It takes the good-vs.-bad action a long time to start.
Nearly half the book is spent just documenting Harlow’s dissolution.
Only a patient reader will hang in long enough to reach the meat of the story.
Johnny Harlow is that worst type of Alistair MacLean protagonist:
The man of superhuman talents, fantastic ability to anticipate events, and nearly infallible judgment.
Would the world’s greatest driver transform himself into James Bond (except more so)?
This strains credibility.
Characters are forever invoking the Deity and questioning others’ sanity.
(Sample quote from a bad guy:
“God’s sake, Harlow, are you mad?“)
It is doubtful that high-level criminals (or good guys, for that matter) go around frequently spouting those sorts of phrases.
In 1973, MacLean was looking at moving to Jamaica.
Above: Flag of Jamaica
He also considered moving to Ireland, but decided to stay in Switzerland.
Above: Flag of Ireland
Geoffrey Reeve directed a film of Caravan to Vaccarès (1974).
By 1973, MacLean had sold over 24 million novels.
“I am not a writer,” he said in 1972.
“I am a businessman.
My business is writing.”
MacLean had spent a number of years focusing on screenplays, but disliked it and decided to return to being predominantly a novel writer.
“Hollywood destroys writers,” he said.
He wrote a biography of Captain James Cook, which was published in 1972.
Above: British Captain James Cook (1728 – 1779)
He wrote Breakheart Pass (1974), Circus (1975), The Golden Gate (1976), Seawitch (1977), Goodbye California (1979) and Athabasca (1980).
Breakheart Pass
The story begins with a perilous winter railroad journey through the Sierra Nevada in the 1870s in the midst of a blizzard.
Aboard the train are Nevada Governor Fairchild and his niece Marica, along with US Army cavalry Colonel Claremont and two carloads of troops.
Joining them are US Marshal Pearce, the Governor’s aide, and Pearce’s old Army buddy Major O’Brien.
Pearce, a lawman and Indian agent is transporting supposedly dangerous murderer and gunman John Deakin.
Their destination is the remote Fort Humboldt deep in the Nevada mountains, whose troops have recently been decimated by a cholera epidemic.
(This Fort Humboldt is fictional and has no connection with the Fort Humboldt State Historic Park in California.)
Dr. Molyneaux, a tropical disease expert, is also accompanying the group.
As the journey continues we slowly learn that all is not what it seems, and that none of the characters is telling the whole truth.
MacLean meticulously obliterates the lines defining exactly which characters are the good guys and which are the bad.
As the story winds down, the cunningly devious nature of the plan is finally revealed.
MacLean lingers, with intricate and well-crafted prose, over the characters we first meet and the down-at-the-heels town from which they will depart.
It is hard at first to guess who are the good guys and who are the baddies.
It is possible to read one MacLean too many …
There is comfort in the familiar, but we see a bit too much of the same old stuff:
- protagonists John and Mary [well, Marica in this case]
- unrealistically convoluted bad-guy schemes, involving senseless massacres
- the knife-wielding villain who delights in killing
- ceaseless drinking
- the one fool who tries to draw when the gun-wielding good guy has just told everyone not to, and so on
The train trip takes virtually the entire book.
MacLean’s typical unrealistic verbal jousting (going from disdainful to pseudo-romantic) between good guy and pretty woman rings false.
He has a habit of issuing bons mot from their mouths while they are in mortal danger and really need to focus on survival rather than flirtation.
Circus
Bruno Wildermann of the Wrinfield Circus is the world’s greatest trapeze artist, a clairvoyant with near-supernatural powers and an implacable enemy of the East German regime that arrested his family and murdered his wife.
The CIA needs such a man for an impossible raid on the impregnable Lubylan Fortress where his family is held, to remove a dangerous weapons formula from a heavily guarded laboratory.
Under cover of a travelling circus tour, Bruno prepares to return to his homeland.
But before the journey even begins a murderer strikes twice.
Somewhere in the circus there is a Communist agent with orders to stop Bruno at any cost.
Action moves along at a good pace.
Whenever it seems too quiet, MacLean whips up another incursion by the bad guys.
Inside (though seldom detailed) looks at circus life add some color to the proceedings.
For an awkwardly forced romance, this one isn’t all that distracting.
The infallibility of Bruno and his circus buddies:
The supreme aerialist, world’s strongest man, perfect rope-trick artist, and can’t-miss knife thrower belong in a kids’ animated series.
MacLean repeatedly describes specific circus performances as reaching new heights, outdoing even their own usual level, but without providing a good picture of what makes those performances so special.
Some factors, such as the deadly secret being held in Bruno’s old hometown, are a bit too coincidental to be credible.
The book’s very last sentence is a near carbon copy of other MacLean book endings.
The Golden Gate
A team of criminals led by mastermind Peter Branson kidnaps the President of the United States and his two guests from the Middle East, a prince and a king, on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, in a masterfully conceived and clockwork-timed operation.
Branson and his men block off both ends of the bridge, wire it with explosives, and demand half a billion dollars and a full pardon for themselves.
Any rescue attempts will result in the detonation of the explosives, which will kill the President (and his guests) and destroy the Golden Gate Bridge.
However, Branson is an egomaniac, and he cannot resist attention from the media.
So he invites the press to stay on the bridge and cover the story.
Aware that the FBI will have placed agents among them, he takes the precaution of searching them and removing the armed ones.
However, Hagenbach (the FBI’s dour but extremely adept head agent) has an ace in the hole: a hand-picked special agent, Paul Revson, who was equipped with only a camera.
Allowed to remain on the bridge, Revson sets out to foil Branson’s plans and rescue the President.
With the help of a doctor and a female journalist, Revson gets a message to his superiors, suggesting various courses of action:
Supplying drugged food to the terrorists, placing a submarine under the bridge, and trying to neutralize the terrorists’ equipment with a laser beam.
He also arranges for several carefully disguised weapons and gadgets to be smuggled to him.
Working on both ends, Revson, Hagenbach, and those working with them unleash their own carefully conceived plans.
In describing so many nefarious deeds by the bad guys, MacLean depicts well the intricate and risky steps needed to carry off such an audacious plot.
Revson’s ingenuity comes across as both impressive and realistic.
At the same time, MacLean shows how he must coordinate his efforts with those of many people outside his immediate environment, enabling the reader to experience more characters and also making it clear that one man can’t always defeat a conspiracy.
Many circumstances, and so many poor decisions by people in important jobs, must go exactly the way Branson had planned/hoped.
The reader is forced to accept this unlikely set of outcomes to reach the meat of the plot.
Part of Branson’s plan entailed extracting a presidential pardon for what he had done.
This is nonsensical, as any agreements (such as pardons) made under duress are unenforceable.
