I am refering back to the post above regarding RIVER OF DEATH and the differences between the US Fawcett paperback edition and the UK hardback. Well, I managed to obtain a UK paperback copy a month or so ago and spent some of this morning going back over the text alterations. The UK paperback is exactly the same as the UK hardback. This suggests the alterations were made specifically for the American audience, although I am struggling to understand why these alterations have been made as they lend nothing extra to the narrative, in fact they frequently worsen the prose. Perhaps American readers couldn't understand the word 'dark' and needed 'black' to clarify, for instance, but I find that explanation condescending and unlikely. I have a suspicion they may be MacLean's own alterations, and possibly only for the Fawcett edition as it did not appear until 1983, a full year after River of Death was published in a soft cover in the UK. Of course, I can't tell for certain without seeing a US hardback copy.
A nice series of covers including, I think, a Spanish copy. The original Fontana wrap-around paperback [bottom right] is quite good.
Although I am not reading Alistair MacLean’s novels in order, there is something depressingly familiar about Ice Station Zebra which makes it a slightly disappointing entry into his canon.
The early sections of the novel outline the premise of the story: Dr John Carpenter is assigned to the USS Dolphin, a nuclear submarine, to attempt a reach at Drift Ice Station Zebra on the Arctic wastelands. The station has been sending SOS messages regarding a disastrous fire and the crew need rescuing. Carpenter’s mission however is completely different to that he tells the sub’s commander, Swanson. Different three times, in fact, as Carpenter alters his story – and his name – in a piece-meal fashion depending on how it suits his circumstances. The circumstances of everyone else, including a submarine crew, don’t even come into it. And of course, like many MacLean heroes, Carpenter has an unspoken and compromising affiliation to the Drift Station team, one which would make him totally unsuitable for the task ahead of him.
As the novel progresses and incident follows incident, I became aware that MacLean was reworkings elements of Night Without End, and that he would rework these again when scripting Athabasca: journeys through Arctic terrain, the fear and dread of death in the frozen north, the sudden unexpected occurrences threatening life and limb, a small abandoned hut containing all suspects, a hidden agenda for one or more of the cast. While there are taut and tense descriptions, the novel is written in an episodic fashion which dilutes the suspense.
This isn’t to say Ice Station Zebra is a bad novel. It isn’t; at times it is very good. The author’s description of the makeshift morgue at Station Zebra was brilliant. So too a vivid and harrowing account of death by asphyxiation aboard the stricken submarine. But florid description doesn’t help the telling and Ice Station Zebra misses some clarity of thought, chiefly from the first person narrator. The protagonist basically provides only the narrative he wants us to hear, or read, and is at pains to miss out acres of information regarding action that we either have not seen [because the narrator never saw it], cannot see [because it happened before the narrator arrived] or will not see [because the narrator deems it unnecessary to tell anyone]. This includes never fully telling Commander Swanson the purpose of his posting on the Dolphin. Oh, sure, Carpenter has a letter of authority, but nobody – including Swanson – adequately believes it and you’d think, for such an important mission he just might be told. All the explanations in the world, or on the page, as it were, cannot convince me the captain of a navy ship would not be informed of the danger and importance of his sortie. In John Sturges’s fine movie adaptation, the script writers cleared this up in a few clipped sentences with chain-of-command orders, MacLean prefers to have Carpenter several times wave the ‘letter of authority’ card – or letter, I guess – in Swanson’s face. It makes the chemistry between the two men utterly unbelievable. There is no way the captain of a navy vessel would cede authority to a civilian. It simply doesn’t happen. MacLean, as an ex-navy serviceman knows this, so it is surprising he allows his characters to behave so out of, well, character.
Clues and red herrings for the operation at hand persist in the manner they may for a detective novel. Fulfilling the Agatha Christie style ‘blink-and-you-miss-it’ prose, MacLean induces a final chapter of relentless monologue where all the signs are explained and all the culprits revealed. The problem is, we haven’t seen half the clues and even Carpenter, in his explanations, stresses that his ideas are only suppositions: “they must have… they probably… unseen by anybody…” Every solution is simply too convenient. It is only now, in the final few pages, that Maclean bothers to tell us why Carpenter's MI6 employers are so desperate to reach Ice Station Zebra. It is because a Soviet spy satellite, Samos III, has gone rogue and crashed into the Arctic ice cap, conveniently near the Drift Station. This might be too much of a coincidence, until you learn that the Russians had known Samos III was out of control far enough ahead of time to infiltrate the Drift Station crew. That isn’t simply a coincidence, it is a manipulated occurrence that could in no way have been successful: even re-entering from a proposed orbit Samos III could have landed anywhere within hundreds of miles of the Drift Station, it was mighty fortuitous the satellite landed close to the enclave. Carpenter’s longwinded explanation of Samos III is another of those moments when you just wish Maclean had included this detail at an earlier point, when Carpenter and Swanson discuss the mission perhaps. It would certainly stop these eyebrows raising. Plotwise, there is no need to disguise this fact. Had Carpenter acknowledged the mission’s target, the stakes would be raised for the crew and for the reader, as it is, all the sabotage, desperate crawls through sub-zero temperatures, murders and intrigue eventually feel almost entirely superfluous as to why the Dolphin is heading under the Arctic ice.
Okay, the action is readable and some sections are very fine, but the plotting is abysmal and the half-hidden conjecture makes for a heavy handed ending. There is nothing very new here, even for an early-ish MacLean, and the book lacks gravitas and emotion. The characters are a tough, hardy lot who endure much hardship and overcome all the odds with a flickering grimace of emotion and a few timely punches and gunshots.
To be brutal, as I was with The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra is better structured as a cinematic outing than it is on the page. The novel is a good read, for most of the way, but falters badly at the end and is neither believable nor particularly empathetic.
It's amusing that one of the covers says "author of The Guns Of Navarone" which is fair enough (one of his best-known) while another says "author of The Golden Gate" which is one of his poorest.
I haven't read Zebra for years, but as frequently happens I'm now wanting to read it again. I remember it being exciting but not making much sense if you stopped to think about it- as so often with this author.
.... and I have just finished rereading "Zebra". Loved it again, it's a fast and (of course) highly improbable tale told by a very unreliable narrator which as Chris has said above is a trademark of this author. It's still one of the good ones, before his talent fell into a whisky bottle, and I prefer it to the film (which I also like).
The second Alistair MacLean novel written under his short-lived pseudonym Ian Stuart features a typically hard-boiled, physically scarred and too intelligent for his own suppositions hero chasing a stolen vial of a deadly biological weapon. The basic premise is very good, touching as it does on Ian Fleming’s similar notions for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. You wonder, in fact, if Fleming hadn’t read it, pinched and refined the plot ideas for his own 1963 opus.
Here the British medical research establishment at Mordon hides a top secret military facility that perfects articles for chemical, biological and germ warfare. Mordon is a fictional rehash of the very real Porton Down. A group of flawed scientists working in Mordon’s Laboratory A have developed a lethal concentrated strain of an airborne pathogen – cryptically referred to as the Satan Bug – and a cache of the apocalyptic weapon has been stolen. The police, under the direction of a secret service head known as the General, recruit Pierre Cavell, who [handily] was once the security chief at Mordon. Cavell turns out to be remarkably capable of investigation, interrogation and, when it counts, intimidation and violence. He’s as blunt and distasteful a hero as you can get. MacLean even has the man sport a vicious facial scar, so he’s as unattractive as he is unpleasant. Cavell has just twenty four hours to uncover the culprit and return the viruses. Things do not quite go according to plan, despite Cavell having the knack of foresight and insight into his antagonist’s movements. This useful skill becomes so prevalent it becomes virtually unbelievable.