A common behavior in MacLean books is for people to refer to each other as madmen, often with little justification or at times when nobody would actually say that.
In The Golden Gate, that happens quite a lot.
Once again we are presented with a wholly unbelievable romantic angle.
MacLean was strangely fixated on the deep feelings that develop between highly skilled agents and random women with large eyes.
Seawitch
Lord Worth, ruthless and fabulously wealthy, has made a lot of enemies in the oil business.
His new offshore tension-leg platform oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, named Seawitch, is one of the biggest in the world, the only one of its kind, and will put his competitors out of business.
To destroy it and therefore be able to inflate the price of oil at will, the competitors get together and send one man to deal with Lord Worth.
The villain has a personal score to settle with Worth and kidnaps his daughters.
But Lord Worth’s daughters are betrothed to the protagonists, Mitchell and Roomer, two former police detectives, now private investigators.
They set trying to save Worth and his daughters from certain death, as the villain intends to leave them on Seawitch when he destroys it with a stolen nuclear weapon.
MacLean’s knowledge of sea vessels helps him spin the yarn.
He has clearly researched the process of aquatic oil exploration.
The characters are two-dimensional and speak in cliches.
It’s not clear why the reader should care about any of them.
The plot often seems like a recitation of events, rather than suspenseful action sequences.
Leading characters (good and bad), who are otherwise shown to be brilliant strategists, overlook obvious threats and fall into absurd traps.
The US military is, multiple times, depicted as grossly incompetent; this grows tiresome.
Goodbye California
An Islamic terrorist kidnaps nuclear scientists and steals radioactive material from a California nuclear power plant.
When Detective Sergeant Ryder’s wife is kidnapped along with nuclear scientists from the California power station where they all work, he sets out to find her.
Facing resistance from within his own police department, he leaves his job and begins taking the law into his own hands.
His son Jeff, a highway patrolman, and a few other trusted friends attempt to stop the terrorists from detonating home-built atomic bombs along California’s fault lines, which would unleash massive earthquakes killing millions of people and destroying California’s major cities.
MacLean’s prose is allowed to unwind in a fairly unconstrained way, as shown by the sheer length of Goodbye California:
315 pages – a substantial read.
He includes enough factual information to make the threat seem all too believable.
Ryder’s brutality toward corrupt officials, and his impertinence toward anyone else who questions his methods, make his character both unsympathetic and unrealistic.
Some of the other characters — a police chief with whom he clashes, one of the captive scientists — repeatedly behave in hot-tempered ways that seem drawn from a B movie.
Events that are connected, or suspected to be connected, to the evildoers’ plot are too convoluted.
After such a long buildup, and so much anticipation, the final showdown with the main bad guys is all too brief and thoroughly unsatisfying.
Athabasca
When the operations manager of an oil company operating in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska receives a mysterious anonymous threat of sabotage, his superiors call in Jim Brady Enterprises, a firm of oilfield specialists.
Dermott and Mackenzie, tough ex-field managers and now anti-sabotage specialists, arrive, but initial investigations get them nowhere.
Then the operations manager is murdered and one of the pump stations in the Trans-Alaska Pipeline is damaged, with further loss of life.
Jim Brady himself arrives to direct operations but to no avail.
Then the company’s operations at the Athabasca Oil Sands in Canada are disrupted and Dermott is nearly killed.
Despite assistance by the RCMP and the FBI, suspicions fall on many employees, but nothing can be proved.
As bodies and equipment damage mount up, Brady and his two investigators play a hunch and finally expose the men they believe to be responsible.
But even they are not the main instigators of the events, as the final chapter of the novel reveals.
The prologue gets this story off to a nice start, educating the reader about oil and its extraction.
Depictions of the fantastic digging and processing equipment that handles the tar sands are quite impressive and yet believable.
A few clues here and there give the reader some chance to start figuring out pieces of the puzzle.
The main investigators are simple stereotypes rather than realistic, flesh-and-blood characters.
They share wit and booze while spouting their theories and going about their business.
The attractive young females (more than one this time!) are simple-minded and unwary.
Their beauty alone seems to motivate various males to form attachments to them.
Some scenes are too familiar, as when the main protagonist hears bad news over the phone and thoughtlessly crushes the glass he’s holding.
We don’t meet some of the bad guys before the denouement, which is unsatisfyingly sudden and short.
We are then treated to one of those drawing-room scenes where the good guys expose the identity of one last baddie.
That sort of scene can be done well, but here it isn’t.
“I read a lot, I travel some,” MacLean said in 1975.
“But mostly what I don’t know, I invent.”
Above: Alistair MacLean
In 1976, he was living in Los Angeles and said he wanted to write a four-volume serious piece called “The Rembrandt Quarter” based on the painting The Night Watch.
These books were never published.
Above: The Night Watch, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1642
In 1977, it was announced MacLean, then worth £5 million, would divorce Mary, who said the author was impossible to live with.
Above: Mary and Alistair MacLean
In 1978, MacLean said he “just can’t understand” why people bought his novels.
“It’s not as if I write that well:
I do feel my English isn’t very good.
In fact, I’d rather write in Gaelic or Spanish than English.“
People buy MacLean because he is a distraction, an escape from the world wherein we live.
So you say you tried
But you just can’t find the pleasure
People around you givin’ you pressure
Try to resist all the hurt that’s all around you
If you taste it, it will haunt you
So come, take me by the hand
We’ll leave this troubled land
I know we can, I know we can, I know we can, I know we can
Getaway
Let’s leave today
Let’s getaway
Watch for the signs
That lead in the right direction
Not to heed them is a bad reflection
They’ll show you the way
To what you have been seeking
To ignore them you’re only cheating
So come, take me by the hand
We’ll leave this troubled land
I know we can getaway
Getaway
He said his stories tended to pit “character against character as a kind of intellectual chess game” and that he found writing “boring” and “lonely“, but “I guess it all boils down to that rather awful philosophy of take the money and run.”
“I am just a journeyman,” he said.
“I blunder along from one book to the next always hopeful that one day I will write something really good.“
The truth is no one knows what they are doing.
No one has any idea what is going on.
No one knows anything.
We are all just guessing, all just hoping that what we do will be successful, that what we do will somehow matter.
There is no manual for Life.
Life happens.
Films were still being made out of his novels, including Breakheart Pass (1975) (from Kastner), Golden Rendezvous (1977), Force 10 from Navarone (1978), and Bear Island (1979), but none did very well.
In 1976, MacLean’s second wife Mary formed a company with producer Peter Snell, Aleelle Productions, which aimed to make movies based on MacLean novels, including Golden Gate, Bear Island, The Way to Dusty Death, and Captain Cook.
This company still owned these film rights after MacLean divorced Mary in 1977, but the rights soon passed to Snell.
MacLean decided to focus on American television, writing a novella titled Air Force One is Down, which was turned down by the American television network NBC.
(It would be produced in 2012.)
Air Force One is Down
Fergus Markey is given a flashback of children who were killed by an infamous mass-murderer by the name of Arkady Dragutin, and decides to avenge them.
When he arrives in front of Dragutin’s safe house, he is denied access.
He and his allies breach the property, leading to an instant gunfight.
Meanwhile, a black vehicle is on the loose, using decoys as defense.
Despite this, Markey manages to catch up and arrest Dragutin.
At Dragutin’s trial in The Hague, the judge sentences him to life imprisonment as a punishment for masterminding wars in the process of creating a “Greater Serbia.”
A furious Dragutin vows to “rip the heart out of Europe“.
US President Harriet Rowntree is scheduled for a flight to Serbia to discuss their negotiations with NATO.
At the Russian Embassy in London, the Russian defense minister Dimitri Kozinski insists Serbia has legal rights to join NATO.
Channel 7 news reporter Francesca Romero is having conversation with Steven Featherstone.
A woman named Irene Burak warns him Kozinski may be executed by the FSB, due to a strong connection with the Western world.
The two enter a parking lot, but are ambushed an unidentified black vehicle.
Burak is taken away.
Dragutin does a stealth-method conversation with his right-hand Milosz Petrovic in Maryland that everything is going as “planned“.
At the Air Force Base in Washington, a maintenance man inserts radioactive tanks onto the landing gear compartment.
Romero boards the aircraft minutes from departure.
In a small town in Serbia, Markey and other men are breaching Petrovic’s residency.
However, once they search for him, Markey realizes the men are allies of Petrovic, but are silently taken out.
Dragutin does a “mental” connection with his hideout base in Serbia, where an Englishman is forced to digitally hijack large aircraft.
Up in the air, Air Force One is under outside control and is dropped to 3,000 feet.
Passengers on board the aircraft put on their oxygen masks, but the radioactive tanks put them to sleep.
However, Romero stays awake after she loses her grip on her phone.
With Market and Featherstone in front of the airstrip, the aircraft arrives, and a group of cars quickly kidnap the President and Romero as the latter tries to sneak away.
With them out of the aircraft, Petrovic sends it back up in the air to destroy it at open waters, witnessed by units of Fast Eagle One.
The President regains consciousness at the hideout.
Petrovic orders a man to execute Romero, but she manages to distract him and escape death.
She discovers where the President is held and storms into her cell.
Markey and Featherstone sneak into the hideout and find the two.
The President realizes Petrovic captured her in order to exchange her for Dragutin.
The four attempt to the flee the base, but only Markey manages to do so.
Petrovic sends a video tape the government and hands them a deal to release Dragutin within 12 hours and Rowntree will be released “unharmed“.
Markey tries to notify Whitehall that he knows the President’s whereabouts.
The government agrees to Petrovic’s offer, but the President is hidden inside a house surrounded by mines.
Featherstone and Romero manage to rescue her.
Dragutin is released in the open, but is removed from radar as he removes a transmitter device implanted in his arm.
The President loses consciousness after she accidentally destabilized a mine wire.
Featherstone and Romero are taken back to the base.
A missile explodes onto the surface of Markey’s open location, watched by Dragutin.
Featherstone and Romero struggle to escape a flooding well, but Markey rescues them.
Another aircraft is hijacked by Petrovic, being witnessed by the three.
Featherstone realizes he is on the assassination list, because he would have the chance to spread the news of Kozinski having the ability to gain power from the West.
The President wakes up with a concussion inside the US Military Hospital in Germany.
Sierri informs Kozinski that someone in FSB blew her cover, and are therefore assisting Dragutin, putting Kozinski’s life in jeopardy, but he orders her to stay where they are.
Markey heads for the base to arrest Dragutin as revenge for the ones he was supposed to protect under the war, because him and the United Nations did no intervention.
The US military receive the hideout’s coordinates, but Dragutin and Petrovic are moving out.
Featherstone and Sierri locate the hacker Mackenzie.
He takes over the aircraft on Featherstone’s will, but is received a video tape by Dragutin, surmised to be on the Russian aircraft heading to destroy London as a revenge for NATO destroying Belgrade.
Mackenzie succeeds to destroy the aircraft, but is murdered by a rocket launcher from behind.
However, the military ambush the hideout, Petrovic is killed and the colonel assures Dragutin is dead, and the trio says goodbye to each other.
In the Kremlin, Kozinski decides to hand Nadia a vacation to Rome, and Featherstone boards a rebuilt Air Force One at Heathrow Airport.
However, his boss Barry mentions he never would (nor did he want to) appear in Washington, neither his plan London, but being employed in Rome.
The three meet each other in Rome by coincidence.
Markey reveals Dragutin is still alive.
He brought a picture of the Sistine Chapel which is Dragutin’s target.
In the meantime, Dragutin plants a nuclear bomb underground, but Markey yells to Dragutin he wants to be taken hostage.
Dragutin leaves for a chopper, but Markey has disarmed Dragutin’s detonator, by replacing the bomb inside Dragutin’s switch, guarantees him to be dead.
Sierri is back at the Kremlin and brought evidence from Dragutin’s pocket, which reveals Dragutin had direct contact with Kozinski.
As a result, he is out of office and arrested, as well as Barry who have been received orders from Kozinski, by the quote of Dragutin:
“For an old friend’s sake“.
The trio end up in Rome for a real vacation with their own plans: Fergus on rugby finale, Featherstone on opera, and Nadia on playing lesbian.
MacLean then pitched six new ideas to networks, each with a 25 to 30-page synopsis to see which was commercially viable before The Hostage Tower was approved by CBS and aired on American television in 1980.
The Hostage Tower
Criminal mastermind Smith is being pursued by Malcolm Philpott, the head of an international peace organization.
Smith draws together a team for a heist including weapons expert Mike Graham (ex-CIA) and thieves Sabrina and Clarence.
Sabrina and Clarence secretly work for Philpott.
When Smith captures the Eiffel Tower and kidnaps the mother of the President of the United States, Philpott must enlist the help of spies to take him down.
Smith demands a ransom of $30 million without which he will blow up the tower and the President’s mother.
He has protected the tower from infiltration by stealing four high-power lasers which will shoot anyone entering who is not equipped with a protective device.
MacLean’s later works include River of Death (1981) (filmed in 1989), Partisans (1982), Floodgate (1983), and San Andreas (1984).
Often, these novels were worked on by ghost writers specializing in drama, with MacLean providing only the plots and characters.
Above: Alistair MacLean
River of Death
In 1945, with the Allies approaching, two German officers ransack a monastery in Greece and make plans to escape with the loot.