So, let’s discuss what is good about the novel.
The biological weapons angle is great. So are the final two chapters which pound along with some of the drama and intensity I recognise in MacLean’s best work. The title.
There.
Now the bad.
MacLean employs a first person narrator and as a storyteller Cavell is the dullest hero you could possibly encounter. He lacks even a modicum of florid language among his tremendously longwinded explanations and descriptions. The exercise is just too long and dull, all those talks by firesides in cottages, drives to and from London or Paris, in-depth detail about security measures, a whole gamut of clues we neither learn of [from Cavell] nor are party to [because Cavell as a narrator – read Maclean as writer – doesn’t tell us]. Worse is the constant relating of information via Cavell’s mouthpiece and his seemingly bottomless supply of important personal details regarding his suspects. I became less interested in the mystery of the break-in than the mystery of how Cavell could piece together the convoluted events and complicated personalities from such small and scanty clues. A clod of earth? A left handed pair of shears? A missing dot above the ‘I’ on a letter head? The identity and history of the villain? The list of Cavell’s revelations is long and, for the first time, MacLean offers a chapter during which his hero summaries all the solutions and where they take us in a monologue of excruciating tedium.
What rankles is that all the incidents Cavell TELLS US about are excellent scenarios and would have been far better revealed had MacLean deemed to SHOW US. The Satan Bug is overloaded with dialogue, much of it covering the same ground, and while dialogue moves narratives forward, in a thriller it can also drag proceedings to a standstill through lack of animation. That is what happens here. By the time MacLean shakes off his shackles for the exciting climax, I was worn out by Cavell’s almost non-stop heavy handed chatter. I am a fast reader, but I spent a whole week digesting this slow moving drama.
Sadly, not only has MacLean pumped his novel full of dozens of red herrings which need both revealing, then debunking, before the actual prescribed events unfold – a tiresome repetitive technique which is exhausting to this reader – but he doesn’t even have the strength of his convictions and alters the villain’s motivations at the last moment. Any thoughts I had that the bad Dr Gregori was an insane multinational terrorist competing with Blofeld and SPECTRE to be the world’s greatest and most dastardly super-nemesis were sadly dashed. He’s just a mobster, this time with a chemistry degree. How disappointing is that?
They made a film of this, and I sense the cinematic potential, but the novel is only partway worthwhile and that part comes too late to make me consider The Satan Bug anything but a failure. Like his other Ian Stuart novel The Dark Crusader, MacLean seems to want his hero to inhabit a world familiar to us from James Bond; in fact the two adventures seem to pre-empt the Bond movies in their fantastical elements and certainly compete well against Fleming’s latter-day world endangering schemes. Unfortunately, neither book is succinct enough to challenge The Master, chiefly because MacLean’s method of utilising a first person narrator to both inform and disguise, often without corroborative witnessed evidence, makes the stories and the heroes unbelievable. While readers enjoy surprises, they also enjoy first-hand details and too often MacLean prefers second-hand reportage. I don’t want to read a ‘report’ of the goings on at Mordon, I want to read about what happened and the people it happened to and how, from the break-in, to the murders, the kidnappings, the bribery, the investigations, the chase, the fight, the denouement. This one-note, one-voice style of storytelling just doesn’t work.
Without going into a detailed review such as the above, I feel I must defend this book a little. I've read it twice and enjoyed it, both times being swept up in the pace of the story. Yes, there's an element of us being told rather shown details but that’s because the author has decided to go first person rather than third which has disadvantages as well as advantages for his style of writing.
I felt there were good characters and an excellent premise. It's not among his best but it's streets ahead of anything from "The Way Yo Dusty Death" onwards. *
The film is faithful in some parts but diverges wildly from the book in others - some would say that’s a good thing! - most obviously in changing the setting to USA and most or all of the character names. Richard Basehart stands out among the cast.
* I might have said "Caravan To Vaccares" but didn't want to get sidetracked.
* I might have said "Caravan To Vaccares" but didn't want to get sidetracked.
Probably a good idea @Barbel - our opinions differ tremendously over that one too ! Reading through all the novels, and not in any particular order, it is amazing to find IMO MacLean's writing quality going up and down throughout his career, big peaks and troughs, minor peaks and big troughs. He simply isn't consistent and that's a real problem when assessing his work as a whole. Also when reading reviews online, people's opinions - like ours - diverge tremendously. He seems to be quite divisive critically too, other than I suppose where it counts which is in the number of books sold.
@Barbel I don't think we share differing allusions over this one...
SANTORINI
1986
I could probably describe Santorini in one word, but it wouldn’t be printable. This novel, Alistair MacLean’s last, follows many of the precepts that have endured throughout his writing, notably a sea-bound location, ridiculously high alcohol consumption, an unfathomable plot and dialogue heavy incident. While in previous novels the author’s undoubted ability to weave a splendid tale covered some of the deficiencies in his repetitive prose, here it is exposed to a fault. Evidence over the previous few publications suggest a severe waning of interest in authorial craft from Maclean. It is telling that his best work of the period 1980 -1986 is the short story collection The Lonely Sea. Of the longer format, only River of Death feels urgently complete; of the rest perhaps San Andreas alone attempts to capture past glories, although the results are mixed and unfulfilling. Basically, by 1986, MacLean’s style of thriller was distinctly old hat – the reportage, the action off page, the stilted and forgettable characters, the silly conundrum-like plots, the long winded explanations, the long winded dialogue, the long winded everything.
Santorini excels in this bland apathetic storytelling. The faults are excruciatingly obvious. The huge cast are given nothing to do except talk, talk, talk and exchange telegraph cables of increasing stupidity. The plot meanders everywhere and nowhere. The major intention of the villain is revealed only at the very end of the novel, so there is no accompanying tension to the unfolding ‘action’ [I use the word ill-advisably, for after the opening pages there is none]. Worse, MacLean’s hero, Commander Talbot, suddenly explains the whole personal operational history of the said villain, including his plan to detonate an atomic device, in a speech which is pure supposition as we have never once seen any of the evidence produced and not once does he offer to procure any. It isn’t good enough to simply say “Commander Talbot has got it right again” and expect the reader to accept this omnipotent hero as believable. He isn’t and hence most of the novel’s plot isn’t either.
Characters are slim at best. Location is barely identifiable as being Santorini – the author spends most of the time calling the Greek island ‘Thira’. Action non-existent. The pace of the story is slow. I spent two days on-and-off reading this book. It isn’t a long book, but I kept falling asleep. There is nothing, not a single iota, of tension or intrigue in this novel. Not even a sliver of humour. Nothing to keep one turning the page. It ends swiftly and obliquely and off-page, like all the other incidents; so not even a description of the cataclysmic explosion. This is perhaps the most lazy of many lazy aspects to Santorini: a nuclear missile is exploded in the Mediterranean Sea but MacLean doesn’t describe the event, its aftermath or the political and economic fallout. The book ends before this moment of Royal Navy infamy.
I don’t know what else to say about Santorini. I guess I’d recommend you don’t read it.
@chrisno1 Yes, we share the same thoughts on this very poor novel. If anything you've been too kind to it above. As you say, a sad end to what had been a brilliant career.
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 9,317MI6 Agent
edited October 2024
From his biography on Wikipedia I see that Alistair MacLean's last years were blighted by alcoholism. No doubt this adversely affected the quality of his work in those last few books?
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Yes, I expect it did. While I am aware of his well recorded addiction, I am trying not to find easy excuses. While MacLean wrote the books - and these latter few are substandard - there are proof readers, editors and publishers who all allowed these woeful novels to be inflicted on the public. I guess once an author gains a reputation and sells millions on his name alone, nobody is prepared to say : "That's really not good enough..."
MacLean's writing had dipped substantially after his second sabbatical of 1972, but a couple of novels kept his head above the waves. Very little post-1980 does. One feels every time that he starts a new novel, he starts fresh, invigorated and (possibly) sober but that the self-confidence demons take over and he simply loses interest and churns out something that passes for an adventure thriller in name only. Alcohol, of course, does not help.
@chrisno1 says: I guess once an author gains a reputation and sells millions on his name alone, nobody is prepared to say : "That's really not good enough...
And that is publishing in a nutshell - they’re looking for profit, not awards. As soon as sales diminish to a level where it’s not worth printing then the author will be dropped like a stone.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Sidetracking a bit, the same is true of Agatha Christie though I must quickly say not through alcohol but rather the effects of old age. Her last few books are very poor ("Passenger To Frankfurt" and the last one "Postern Of Fate" especially) and sold millions on her name alone. As with McLean, the publishers resorted to repackaging older short stories towards the end and those volumes helped raise the standard.
Mr MacLean would have certainly had more novels published had he not have passed away, instead they went down the now well trodden track of getting continuation authors and then saying it was inspired by plot lines left by the original author (something I’m inherently suspicious of apart from say one unfinished novel) or of course just continuing a series. Our own James Bond is still going down this route of course (the merits of which there are differing opinions).
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
I agree @CoolHandBond about these posthumous 'collaborative' novels. Wilbur Smith RIP is the prime offender here, or rather his estate is, in using the author's notes and some abandoned manuscripts to fashion new 'Wilbur Smith' novels. There is quite a long blurb explaining this very practice inside the sleeve of his estate's latest publication Warrior King, which is co-authored [in small letters on the cover] by Tom Harper. Harper did write collaboratively with Smith on two Courtney novels before the author died, so you can justify his continuing the Courtney saga, but I wish they wouldn't dress the novels up like bona fide Wilbur Smith pieces. MacLean had a similar happening with the Golden Girl and UNACO series.
IIRC, Smith even sold the rights to his very name a while before he died so a book with his name on it from that point on didn't necessarily have any input from him at all. I had tired of his work long before then so never read any of these.
@Barbel I was not aware of that re: Wilbur Smith. I made the post because I happen to be reading one of his novels at the moment - Eagle in the Sky - one of the early ones. Like you, I stopped reading his work [ mid-80s for me ] because he started to get bogged down with the Courtney saga. The coda to the Ballentyne trilogy, The Leopard Hunts in Darkness, finished me off. His early standalones are better.
Alistair MacLean's The Guns of Navarone and Force 10 from Navarone have both been on telly over Christmas. I was surprised Where Eagles Dare didn't get a run out, given its wintery setting, but as it seems to come around once a month on Great Action or some such channel ...
Anyhow, I read this book a few months back, but never posted the review.
That paperback cover doesn't quite do the book justice, but it'll do - it is wintery, like now...
THE LAST FRONTIER
1959
The Last Frontier is one of Alistair Maclean’s best adventures. A tense, taut thriller with a believable central character, action and intrigue that fairly pounds the pages and prose that reminds us [those of us who have been reading a lot of MacLean…] that the author can, when he wants to, exhibit tremendous excitement and coherent storylines.
Michael Reynolds is a British secret agent shovelled over the Iron Curtain into post-1956 Hungary, ostensibly to counter-defect a government scientist back to the UK. As Reynolds attempts to contact Professor Jennings, he witnesses firsthand the oppressive pro-Soviet regime and its feared secret police, the AVO. These incidents change Reynolds's outlook on his profession, turning him from the famous blunt, unemotional instrument so typical of James Bond and his imitators, and into a more liberal and liberated human being, where freedom comes not via the point of a thousand guns but through companionship, trust and empathy. MacLean uses for emphasis the socialist ethos of the revolutionary Jansci, a man who is fervently anti-Soviet although not anti-communist. Jansci outlines in two long monologues the change in his ideals, which twist with the wind of political change. If anything, it is the political rhetoric which is the novel’s only fault as these speeches date the book to its time period. Interestingly, by 2024 some of the attitudes and assumptions espoused here have begun to rear their ugly heads again in the modern socio-economic climate but the novel’s contemporary East V West battle still feels distinctly old hat.
Reynolds is aided by a number of Jansci’s singularly talented individual comrades, the Count [a master of disguise], Sandor [a giant bodyguard], the Cossack [a young whip-wielding rascal] and Julia [a comely daughter]. Each play a role in Jansci’s successful human smuggling operation and will play bigger roles in the defection scheme. Reynolds hopes Jansci will help him traffic Jennings into Austria, but unbeknown to both men their informer at the AVO has been rumbled and a chase is on to kidnap Jennings and make good an escape before the vicious Colonel Hidas can catch them. There are tortures, fights, gunbattles and a ferocious crawl across the roof of a speeding express train to keep us suitably occupied until the climax in the blizzarding borderlands near Lake Balaton. Suspense, intrigue and violence come at us with heavy foreboding.
This was MacLean’s fourth novel and his first not to be set in the Second World war and partly at sea. While the descriptions of Budapest and the surrounding forests may not be as vivid as those of the warring oceans, MacLean still carries a hefty lick of working prose, taking us into the conscience stricken mind of Micheal Reynolds. It is unusual to find MacLean writing so closely in the third person, yet constantly from Reynolds’s POV. He never once departs from his central character’s thought, feelings and experience. This is a remarkable feat of writing and draws the reader closer into the ensuing situations, for we are as baffled, absorbed, frightened and exalted by the goings on as Reynolds is. Even the thin love story has more immediate depth than some of the author’s usual ilk.
Most rewarding are the slow-burn action sequences. Whereas in South by Java Head, probably the most easily accessible of his early books, MacLean chose a very ‘in your face’ method of violent description, he elicits more subtlety in The Last Frontier and much of the ferocity is curtailed. This would become a staple of MacLean’s writing and a fixture that became a brace on his authorial back as he more and more declined to demonstrate his descriptive skill for the fight. The Last Frontier has the balance just about even, although there is one regrettable lapse towards the end of the novel which doesn’t ring true to character. Inevitably, the story plays out almost exactly how you would expect, but getting there was a fantastic read which gripped and enthralled immeasurably.