One of the Germans is left behind by his partner, while the other escapes by submarine from Wilhelmshaven.
Twenty years elapse.
A wealthy millionaire, Smith, hires Hamilton, allegedly an expert on the jungle, to lead him to the ruins of a lost Indian civilization recently discovered in the wilderness of the Amazon jungle in Brazil.
The entourage faces giant anacondas, giant spiders (only mentioned in a conversation), cannibalistic natives, and so on, discovering a settlement of Nazi war criminals and their descendants, living as if the Third Reich had never ended.
It is soon clear that Smith’s real purpose has little to do with archaeology, and more to do with revenge.
Viewed in its own right, the plotline is a promising intermingling of Nazis, gold, savage tribes, and multiple revenge.
MacLean’s superb sense for portraying characters and their surroundings is evident in many scenes, though not nearly all.
To his credit, MacLean just subtly hints at a possible future romantic thread, without nearly overdoing that angle as he did in some of his other works from this era.
Outside of its “classic MacLean” scenes, this book often consists of forgettable prose and cliched action.
For example, more than once we see a good guy knock an enemy unconscious with one blow from a knife handle.
The descriptions are boringly matter-of-fact.
Some bad guys capture the good guys, they make the typical mistake of not guarding the heroes closely enough, despite the obvious threat posed by a crew who had overcome many obstacles to infiltrate the enemy camp.
There are a few of MacLean’s usual “alcohol solves everything” scenes, though they’re not as heavy-handed as in some other books.
Partisans
During the Second World War, Pete Petersen, a Yugoslavian agent with an unlikely name, and his team of compatriots cross war-torn Yugoslavia to deliver a secret message and unmask a double agent.
It is not clear who Petersen is actually working for, as the plot meanders through the confusion of Yugoslavia’s three-way civil war, with Communist Partisans, the Serb royalist Chetniks and the Croatian fascist Ustashe fighting as much against each other as against their Italian and German occupiers.
Everyone’s loyalties are uncertain.
Obviously, the sardonic Petersen is not working for the Nazis, but what about those with him?
Much of MacLean’s prose is reminiscent of his earlier best efforts.
As the reader, you feel as if you know these characters well, and as if you are experiencing the hazards and dilemmas they face.
This feature alone makes the book worth your time and attention.
Plot and pacing are well below MacLean’s usual standard.
Most of the book is spent watching the parties reach their destination (having faced typical dangers en route), but the rest of the story is anticlimactic, hardly justifying the long buildup.
While the characters’ actions usually make sense, what comes out of their mouths is often mediocre.
The main good guys always have the unrealistically perfect answer to whatever someone else says.
Meanwhile, other characters appear goofy.
(Some of them bounce back and forth between saying the protagonist is wonderful and flying into petty rages at him.
This grows tiresome.)
There are a couple of weak and unrealistic stabs at a romantic connection.
They merely detract from the story.
It is hard to keep some of their commanders’ and adversaries’ names straight.
After reading about so many majors and generals, and who is on which side of the conflict, and whose secret orders are being followed by whom, much interest is lost in seeing what happened to those officers.
It is hard to keep writing completely fresh material after so many years, but this book echoes some earlier books too closely.
For instance, one of the main good guys is awfully similar to a character from Caravan to Vaccares.
Some dialogue is recycled too.
Example:
“By heaven, Stefan, I don’t care what people say, there’s nothing wrong with the young generation.”
(The Secret Ways)
“By heavens, Major, there’s nothing wrong with this new generation of ours.”
(Partisans)
Floodgate
A mysterious terrorist organization known as the “FFF” has detonated a mine which bursts dykes in the Netherlands and caused massive flooding of Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport.
Unless their demands are met (i.e. immediate withdrawal of all British military forces from Northern Ireland), they threaten to detonate more mines, flooding the Netherlands beneath a wall of water from the North Sea.
Colonel van de Graaf, the Amsterdam Chief of Police, puts Detective Lieutenant Peter van Effen, a man with a sardonic sense of humor and many hidden talents, in charge of the investigation.
Lieutenant van Effen is also an undercover operative with connections to a Dutch criminal gang.
Posing as a criminal explosives expert and with the help of fellow undercover officers Vasco (as a corrupt Dutch Army officer) and George (as a black market arms dealer), he sets out to infiltrate the FFF and sabotage their plans one way or another.
Matters, however, take an unexpected and dangerous turn when van Effen’s sister Julie and Annemarie Meijer (an undercover policewoman and the daughter of a powerful Dutch industrialist) are kidnapped and held hostage by the FFF.
The prose is both admirable and familiar, though some of MacLean’s typical themes are overdone.
The plot meanders and chases its tail and then doesn’t deliver at the key moment.
Instead of a typical story where good and bad guys are aware of each other and have unpleasant / violent interplay at various points, this one offers an almost purely psychological buildup that isn’t satisfyingly resolved.
As Gertrude Stein said about Oakland:
“There’s no there there.”
Above: American writer / art collector Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946)
Above: Oakland, California
As occasionally happens in MacLean’s works, the evildoers are superhumanly clever and capable, and the heroes are so smart that they understand (and professionally admire) every action and motivation of the villains.
Fallible flesh-and-blood characters would ring truer.
One glaring exception is that when several different organizations suddenly start committing awful acts on a large scale, the brilliant policemen don’t seem to consider that these groups could be related to each other.
Weird.
Another in a long line of weak romantic subplots doesn’t help matters.
There are so many “Von” and “Van” names that it is difficult to keep the characters straight.
The protagonists subsist almost entirely on, and are fairly obsessed by, stiff drinks.
San Andreas
The British Merchant Navy hospital ship San Andreas is en route from Murmansk to Halifax, Nova Scotia during World War II.
With large red crosses painted on the sides of its hull, San Andreas should have immunity from attack from all sides in the war and be granted safe passage.
The first sign of trouble occurs when the ship’s lights mysteriously fail just before a pre-dawn bombing attack that severely damages its superstructure and sinks its escort frigate.
With most of the senior officers dead and the captain incapacitated, Bosun Archie McKinnon must take charge of the damaged ship and steer her to safety despite German aircraft, U-boats, stormy Arctic weather and sabotage by an unknown traitor on board.
He must also discover the reason for the repeated German attempts to capture the San Andreas.
From the prologue on, this often reads like classic MacLean, showing how all-too-human protagonists (in a well-detailed naval setting) struggle to shorten the long odds against their very survival.
Given the amount of real action that occurs, the book feels too long by about a third.
Many pages are spent describing unenthralling events such as repairs being made to portions of the ship.
As usual, one protagonist is clever enough to anticipate almost everything the enemies will attempt … and on the few occasions when he overlooks a threat, he is full of self-recrimination, even though nobody else had seen it coming either.