A first rate novel. I would recommend The Last Frontier as a good place to start any novice Alistair MacLean reader on their journey of adventure and discovery.
Note:
They made a movie of this called THE SECRET WAYS (1961) starring Richard Widmark. I have yet to see it, but rest assured I shall at some point.
I saw it many years ago - it wasn't much like the book, which I enjoyed a lot more. Senta Berger was there in I believe the first of her string of 60s spy movies. Widmark was also the producer and fired the director during filming, taking over himself.
Well, I promised myself that by the year end I would finish all the remaining Alistair MacLean novels on my reading list. Perversely, I left his first published novel until the last, perhaps in a misguided attempt to see where his narrative voice and descriptive style stemmed from. If I am totally honest, having read all the other novels over two years, reflected and cogitated on their merits and shortcomings, I really didn’t need to bother. As such, HMS Ulysses, which in some quarters is regarded as a classic wartime maritime adventure story, to me felt like a crushing disappointment.
Being generous, it needs to be noted that MacLean was a fledgling author at this point. In fact, he’d barely written a word of significance, not being a journalist or a poet. He was a schoolmaster. A winning entry for a newspaper short story competition got him an agent and he wrote his first novel utilising his love of the sea, interest in ships and shipping and his personal experiences of running merchant navy convoys during the Second World War: one of those forgotten arenas of death and sometime glory where, basically, civilians died for the war effort, exposed and expendable, an after-thought for the Naval Commanders-in-Chief. MacLean makes this point several times during HMS Ulysses, a rippling and occasionally gripping story that concerns an escort light cruiser and its torturous journey through the North Atlantic winter from Scapa Flow to Murmansk via Iceland, the Artic Circle and a wolf-pack of German U-Boats. Central to MacLean’s reasoning is the poor evidence gathered by Allied spies who constantly misinform the convoy about battle support. The Royal Navy is more concerned about keeping the German battleship Tirpitz blockaded in harbour than it is about protecting essential supply lines – a one-sided argument that betrays a lack of confidence in the Navy’s abilities, a fear of the German Navy and brusque incompetence. The opening scene features the officious Vice-Admiral Starr remonstrating with the seasoned and reasoned Captain Vallery and his officer corps about the Ulysses’s crew and their suitability for action. Rumours of mutiny have been suppressed, but Starr displays no sureness in his subordinates. He is a weak leader, unused to commanding men; his forte is paperwork, charts and Whitehall; his orders come via telegram and morse code. Vallery and his numerous officers understand their crew, their expectations and competencies. It is this fortitude that ensures the Ulysses takes to the open sea in fettle and with grace, despite being denied rest and recuperation.
MacLean ramps up the drudgery of the seagoing voyage and piles on the agony as the sea battles rage and the officers and men suffer indignity and loss, crisis and sacrifice, death, death and more death. This is about as bleak a novel as you’ll ever read about the war. There is nothing charming or glorious about HMS Ulysses. The warship is old, damaged and tired. She ploughs through the furrowed sea with lessening strength and an air of inevitable passing about her. The same can be said of her worn out crew. The experience of reading the novel is a bit like watching a close relative die of an incurable disease. MacLean sucks us into the familiar, the jovial, the rivalry, the unfortunate, the flicker of home fires and romance, families, fortunes and futures – then he peels it away from us, layer by layer, until all the safe skins have been stripped and the flesh is exposed and raw and bleeding.
So far, so good, in terms of observational intent. Where the novel becomes problematic is threefold. Firstly, it defied all kinds of belief that the Ulysses manages to survive so long on its agonising voyage. The ship and the convoy are attacked by submarines, cruisers and aircraft. She is holed, burnt, fractured, machine gunned and torpedoed, yet never seems to flinch or baulk. Secondly, I could really have done with a decent diagram of the superstructure, as after a while so many parts of her seemed to have been blown up or rendered unusable or unsurpassable that I couldn’t make head or tail of the ship’s dimensions and design or what was still afloat. MacLean bombards his audience with too much technological data and not enough directional detail for the reader to qualify the prose. Lastly, MacLean alters the narrative point of view too often, switching from Captain Vallery, to Commander Turner, to Chief Surgeon Brooks, to Rear-Admiral Tyndall, to Assistant Surgeon Nicholls, to Stoker Doyle, etc, etc. This lack of clarity over the narrative focus means that every narrator ends up with the same voice, mannerisms and characteristics. To a person they are resourceful, amazingly stoic, tough, self-sacrificing and loyal. Even the bad eggs turn good.
I can see MacLean’s intent. He has gathered his experiences, particularly of Convoy JW58 which he partook in and was attacked by U-Boats, as well as other recorded histories, notably PQ17 which took a similar route and suffered similar misfortunes to MacLean’s fictional creation. PQ17 was virtually wiped out by enemy forces. The author melds the true life stories into a stop-start seagoing adventure where everything that did happen in the North Atlantic happens to HMS Ulysses. The effect is pulpifying. As a reader, about half way through, I began to wonder how much more punishment the poor suffering ship could take. By the final chapters, I had lost interest and just accepted the constant explosions, attacks and survivals for what they were: opportunities to offer relentless bloody visual flourishes among the intimacies of the crew and intricacies of wartime sailing. It might have worked better had MacLean wrote a series of vignettes about each character and how they experienced this fateful and vicious winter convoy. He sort of makes the same decision, but weaves the thoughts and actions of cast members in and out of the story, making it hard to identify with them. What should be a shifting point of view ends up being the same point of view related by different individuals.
As MacLean’s career continued, he ironed out many of these lumpy prose techniques. His second novel, The Guns of Navarone, repeats many of the same problems, only on land. His third, South By Java Head, begins to straighten things out, with a more singular reliable narrator and a more measured approach to the terrible happenings. By The Last Frontier, MacLean has finally figured his approach and is able to present the action is a less startling and explosive manner, building his intrigues slowly and saving the real highlights for when they matter narratively, not simply to propel the story which is what he does in HMS Ulysses.
The novel is good, let’s be honest. The descriptions of the sea and the wartime battles are well-created and moments of distress and fortitude are in the main well-presented. It stops and starts some and the conflicts become increasingly tiresome. As with many of MacLean’s novels the final confrontation is remarkably short and oblique, almost as if the author doesn’t care to provide a suitable finale, trusting instead in all that has gone before. The epilogue is poorly written, an afterthought of afterthoughts. I can understand why the novel quickly gained a reputation and why it has maintained a position of some importance in genre fiction. However, understanding what I am reading isn’t the same as enjoying it and for the most part, HMS Ulysses is a boggy repetitive and somewhat bitter read.
I picked this up for a casual rereading and couldn't put it down. I echo every praise Chris gives it above. I had remembered it as being very good but not this good. Way up in the rankings, if you haven't read this then do yourself a favour and find a copy.
Comments
It's perhaps the best of his very late period novels but that isn't high praise.
https://www.ajb007.co.uk/discussion/comment/1067334#Comment_1067334
I am refering back to the post above regarding RIVER OF DEATH and the differences between the US Fawcett paperback edition and the UK hardback. Well, I managed to obtain a UK paperback copy a month or so ago and spent some of this morning going back over the text alterations. The UK paperback is exactly the same as the UK hardback. This suggests the alterations were made specifically for the American audience, although I am struggling to understand why these alterations have been made as they lend nothing extra to the narrative, in fact they frequently worsen the prose. Perhaps American readers couldn't understand the word 'dark' and needed 'black' to clarify, for instance, but I find that explanation condescending and unlikely. I have a suspicion they may be MacLean's own alterations, and possibly only for the Fawcett edition as it did not appear until 1983, a full year after River of Death was published in a soft cover in the UK. Of course, I can't tell for certain without seeing a US hardback copy.
ICE STATION ZEBRA
1963
A nice series of covers including, I think, a Spanish copy. The original Fontana wrap-around paperback [bottom right] is quite good.
Although I am not reading Alistair MacLean’s novels in order, there is something depressingly familiar about Ice Station Zebra which makes it a slightly disappointing entry into his canon.
The early sections of the novel outline the premise of the story: Dr John Carpenter is assigned to the USS Dolphin, a nuclear submarine, to attempt a reach at Drift Ice Station Zebra on the Arctic wastelands. The station has been sending SOS messages regarding a disastrous fire and the crew need rescuing. Carpenter’s mission however is completely different to that he tells the sub’s commander, Swanson. Different three times, in fact, as Carpenter alters his story – and his name – in a piece-meal fashion depending on how it suits his circumstances. The circumstances of everyone else, including a submarine crew, don’t even come into it. And of course, like many MacLean heroes, Carpenter has an unspoken and compromising affiliation to the Drift Station team, one which would make him totally unsuitable for the task ahead of him.
As the novel progresses and incident follows incident, I became aware that MacLean was reworkings elements of Night Without End, and that he would rework these again when scripting Athabasca: journeys through Arctic terrain, the fear and dread of death in the frozen north, the sudden unexpected occurrences threatening life and limb, a small abandoned hut containing all suspects, a hidden agenda for one or more of the cast. While there are taut and tense descriptions, the novel is written in an episodic fashion which dilutes the suspense.
This isn’t to say Ice Station Zebra is a bad novel. It isn’t; at times it is very good. The author’s description of the makeshift morgue at Station Zebra was brilliant. So too a vivid and harrowing account of death by asphyxiation aboard the stricken submarine. But florid description doesn’t help the telling and Ice Station Zebra misses some clarity of thought, chiefly from the first person narrator. The protagonist basically provides only the narrative he wants us to hear, or read, and is at pains to miss out acres of information regarding action that we either have not seen [because the narrator never saw it], cannot see [because it happened before the narrator arrived] or will not see [because the narrator deems it unnecessary to tell anyone]. This includes never fully telling Commander Swanson the purpose of his posting on the Dolphin. Oh, sure, Carpenter has a letter of authority, but nobody – including Swanson – adequately believes it and you’d think, for such an important mission he just might be told. All the explanations in the world, or on the page, as it were, cannot convince me the captain of a navy ship would not be informed of the danger and importance of his sortie. In John Sturges’s fine movie adaptation, the script writers cleared this up in a few clipped sentences with chain-of-command orders, MacLean prefers to have Carpenter several times wave the ‘letter of authority’ card – or letter, I guess – in Swanson’s face. It makes the chemistry between the two men utterly unbelievable. There is no way the captain of a navy vessel would cede authority to a civilian. It simply doesn’t happen. MacLean, as an ex-navy serviceman knows this, so it is surprising he allows his characters to behave so out of, well, character.
Clues and red herrings for the operation at hand persist in the manner they may for a detective novel. Fulfilling the Agatha Christie style ‘blink-and-you-miss-it’ prose, MacLean induces a final chapter of relentless monologue where all the signs are explained and all the culprits revealed. The problem is, we haven’t seen half the clues and even Carpenter, in his explanations, stresses that his ideas are only suppositions: “they must have… they probably… unseen by anybody…” Every solution is simply too convenient. It is only now, in the final few pages, that Maclean bothers to tell us why Carpenter's MI6 employers are so desperate to reach Ice Station Zebra. It is because a Soviet spy satellite, Samos III, has gone rogue and crashed into the Arctic ice cap, conveniently near the Drift Station. This might be too much of a coincidence, until you learn that the Russians had known Samos III was out of control far enough ahead of time to infiltrate the Drift Station crew. That isn’t simply a coincidence, it is a manipulated occurrence that could in no way have been successful: even re-entering from a proposed orbit Samos III could have landed anywhere within hundreds of miles of the Drift Station, it was mighty fortuitous the satellite landed close to the enclave. Carpenter’s longwinded explanation of Samos III is another of those moments when you just wish Maclean had included this detail at an earlier point, when Carpenter and Swanson discuss the mission perhaps. It would certainly stop these eyebrows raising. Plotwise, there is no need to disguise this fact. Had Carpenter acknowledged the mission’s target, the stakes would be raised for the crew and for the reader, as it is, all the sabotage, desperate crawls through sub-zero temperatures, murders and intrigue eventually feel almost entirely superfluous as to why the Dolphin is heading under the Arctic ice.
Okay, the action is readable and some sections are very fine, but the plotting is abysmal and the half-hidden conjecture makes for a heavy handed ending. There is nothing very new here, even for an early-ish MacLean, and the book lacks gravitas and emotion. The characters are a tough, hardy lot who endure much hardship and overcome all the odds with a flickering grimace of emotion and a few timely punches and gunshots.
To be brutal, as I was with The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra is better structured as a cinematic outing than it is on the page. The novel is a good read, for most of the way, but falters badly at the end and is neither believable nor particularly empathetic.
It's amusing that one of the covers says "author of The Guns Of Navarone" which is fair enough (one of his best-known) while another says "author of The Golden Gate" which is one of his poorest.
Golden Gate may have been his latest novel at that point, it’s the only reason I can think of.
Sounds right.
I haven't read Zebra for years, but as frequently happens I'm now wanting to read it again. I remember it being exciting but not making much sense if you stopped to think about it- as so often with this author.
And the film version also eliminates a vast number of the book's plot inconsistencies.
I like both book and film. The film was a favourite of my father’s, so always holds a special place for me.
.... and I have just finished rereading "Zebra". Loved it again, it's a fast and (of course) highly improbable tale told by a very unreliable narrator which as Chris has said above is a trademark of this author. It's still one of the good ones, before his talent fell into a whisky bottle, and I prefer it to the film (which I also like).
I am pleased to be reinvigorating long lost interest @Barbel although I sense you won't be digging into Floodgate or Santorini any time soon.
THE SATAN BUG
1962
The second Alistair MacLean novel written under his short-lived pseudonym Ian Stuart features a typically hard-boiled, physically scarred and too intelligent for his own suppositions hero chasing a stolen vial of a deadly biological weapon. The basic premise is very good, touching as it does on Ian Fleming’s similar notions for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. You wonder, in fact, if Fleming hadn’t read it, pinched and refined the plot ideas for his own 1963 opus.