That gets a bit old.
Though more substantial than in some of his other later works, the romantic subplots still don’t feel genuine.
Just too much cleverness and over-emoting, while a real war is raging around them.
Some plot twists that seem to be in the works never quite materialize.
For example, the half-German British nurse and the half-British German pilot almost seem to know each other … but we never learn more about their connections, or why they are immediately so chummy.
The universal solution to any physical or mental problem is, as in so many other MacLean books, alcohol.
If you urgently need to figure out how to evade a U-boat or how to navigate through unknown waters without instruments, spend time going into rapture over a glass of scotch.
His last novel was Santorini (1986), which was published after his death.
Santorini
While on station in the Aegean Sea under the guise of a hydrographic survey mission, the crew of Royal Navy electronic intelligence vessel HMS Ariadne witnesses two disasters at once, a mysterious strategic bomber crashing into the sea and a large pleasure yacht on fire and sinking.
The plane turns out to have been loaded with nuclear weapons, and the survivors rescued from the yacht (who include a wealthy Greek tycoon) appear somehow connected with the plane’s destruction.
With potential saboteurs aboard, Commander Talbot and the crew of the Ariadne must raise the one activated weapon before it can explode, setting off the others by sympathetic detonation and causing the nearby volcano of Santorini to explode in a tremendous eruption which would bring on a devastating tsunami and possibly a worldwide nuclear winter.
The setup is quite promising:
Nuclear weapons, shady characters, beyond-capable naval officers.
It is easy to keep turning pages.
Interesting bits of actual history (mainly of natural disasters) are thrown in to enhance the sense of danger.
As in a few of MacLean’s other later books, he spends most of the book setting up a final confrontation that then peters out disappointingly.
Too often, his protagonists seem smug and fully confident that they have anticipated and defused any threats from the bad guys.
In the face of such a potential catastrophe, real people wouldn’t act this way.
Much of the action that does occur takes place behind the scenes.
The protagonists are notified of it from afar.
The reader is told of, but not shown, some key happenings.
His estate left behind several outlines.
One of them was filmed as Death Train (1993).
Death Train
With the aid of a German nuclear physicist, dissident Russian General Konstantin Benin, a military casualty of the Soviet collapse, is conspiring to restore the Soviet Union to superpower status.
His plan is to place a nuclear bomb on a train controlled by mercenaries, led by Alex Tierney, bound for Iraq, forcing the Russian army to invade Iraq to recover it and once again mobilize its might – creating a new military union in the process.
Malcolm Philpott, the head of the United Nations Anti-Crime Organisation (UNACO), entrusts the mission of stopping the train and its deadly cargo to a multinational team led by field operative Mike Graham and information analyst Sabrina Carver who are forced to form a reluctant partnership as the international balance of power hits crisis point.
His later books were not as well received as the earlier publications, and in an attempt to keep his stories in keeping with the time, he sometimes lapsed into unduly improbable plots.
MacLean died of heart failure, age 64, in Munich on 2 February 1987.
Above: Munich (München), Germany (Deautchland)
His last years were affected by alcoholism.
According to one obituary:
“A master of nail-chewing suspense, MacLean met an appropriately mysterious death.
When he died in the Bavarian capital after a brief illness, no one, including the British Embassy, knew what he was doing there.“
Because I deem the works of Alaistair MacLean less than Literature would I advocate banning / burning his books?
Absolutely not.
Above: Chilean soldiers burn books considered politically subversive in 1973, under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Book censorship is the act of some authority taking measures to suppress ideas and information within a book.
Censorship is “the regulation of free speech and other forms of entrenched authority“.
Censors typically identify as either a concerned parent, community members who react to a text without reading, or local or national organizations.
Books have been censored by authoritarian dictatorships to silence dissent, such as the People’s Republic of China, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Books are most often censored for age appropriateness, offensive language, sexual content, amongst other reasons.
Similarly, religions may issue lists of banned books, such as the historical example of the Roman Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum and bans of such books as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses by Ayatollah Khomeini, which do not always carry legal force.
Above: The master title page of Index Librorum Prohibitorum (in Venice, 1564)
Censorship can be enacted at the national or subnational level as well, and can carry legal penalties.
In many cases, the authors of these books could face harsh sentences, exile from the country, or even execution.
“Almost every country places some restrictions on what may be published, although the emphasis and the degree of control differ from country to country and at different periods.“
There are a variety of reasons why books may be censored.
Materials are often suppressed due to the perceived notion of obscenity.
This obscenity can apply to materials that are about sexuality, race, drugs, or social standing.
The censorship of literature on the charge of obscenity appears to have begun in the mid-19th century.
The rise of the middle class, who had evangelical backgrounds, brought about this concern with obscenity.
Book censorship has been happening in society for as long as they have been printed, and even before with manuscripts and codices.
The use of book censorship has been a common practice throughout our history.
Governments have also sought to ban certain books which they perceive to contain material that could threaten, embarrass, or criticize them.
Throughout history, societies practiced various forms of censorship in the belief that the community, as represented by the government, was responsible for molding the individual.
According to Harvard Library, books have been getting banned since 1637 when the first book was recorded to be banned.
Other leaders outside the government have banned books, including religious authorities.
Church leaders who prohibit members of their faith from reading the banned books may want to shelter them from perceived obscene, immoral, or profane ideas or situations or from ideas that may challenge the teaching of that religion.
Religious materials have been subject to censorship as well.
For example, various scriptures have been banned (and sometimes burned at several points in history).
The Bible has been censored and even banned, as have other religious scriptures.
Above: The Gutenberg Bible, published in the mid-15th century by Johannes Gutenberg, is the first published Bible.
Similarly, books based on the scriptures have also been banned, such as Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You, which was banned in the Russian Empire for being anti-establishment.
The banning of a book often has the effect of enticing people to seek the book.
The action of banning the book creates an interest in the book which has the opposite effect of making the work more popular.
Above: Nazi Germany burned works of Jewish authors, and other works considered “un-German“
Perhaps I could increase sales of the works of MacLean by suggesting his books should be banned?
No.
Let each individual come to a book free to decide whether they enjoy the book or not themselves.
Let us not allow others to dictate what we should read or how we should think.
Certainly, parents should monitor what their impressionable children read, but once a child has proven to be emotionally and intellectually capable of making their own decisions then let their reading be their choice even if we wish their choices were more discerning than they are.
I prefer that people read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War instead of Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal.
I prefer that politicians view George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as a cautionary tale rather than an instruction manual.
I prefer people who read Rousseau over those who read Harold Robbins, but just as we should not control how people think neither can we command that they think.
Above: Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778)
I turn from MacLean and instead consider the wisdom of Ray Bradbury.