Here the British medical research establishment at Mordon hides a top secret military facility that perfects articles for chemical, biological and germ warfare. Mordon is a fictional rehash of the very real Porton Down. A group of flawed scientists working in Mordon’s Laboratory A have developed a lethal concentrated strain of an airborne pathogen – cryptically referred to as the Satan Bug – and a cache of the apocalyptic weapon has been stolen. The police, under the direction of a secret service head known as the General, recruit Pierre Cavell, who [handily] was once the security chief at Mordon. Cavell turns out to be remarkably capable of investigation, interrogation and, when it counts, intimidation and violence. He’s as blunt and distasteful a hero as you can get. MacLean even has the man sport a vicious facial scar, so he’s as unattractive as he is unpleasant. Cavell has just twenty four hours to uncover the culprit and return the viruses. Things do not quite go according to plan, despite Cavell having the knack of foresight and insight into his antagonist’s movements. This useful skill becomes so prevalent it becomes virtually unbelievable.
So, let’s discuss what is good about the novel.
The biological weapons angle is great. So are the final two chapters which pound along with some of the drama and intensity I recognise in MacLean’s best work. The title.
There.
Now the bad.
MacLean employs a first person narrator and as a storyteller Cavell is the dullest hero you could possibly encounter. He lacks even a modicum of florid language among his tremendously longwinded explanations and descriptions. The exercise is just too long and dull, all those talks by firesides in cottages, drives to and from London or Paris, in-depth detail about security measures, a whole gamut of clues we neither learn of [from Cavell] nor are party to [because Cavell as a narrator – read Maclean as writer – doesn’t tell us]. Worse is the constant relating of information via Cavell’s mouthpiece and his seemingly bottomless supply of important personal details regarding his suspects. I became less interested in the mystery of the break-in than the mystery of how Cavell could piece together the convoluted events and complicated personalities from such small and scanty clues. A clod of earth? A left handed pair of shears? A missing dot above the ‘I’ on a letter head? The identity and history of the villain? The list of Cavell’s revelations is long and, for the first time, MacLean offers a chapter during which his hero summaries all the solutions and where they take us in a monologue of excruciating tedium.
What rankles is that all the incidents Cavell TELLS US about are excellent scenarios and would have been far better revealed had MacLean deemed to SHOW US. The Satan Bug is overloaded with dialogue, much of it covering the same ground, and while dialogue moves narratives forward, in a thriller it can also drag proceedings to a standstill through lack of animation. That is what happens here. By the time MacLean shakes off his shackles for the exciting climax, I was worn out by Cavell’s almost non-stop heavy handed chatter. I am a fast reader, but I spent a whole week digesting this slow moving drama.
Sadly, not only has MacLean pumped his novel full of dozens of red herrings which need both revealing, then debunking, before the actual prescribed events unfold – a tiresome repetitive technique which is exhausting to this reader – but he doesn’t even have the strength of his convictions and alters the villain’s motivations at the last moment. Any thoughts I had that the bad Dr Gregori was an insane multinational terrorist competing with Blofeld and SPECTRE to be the world’s greatest and most dastardly super-nemesis were sadly dashed. He’s just a mobster, this time with a chemistry degree. How disappointing is that?
They made a film of this, and I sense the cinematic potential, but the novel is only partway worthwhile and that part comes too late to make me consider The Satan Bug anything but a failure. Like his other Ian Stuart novel The Dark Crusader, MacLean seems to want his hero to inhabit a world familiar to us from James Bond; in fact the two adventures seem to pre-empt the Bond movies in their fantastical elements and certainly compete well against Fleming’s latter-day world endangering schemes. Unfortunately, neither book is succinct enough to challenge The Master, chiefly because MacLean’s method of utilising a first person narrator to both inform and disguise, often without corroborative witnessed evidence, makes the stories and the heroes unbelievable. While readers enjoy surprises, they also enjoy first-hand details and too often MacLean prefers second-hand reportage. I don’t want to read a ‘report’ of the goings on at Mordon, I want to read about what happened and the people it happened to and how, from the break-in, to the murders, the kidnappings, the bribery, the investigations, the chase, the fight, the denouement. This one-note, one-voice style of storytelling just doesn’t work.
Disappointing.
Without going into a detailed review such as the above, I feel I must defend this book a little. I've read it twice and enjoyed it, both times being swept up in the pace of the story. Yes, there's an element of us being told rather shown details but that’s because the author has decided to go first person rather than third which has disadvantages as well as advantages for his style of writing.
I felt there were good characters and an excellent premise. It's not among his best but it's streets ahead of anything from "The Way Yo Dusty Death" onwards. *
The film is faithful in some parts but diverges wildly from the book in others - some would say that’s a good thing! - most obviously in changing the setting to USA and most or all of the character names. Richard Basehart stands out among the cast.
* I might have said "Caravan To Vaccares" but didn't want to get sidetracked.
* I might have said "Caravan To Vaccares" but didn't want to get sidetracked.
Probably a good idea @Barbel - our opinions differ tremendously over that one too ! Reading through all the novels, and not in any particular order, it is amazing to find IMO MacLean's writing quality going up and down throughout his career, big peaks and troughs, minor peaks and big troughs. He simply isn't consistent and that's a real problem when assessing his work as a whole. Also when reading reviews online, people's opinions - like ours - diverge tremendously. He seems to be quite divisive critically too, other than I suppose where it counts which is in the number of books sold.
@Barbel I don't think we share differing allusions over this one...
SANTORINI
1986
I could probably describe Santorini in one word, but it wouldn’t be printable. This novel, Alistair MacLean’s last, follows many of the precepts that have endured throughout his writing, notably a sea-bound location, ridiculously high alcohol consumption, an unfathomable plot and dialogue heavy incident. While in previous novels the author’s undoubted ability to weave a splendid tale covered some of the deficiencies in his repetitive prose, here it is exposed to a fault. Evidence over the previous few publications suggest a severe waning of interest in authorial craft from Maclean. It is telling that his best work of the period 1980 -1986 is the short story collection The Lonely Sea. Of the longer format, only River of Death feels urgently complete; of the rest perhaps San Andreas alone attempts to capture past glories, although the results are mixed and unfulfilling. Basically, by 1986, MacLean’s style of thriller was distinctly old hat – the reportage, the action off page, the stilted and forgettable characters, the silly conundrum-like plots, the long winded explanations, the long winded dialogue, the long winded everything.
Santorini excels in this bland apathetic storytelling. The faults are excruciatingly obvious. The huge cast are given nothing to do except talk, talk, talk and exchange telegraph cables of increasing stupidity. The plot meanders everywhere and nowhere. The major intention of the villain is revealed only at the very end of the novel, so there is no accompanying tension to the unfolding ‘action’ [I use the word ill-advisably, for after the opening pages there is none]. Worse, MacLean’s hero, Commander Talbot, suddenly explains the whole personal operational history of the said villain, including his plan to detonate an atomic device, in a speech which is pure supposition as we have never once seen any of the evidence produced and not once does he offer to procure any. It isn’t good enough to simply say “Commander Talbot has got it right again” and expect the reader to accept this omnipotent hero as believable. He isn’t and hence most of the novel’s plot isn’t either.
Characters are slim at best. Location is barely identifiable as being Santorini – the author spends most of the time calling the Greek island ‘Thira’. Action non-existent. The pace of the story is slow. I spent two days on-and-off reading this book. It isn’t a long book, but I kept falling asleep. There is nothing, not a single iota, of tension or intrigue in this novel. Not even a sliver of humour. Nothing to keep one turning the page. It ends swiftly and obliquely and off-page, like all the other incidents; so not even a description of the cataclysmic explosion. This is perhaps the most lazy of many lazy aspects to Santorini: a nuclear missile is exploded in the Mediterranean Sea but MacLean doesn’t describe the event, its aftermath or the political and economic fallout. The book ends before this moment of Royal Navy infamy.