Above: American writer Ray Bradbury (1920 – 2012)
Shortly after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the conclusion of World War II, the United States focused its concern on the Soviet atomic bomb project and the expansion of Communism.
Above: Atomic bombing of Japan: Mushroom clouds over Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945)
The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), formed in 1938 to investigate American citizens and organizations suspected of having communist ties, held hearings in 1947 to investigate alleged communist influence in Hollywood movie-making.
Above: Chairman Martin Dies (1900 – 1972) of the House Committee investigating Un-American activities, proofs and reads to the press his statement replying to President Roosevelt’s attack on the Committee, 26 October 1938
These hearings resulted in the blacklisting of the “Hollywood Ten“, a group of influential screenwriters and directors.
The following ten individuals were cited for contempt of Congress and blacklisted after refusing to answer questions about their alleged involvement with the Communist Party:
- Alvah Bessie, screenwriter (1904 – 1985)
- Herbert Biberman, screenwriter and director (1900 – 1971)
- Lester Cole, screenwriter (1904 – 1985)
- Edward Dmytryk, director (1908 – 1999)
- Ring Lardner Jr., screenwriter (1915 – 2000)
- John Howard Lawson, screenwriter (1894 – 1977)
- Albert Maltz, screenwriter (1908 – 1985)
- Samuel Ornitz, screenwriter (1890 – 1957)
- Adrian Scott, producer and screenwriter (1911 – 1972)
- Dalton Trumbo, screenwriter (1905 – 1976)
The year HUAC began investigating Hollywood is often considered the beginning of the Cold War (1947 – 1991), as in March 1947, the Truman Doctrine was announced.
(The Truman Doctrine is a foreign policy that pledges American “support for democracies against authoritarian threats“.
The Doctrine originated with the primary goal of countering the growth of the Soviet bloc during the Cold War.
Truman told Congress that:
“It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures“.
Truman contended that because totalitarian regimes coerced free peoples, they automatically represented a threat to international peace and the national security of the United States.)
Above: US President Harry S. Turman (1884 – 1972)
By about 1950, the Cold War was in full swing.
The American public’s fear of nuclear warfare and Communist influence was at a feverish level.
The government’s interference in the affairs of artists and creative types infuriated Bradbury.
He was bitter and concerned about the workings of his government, and a late 1949 nighttime encounter with an overzealous police officer would inspire Bradbury to write “The Pedestrian“, a short story which would go on to become “The Fireman” and then Fahrenheit 451.
The rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings hostile to accused Communists, beginning in 1950, deepened Bradbury’s contempt for government overreach.
Above: US Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908 – 1957)
The Golden Age of Radio occurred between the early 1920s to the late 1950s, during Bradbury’s early life, while the transition to the Golden Age of Television (1947 – 1960) (an era of television in the US marked by its large number of live productions) began right around the time he started to work on the stories that would eventually lead to Fahrenheit 451.
Above: Photograph of a young girl listening to a radio during the Great Depression. From 1920 through the end of WW2, a period called the Golden Age of Radio, radio was the only broadcast entertainment medium, and families gathered to listen to the home radio receiver in the evening. The radio shown is a cathedral-style vacuum tube radio.
Bradbury saw these forms of media as a threat to the reading of books, indeed as a threat to society, as he believed they could act as a distraction from important affairs.
Above: Screen shot from Westinghouse Studio One production of The Night America Trembled (9 September 1957)
This contempt for mass media and technology would express itself through Mildred and her friends and is an important theme in the book.
Bradbury’s lifelong passion for books began at an early age.
After he graduated from high school, his family could not afford for him to attend college, so Bradbury began spending time at the Los Angeles Public Library where he educated himself.
As a frequent visitor to his local libraries in the 1920s and 1930s, he recalls being disappointed because they did not stock popular science fiction novels, like those of H. G. Wells, because, at the time, they were not deemed literary enough.
Above: English writer Herbert George Wells (1866 – 1946)
Between this and learning about the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, a great impression was made on Bradbury about the vulnerability of books to censure and destruction.
(The Great Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt, was one of the largest and most significant libraries of the Ancient World.
It is unknown precisely how many scrolls were housed at any given time, but estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 at its height.
Alexandria came to be regarded as the capital of knowledge and learning, in part because of the Great Library.
Many important and influential scholars worked at the Library during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC.
The influence of the Library declined gradually over the course of several centuries.
This decline began with the purging of intellectuals from Alexandria in 145 BC during the reign of Ptolemy VIII Physcon (184 – 116 BC), which resulted in Aristarchus of Samothrace (220 – 143 BC), the head librarian, resigning and exiling himself to Cyprus.
Many other scholars fled to other cities, where they continued teaching and conducting scholarship.
The Library, or part of its collection, was accidentally burned by Julius Caesar (100 – 44 BC) during his civil war in 48 BC, but it is unclear how much was actually destroyed and it seems to have either survived or been rebuilt shortly thereafter.
The geographer Strabo (64 – 24 BC) mentions having visited the Mouseion in around 20 BC.
The prodigious scholarly output of Didymus Chalcenterus (63 – 10 BC) in Alexandria from this period indicates that he had access to at least some of the Library’s resources.
The Library dwindled during the Roman period, from a lack of funding and support.
Its membership appears to have ceased by the 260s AD.
Between 270 and 275, Alexandria saw a Palmyrene invasion and an imperial counterattack that probably destroyed whatever remained of the Library, if it still existed.)
Above: Artistic rendering of the Library of Alexandria, based on archaeological evidence
Later, as a teenager, Bradbury was horrified by the Nazi book burnings and later by Joseph Stalin’s campaign of political repression, the “Great Purge“, in which writers and poets, among many others, were arrested and often executed.
Above: A member of the SA throws confiscated books into the bonfire during the public burning of “un-German” books on the Opernplatz in Berlin.
Above: Soviet politician Joseph Stalin (1878 – 1953)
Above: People looking for relatives among the dead of the mass execution of between 9,000 and 11,000 people in the Ukrainian town of Vinnytsia by the Soviet secret police NKVD during the Great Purge (1936 – 1938). Scholars estimate the death toll for the Great Purge to be roughly 700,000.
(Despite legal provisions, freedom of the press in Turkey has steadily deteriorated from 2010 onwards, with a precipitous decline following the attempted coup in July 2016.
Above: Flag of the Republic of Türkiye
The Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has arrested hundreds of journalists, closed or taken over dozens of media outlets, and prevented journalists and their families from travelling.
Above: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
By some accounts, Turkey currently accounts for 1/3 of all journalists imprisoned around the world.
Since 2013, Freedom House ranks Turkey as “Not Free“.
Reporters Without Borders ranked Turkey at the 149th place out of over 180 countries, between Mexico and the Democratic Republic of Congo, with a score of 44.16.