I don’t know what else to say about Santorini. I guess I’d recommend you don’t read it.
Truly terrible.
A sorry end to Alistair MacLean’s career.
@chrisno1 Yes, we share the same thoughts on this very poor novel. If anything you've been too kind to it above. As you say, a sad end to what had been a brilliant career.
From his biography on Wikipedia I see that Alistair MacLean's last years were blighted by alcoholism. No doubt this adversely affected the quality of his work in those last few books?
Yes, I expect it did. While I am aware of his well recorded addiction, I am trying not to find easy excuses. While MacLean wrote the books - and these latter few are substandard - there are proof readers, editors and publishers who all allowed these woeful novels to be inflicted on the public. I guess once an author gains a reputation and sells millions on his name alone, nobody is prepared to say : "That's really not good enough..."
MacLean's writing had dipped substantially after his second sabbatical of 1972, but a couple of novels kept his head above the waves. Very little post-1980 does. One feels every time that he starts a new novel, he starts fresh, invigorated and (possibly) sober but that the self-confidence demons take over and he simply loses interest and churns out something that passes for an adventure thriller in name only. Alcohol, of course, does not help.
@chrisno1 says: I guess once an author gains a reputation and sells millions on his name alone, nobody is prepared to say : "That's really not good enough...
And that is publishing in a nutshell - they’re looking for profit, not awards. As soon as sales diminish to a level where it’s not worth printing then the author will be dropped like a stone.
Indeed - and according to the Wiki Web, Santorini - whatever its merits - was a bestseller. So there! I suppose.
Sidetracking a bit, the same is true of Agatha Christie though I must quickly say not through alcohol but rather the effects of old age. Her last few books are very poor ("Passenger To Frankfurt" and the last one "Postern Of Fate" especially) and sold millions on her name alone. As with McLean, the publishers resorted to repackaging older short stories towards the end and those volumes helped raise the standard.
Mr MacLean would have certainly had more novels published had he not have passed away, instead they went down the now well trodden track of getting continuation authors and then saying it was inspired by plot lines left by the original author (something I’m inherently suspicious of apart from say one unfinished novel) or of course just continuing a series. Our own James Bond is still going down this route of course (the merits of which there are differing opinions).
I agree @CoolHandBond about these posthumous 'collaborative' novels. Wilbur Smith RIP is the prime offender here, or rather his estate is, in using the author's notes and some abandoned manuscripts to fashion new 'Wilbur Smith' novels. There is quite a long blurb explaining this very practice inside the sleeve of his estate's latest publication Warrior King, which is co-authored [in small letters on the cover] by Tom Harper. Harper did write collaboratively with Smith on two Courtney novels before the author died, so you can justify his continuing the Courtney saga, but I wish they wouldn't dress the novels up like bona fide Wilbur Smith pieces. MacLean had a similar happening with the Golden Girl and UNACO series.
IIRC, Smith even sold the rights to his very name a while before he died so a book with his name on it from that point on didn't necessarily have any input from him at all. I had tired of his work long before then so never read any of these.
@Barbel I was not aware of that re: Wilbur Smith. I made the post because I happen to be reading one of his novels at the moment - Eagle in the Sky - one of the early ones. Like you, I stopped reading his work [ mid-80s for me ] because he started to get bogged down with the Courtney saga. The coda to the Ballentyne trilogy, The Leopard Hunts in Darkness, finished me off. His early standalones are better.
Alistair MacLean's The Guns of Navarone and Force 10 from Navarone have both been on telly over Christmas. I was surprised Where Eagles Dare didn't get a run out, given its wintery setting, but as it seems to come around once a month on Great Action or some such channel ...
Anyhow, I read this book a few months back, but never posted the review.
That paperback cover doesn't quite do the book justice, but it'll do - it is wintery, like now...
THE LAST FRONTIER
1959
The Last Frontier is one of Alistair Maclean’s best adventures. A tense, taut thriller with a believable central character, action and intrigue that fairly pounds the pages and prose that reminds us [those of us who have been reading a lot of MacLean…] that the author can, when he wants to, exhibit tremendous excitement and coherent storylines.
Michael Reynolds is a British secret agent shovelled over the Iron Curtain into post-1956 Hungary, ostensibly to counter-defect a government scientist back to the UK. As Reynolds attempts to contact Professor Jennings, he witnesses firsthand the oppressive pro-Soviet regime and its feared secret police, the AVO. These incidents change Reynolds's outlook on his profession, turning him from the famous blunt, unemotional instrument so typical of James Bond and his imitators, and into a more liberal and liberated human being, where freedom comes not via the point of a thousand guns but through companionship, trust and empathy. MacLean uses for emphasis the socialist ethos of the revolutionary Jansci, a man who is fervently anti-Soviet although not anti-communist. Jansci outlines in two long monologues the change in his ideals, which twist with the wind of political change. If anything, it is the political rhetoric which is the novel’s only fault as these speeches date the book to its time period. Interestingly, by 2024 some of the attitudes and assumptions espoused here have begun to rear their ugly heads again in the modern socio-economic climate but the novel’s contemporary East V West battle still feels distinctly old hat.
Reynolds is aided by a number of Jansci’s singularly talented individual comrades, the Count [a master of disguise], Sandor [a giant bodyguard], the Cossack [a young whip-wielding rascal] and Julia [a comely daughter]. Each play a role in Jansci’s successful human smuggling operation and will play bigger roles in the defection scheme. Reynolds hopes Jansci will help him traffic Jennings into Austria, but unbeknown to both men their informer at the AVO has been rumbled and a chase is on to kidnap Jennings and make good an escape before the vicious Colonel Hidas can catch them. There are tortures, fights, gunbattles and a ferocious crawl across the roof of a speeding express train to keep us suitably occupied until the climax in the blizzarding borderlands near Lake Balaton. Suspense, intrigue and violence come at us with heavy foreboding.
This was MacLean’s fourth novel and his first not to be set in the Second World war and partly at sea. While the descriptions of Budapest and the surrounding forests may not be as vivid as those of the warring oceans, MacLean still carries a hefty lick of working prose, taking us into the conscience stricken mind of Micheal Reynolds. It is unusual to find MacLean writing so closely in the third person, yet constantly from Reynolds’s POV. He never once departs from his central character’s thought, feelings and experience. This is a remarkable feat of writing and draws the reader closer into the ensuing situations, for we are as baffled, absorbed, frightened and exalted by the goings on as Reynolds is. Even the thin love story has more immediate depth than some of the author’s usual ilk.
Most rewarding are the slow-burn action sequences. Whereas in South by Java Head, probably the most easily accessible of his early books, MacLean chose a very ‘in your face’ method of violent description, he elicits more subtlety in The Last Frontier and much of the ferocity is curtailed. This would become a staple of MacLean’s writing and a fixture that became a brace on his authorial back as he more and more declined to demonstrate his descriptive skill for the fight. The Last Frontier has the balance just about even, although there is one regrettable lapse towards the end of the novel which doesn’t ring true to character. Inevitably, the story plays out almost exactly how you would expect, but getting there was a fantastic read which gripped and enthralled immeasurably.
A first rate novel. I would recommend The Last Frontier as a good place to start any novice Alistair MacLean reader on their journey of adventure and discovery.
Note:
They made a movie of this called THE SECRET WAYS (1961) starring Richard Widmark. I have yet to see it, but rest assured I shall at some point.
I saw it many years ago - it wasn't much like the book, which I enjoyed a lot more. Senta Berger was there in I believe the first of her string of 60s spy movies. Widmark was also the producer and fired the director during filming, taking over himself.
H.M.S. ULYSSES
1955
Well, I promised myself that by the year end I would finish all the remaining Alistair MacLean novels on my reading list. Perversely, I left his first published novel until the last, perhaps in a misguided attempt to see where his narrative voice and descriptive style stemmed from. If I am totally honest, having read all the other novels over two years, reflected and cogitated on their merits and shortcomings, I really didn’t need to bother. As such, HMS Ulysses, which in some quarters is regarded as a classic wartime maritime adventure story, to me felt like a crushing disappointment.
Being generous, it needs to be noted that MacLean was a fledgling author at this point. In fact, he’d barely written a word of significance, not being a journalist or a poet. He was a schoolmaster. A winning entry for a newspaper short story competition got him an agent and he wrote his first novel utilising his love of the sea, interest in ships and shipping and his personal experiences of running merchant navy convoys during the Second World War: one of those forgotten arenas of death and sometime glory where, basically, civilians died for the war effort, exposed and expendable, an after-thought for the Naval Commanders-in-Chief. MacLean makes this point several times during HMS Ulysses, a rippling and occasionally gripping story that concerns an escort light cruiser and its torturous journey through the North Atlantic winter from Scapa Flow to Murmansk via Iceland, the Artic Circle and a wolf-pack of German U-Boats. Central to MacLean’s reasoning is the poor evidence gathered by Allied spies who constantly misinform the convoy about battle support. The Royal Navy is more concerned about keeping the German battleship Tirpitz blockaded in harbour than it is about protecting essential supply lines – a one-sided argument that betrays a lack of confidence in the Navy’s abilities, a fear of the German Navy and brusque incompetence. The opening scene features the officious Vice-Admiral Starr remonstrating with the seasoned and reasoned Captain Vallery and his officer corps about the Ulysses’s crew and their suitability for action. Rumours of mutiny have been suppressed, but Starr displays no sureness in his subordinates. He is a weak leader, unused to commanding men; his forte is paperwork, charts and Whitehall; his orders come via telegram and morse code. Vallery and his numerous officers understand their crew, their expectations and competencies. It is this fortitude that ensures the Ulysses takes to the open sea in fettle and with grace, despite being denied rest and recuperation.
MacLean ramps up the drudgery of the seagoing voyage and piles on the agony as the sea battles rage and the officers and men suffer indignity and loss, crisis and sacrifice, death, death and more death. This is about as bleak a novel as you’ll ever read about the war. There is nothing charming or glorious about HMS Ulysses. The warship is old, damaged and tired. She ploughs through the furrowed sea with lessening strength and an air of inevitable passing about her. The same can be said of her worn out crew. The experience of reading the novel is a bit like watching a close relative die of an incurable disease. MacLean sucks us into the familiar, the jovial, the rivalry, the unfortunate, the flicker of home fires and romance, families, fortunes and futures – then he peels it away from us, layer by layer, until all the safe skins have been stripped and the flesh is exposed and raw and bleeding.
So far, so good, in terms of observational intent. Where the novel becomes problematic is threefold. Firstly, it defied all kinds of belief that the Ulysses manages to survive so long on its agonising voyage. The ship and the convoy are attacked by submarines, cruisers and aircraft. She is holed, burnt, fractured, machine gunned and torpedoed, yet never seems to flinch or baulk. Secondly, I could really have done with a decent diagram of the superstructure, as after a while so many parts of her seemed to have been blown up or rendered unusable or unsurpassable that I couldn’t make head or tail of the ship’s dimensions and design or what was still afloat. MacLean bombards his audience with too much technological data and not enough directional detail for the reader to qualify the prose. Lastly, MacLean alters the narrative point of view too often, switching from Captain Vallery, to Commander Turner, to Chief Surgeon Brooks, to Rear-Admiral Tyndall, to Assistant Surgeon Nicholls, to Stoker Doyle, etc, etc. This lack of clarity over the narrative focus means that every narrator ends up with the same voice, mannerisms and characteristics. To a person they are resourceful, amazingly stoic, tough, self-sacrificing and loyal. Even the bad eggs turn good.
I can see MacLean’s intent. He has gathered his experiences, particularly of Convoy JW58 which he partook in and was attacked by U-Boats, as well as other recorded histories, notably PQ17 which took a similar route and suffered similar misfortunes to MacLean’s fictional creation. PQ17 was virtually wiped out by enemy forces. The author melds the true life stories into a stop-start seagoing adventure where everything that did happen in the North Atlantic happens to HMS Ulysses. The effect is pulpifying. As a reader, about half way through, I began to wonder how much more punishment the poor suffering ship could take. By the final chapters, I had lost interest and just accepted the constant explosions, attacks and survivals for what they were: opportunities to offer relentless bloody visual flourishes among the intimacies of the crew and intricacies of wartime sailing. It might have worked better had MacLean wrote a series of vignettes about each character and how they experienced this fateful and vicious winter convoy. He sort of makes the same decision, but weaves the thoughts and actions of cast members in and out of the story, making it hard to identify with them. What should be a shifting point of view ends up being the same point of view related by different individuals.
As MacLean’s career continued, he ironed out many of these lumpy prose techniques. His second novel, The Guns of Navarone, repeats many of the same problems, only on land. His third, South By Java Head, begins to straighten things out, with a more singular reliable narrator and a more measured approach to the terrible happenings. By The Last Frontier, MacLean has finally figured his approach and is able to present the action is a less startling and explosive manner, building his intrigues slowly and saving the real highlights for when they matter narratively, not simply to propel the story which is what he does in HMS Ulysses.
The novel is good, let’s be honest. The descriptions of the sea and the wartime battles are well-created and moments of distress and fortitude are in the main well-presented. It stops and starts some and the conflicts become increasingly tiresome. As with many of MacLean’s novels the final confrontation is remarkably short and oblique, almost as if the author doesn’t care to provide a suitable finale, trusting instead in all that has gone before. The epilogue is poorly written, an afterthought of afterthoughts. I can understand why the novel quickly gained a reputation and why it has maintained a position of some importance in genre fiction. However, understanding what I am reading isn’t the same as enjoying it and for the most part, HMS Ulysses is a boggy repetitive and somewhat bitter read.
Better than average – just.
Dust jacket for the Collins First Edition.
I picked this up for a casual rereading and couldn't put it down. I echo every praise Chris gives it above. I had remembered it as being very good but not this good. Way up in the rankings, if you haven't read this then do yourself a favour and find a copy.
Thank you @Barbel It is good know my work is not wasted 😀
Is there anyone still on this thread? I just found it and joined hoping to discuss Maclean stories. Let me know.