Above: Logo of Reporters sans frontières (Reporters Without Borders)
In the third quarter of 2015, the independent Turkish press agency Bianet recorded a strengthening of attacks on opposition media under the Justice and Development Party (AKP) interim government.
Bianet’s final 2015 monitoring report confirmed this trend and underlined that, once the AKP had regained a majority in Parliament after the AKP interim government period, the Turkish government further intensified its pressure on the country’s media.
According to Freedom House,
The government enacted new laws that expanded both the state’s power to block websites and the surveillance capability of the National Intelligence Organization (MİT).
Journalists faced unprecedented legal obstacles as the courts restricted reporting on corruption and national security issues.
The authorities also continued to aggressively use the penal code, criminal defamation laws and the antiterrorism law to crack down on journalists and media outlets.
Verbal attacks on journalists by senior politicians — including Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the incumbent Prime Minister who was elected President in August — were often followed by harassment and even death threats against the targeted journalists on social media.
Meanwhile, the government continued to use the financial and other leverage it holds over media owners to influence coverage of politically sensitive issues.
Several dozen journalists, including prominent columnists, lost their jobs as a result of such pressure during the year, and those who remained had to operate in a climate of increasing self-censorship and media polarization.”
Above: Seal of the Turkish National Intelligence
In 2012 and 2013 the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) ranked Turkey as the worst journalist jailer in the world (ahead of Iran and China), with 49 journalists sitting in jail in 2012 and 40 in 2013.
Twitter’s 2014 Transparency Report showed that Turkey filed over five times more content removal requests to Twitter than any other country in the second half of 2014, with requests rising another 150% in 2015.
During its rule since 2002 the ruling AKP has gradually expanded its control over media.
Today, numerous newspapers, TV channels and internet portals dubbed as Yandaş Medya (“Partisan Media“) or Havuz Medyası (“Pool Media“) continue their heavy pro-government propaganda.
Several media groups receive preferential treatment in exchange for AKP-friendly editorial policies.
Some of these media organizations were acquired by AKP-friendly businesses through questionable funds and processes.
Media not friendly to AKP, on the other hand, are threatened with intimidation, inspections and fines.
These media group owners face similar threats to their other businesses.
An increasing number of columnists have been fired for criticizing the AKP leadership.
The AKP leadership has been criticized by multiple journalists over the years because of censorship.)
“America isn’t easy.
America is advanced citizenship.
You’ve gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight.
It’s gonna say:
“You want free speech?
Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who is standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.”
You want to claim this land as the land of the free?
Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag.
The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest.
Now show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms.
Then, you can stand up and sing about the land of the free.”
(Aaron Sorkin, The American President)
I may not like the writing of MacLean, but I want each and every one to come to their own conclusions and not take my opinion as one they should accept or reject but rather make that judgment themselves only after they have read him.
Above: The Thinker, Auguste Rodin (1904), Musée Rodin, Paris
Between 1947 and 1948, Bradbury wrote “Bright Phoenix“, a short story about a librarian who confronts a “Chief Censor“, who burns books.
An encounter Bradbury had in 1949 with the police inspired him to write the short story “The Pedestrian” in 1951.
In “The Pedestrian“, a man going for a night-time walk in his neighborhood is harassed and detained by the police.
In the society of “The Pedestrian“, citizens are expected to watch television as a leisurely activity, a detail that would be included in Fahrenheit 451.
In late 1949, Bradbury was stopped and questioned by a police officer while walking late one night.
When asked “What are you doing?“, Bradbury wisecracked, “Putting one foot in front of another.“
This incident inspired Bradbury to write the 1951 short story “The Pedestrian“.
In “The Pedestrian“, Leonard Mead is harassed and detained by the city’s only remotely operated police cruiser for taking night-time walks, something that has become extremely rare in this future-based setting, as everybody else stays inside and watches television (“viewing screens“).
Alone and without an alibi, Mead is taken to the “Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies” for his peculiar habit.
Fahrenheit 451 would later echo this theme of an authoritarian society distracted by broadcast media.
“An ad I found in the Los Angeles Times for a CD-ROM encyclopedia, the text occupied a whole page:
“You used to walk across town in the pouring rain to use our encyclopedia.
We are pretty confident that we can get your kid to click and drag.“
I think it was the kid’s walk in the rain that constituted the real education, at least of the senses and the imagination.
It is the unpredictable incidents between official events that add up to a life, the incalculable that gives it value.
The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between.
New timesaving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free, in a world that seems to be accelerating around them.
The rheotric of efficiency around these technologies suggests that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued – that the vast array pf pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular, of woolgathering, cloud gazing, wandering, window shopping, are nothing but voids to be filled by something more definite, more productive or faster paced.
I know these things have their uses and I use them, but I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival.
I like walking because it is slow and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour.
If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.”
(Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking)
Elements of both “Bright Phoenix” and “The Pedestrian” would be combined into The Fireman, a novella published in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1951.
Bradbury was urged by Stanley Kauffmann, a publisher at Ballantine Books, to make The Fireman into a full novel.
Bradbury finished the manuscript for Fahrenheit 451 in 1953.
The novel was published later that year.
In 1954, Galaxy Science Fiction reviewer Groff Conklin placed the novel “among the great works of the imagination written in English in the last decade or more.”
The Chicago Sunday Tribune‘s August Derleth described the book as “a savage and shockingly prophetic view of one possible future way of life“, calling it “compelling” and praising Bradbury for his “brilliant imagination“.
Over half a century later, Sam Weller wrote:
“Upon its publication, Fahrenheit 451 was hailed as a visionary work of social commentary“.
Today, Fahrenheit 451 is still viewed as an important cautionary tale about conformity and the evils of government censorship.
When the novel was first published, there were those who did not find merit in the tale.
Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas were less enthusiastic, faulting the book for being “simply padded, occasionally with startlingly ingenious gimmickry, often with coruscating cascades of verbal brilliance but too often merely with words.”
Reviewing the book for Astounding Science Fiction, P. Schuyler Miller characterized the title piece as “one of Bradbury’s bitter, almost hysterical diatribes“, while praising its “emotional drive and compelling, nagging detail“.
Similarly, The New York Times was unimpressed with the novel and further accused Bradbury of developing a “virulent hatred for many aspects of present-day culture, namely, such monstrosities as radio, TV, most movies, amateur and professional sports, automobiles, and other similar aberrations which he feels debase the bright simplicity of the thinking man’s existence“.
Discussions about Fahrenheit 451 often center on its story foremost as a warning against state-based censorship.
Indeed, when Bradbury wrote the novel during the McCarthy era, he was concerned about censorship in the United States.
During a radio interview in 1956, Bradbury said:
I wrote this book at a time when I was worried about the way things were going in this country four years ago.
Too many people were afraid of their shadows.
There was a threat of book burning.
Many of the books were being taken off the shelves at that time.
And of course, things have changed a lot in four years.
Things are going back in a very healthy direction.
But at the time I wanted to do some sort of story where I could comment on what would happen to a country if we let ourselves go too far in this direction, where then all thinking stops, and the dragon swallows his tail, and we sort of vanish into a limbo and we destroy ourselves by this sort of action.”
Where all thinking stops.
As time went by, Bradbury tended to dismiss censorship as a chief motivating factor for writing the story.
Instead he usually claimed that the real messages of Fahrenheit 451 were about the dangers of an illiterate society infatuated with mass media and the threat of minority and special interest groups to books.
In the late 1950s, Bradbury recounted:
In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451, I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades.
But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog.
I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned.
The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering.
From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear.
There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there.
This was not fiction.”
This story echoes Mildred’s “seashell ear-thimbles” (i.e., a brand of in-ear headphones) that act as an emotional barrier between her and Montag.
(A husband who might just as well not have been there.
“One of the many depressing truths about the relationship between the sexes is simply that man hardly exists in a woman’s world.
Women’s dependence on him is only material, of a “physical” nature, something like a tourist’s dependence on an airline, a café proprietor’s on his espresso machine, a car’s on gasoline, a TV set’s on electric current.
Such dependencies hardly involve agonizing.“
(Esther Vilar, The Manipulated Man)
In a 2007 interview, Bradbury maintained that people misinterpret his book and that Fahrenheit 451 is really a statement on how mass media like television marginalizes the reading of literature.
Regarding minorities, he wrote in his 1979 Coda:
There is more than one way to burn a book.
And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.
Every minority – be it Baptist / Unitarian / Irish / Italian / Octogenarian / Zen Buddhist / Zionist / Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib / Republican / Mattachine / Four Square Gospel – feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse.
Fire Captain Beatty, in my novel Fahrenheit 451, described how the books were burned first by minorities, each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever.
Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some seventy-five separate sections from the novel.
Students, reading the novel, which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, wrote to tell me of this exquisite irony.
Judy-Lynn del Rey, one of the new Ballantine editors, is having the entire book reset and republished this summer with all the ‘damn‘s and ‘hell‘s back in place.”
Book-burning censorship, Bradbury would argue, was a side-effect of these two primary factors.
This is consistent with Captain Beatty’s speech to Montag about the history of the firemen.
According to Bradbury, it is the people, not the state, who are the culprit in Fahrenheit 451.
Fahrenheit’s censorship is not the result of an authoritarian program to retain power, but the result of a fragmented society seeking to accommodate its challenges by deploying the power of entertainment and technology.
As Captain Beatty explains:
“The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!
All the minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean.
It didn’t come from the Government down.
There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!
Technology, mass exploitation and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.”
A variety of other themes in the novel besides censorship have been suggested.
Two major themes are resistance to conformity and control of individuals via technology and mass media.
Bradbury explores how the government is able to use mass media to influence society and suppress individualism through book burning.
The characters Beatty and Faber point out that the American population is to blame.
Due to their constant desire for a simplistic, positive image, books must be suppressed.
Beatty blames the minority groups, who would take offense to published works that displayed them in an unfavorable light.
Faber went further to state that, rather than the government banning books, the American population simply stopped reading on their own.
He notes that the book burnings themselves became a form of entertainment for the general public.
In a 1994 interview, Bradbury stated that Fahrenheit 451 was more relevant during this time than in any other, stating that:
“It works even better because we have political correctness now.
Political correctness is the real enemy these days.
It is thought control and freedom of speech control.“
As a teacher, with the median age of my students being 20-something, I frequently hear comments like:
“I don’t like to read.
I can’t read handwriting.
I get my news from social media.”
They simply stopped reading on their own.
I frequently see young women (and men), walking down a crowded street, wearing huge headphones over their ears and heads down staring at their cellphone screens.
I have seen cyclists and drivers using their cellphones while their machines are in motion.
Very few students tell me that they like to walk.
My younger colleagues find my desire to ramble – odd.
I often recall a scene from Friends where Pheobe criticizes Chandler and Joey for spending all their spare time watching TV, to which they respond with:
“Inside – good. Outside – bad.“
Above: Scene from Friends: Pheobe (Lisa Kudrow), Joey (Matt LeBlanc) and Chandler (Matthew Perry)
I feel we live in a world where people don’t act as much as they react, a world where even mental effort is too exhausting.
And that is the lure of MacLean.
That is the lure of the machines that dominate our lives.
Movement – mental or physical – demands too much time and effort.
Better to watch than participate.
Easier to complain than campaign.
Above: Scene from WALL-E (2008)
We have arrived at our destination.
The place where all thinking stops.
Mind the gap.
Sources
- Wikipedia
- Wikiquote
- Google Photos
- AlistairMacLean.com
- Plot and Structure, James Scott Bell
- The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker
- Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
- Daily Rituals, Mason Currey
- “Getaway”, Earth, Wind and Fire
- How to Be a Writer, Stewart Ferris
- Air Force One is Down, Alistair MacLean
- Athabaska, Alistair MacLean
- Bear Island, Alistair MacLean
- Breakheart Pass, Alistair MacLean
- Caravan to Vaccarès, Alistair MacLean
- Circus, Alistair MacLean
- The Dark Crusader, Alistair MacLean
- Death Train, Alistair MacLean
- Fear is the Key, Alistair MacLean
- Floodgate, Alistair MacLean
- Force 10 from Navarone, Alistair MacLean
- The Golden Gate, Alistair MacLean
- The Golden Rendezvous, Alistair MacLean
- Goodbye California, Alistair MacLean
- The Guns of Navarone, Alistair MacLean
- HMS Ulysses, Alistair MacLean
- The Hostage Tower, Alistair MacLean
- Ice Station Zebra, Alistair MacLean
- The Last Frontier, Alistair MacLean
- Night Without End, Alistair MacLean
- Partisans, Alistair MacLean
- Puppet on a Chain, Alistair MacLean
- River of Death, Alistair MacLean
- San Andreas, Alistair MacLean
- Santorini, Alistair MacLean
- The Satan Bug, Alistair MacLean
- Seawitch, Alistair MacLean
- South by Java Head, Alistair MacLean
- The Way to Dusty Death, Alistair MacLean
- When Eight Bells Toll, Alistair MacLean
- Get Started in Creative Writing, Stephen May
- Writing for Dollars, John McCollister
- “Where is my mind?“, The Pixies
- Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit
- Techniques of the Selling Writer, Dwight V. Swain
- The Manipulated Man, Esther Vilar
- Write a Blockbuster and Get It Published, Lee Weatherly and Helen Corner
