Santorini

The crew of a navy ship are sudenly faced with two disasters: A burning yacht and a crashed airplane... The story gets more and more intense as the connection between the two events becomes clear. The story evolves on into an international espionage setting. The end is very untypical to macLean and is quite surprising.


Alistair MacLean's worst book   July 8, 2000
Duane Schermerhorn (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful

Alistair MacLean, one of the great adventure storywriters of all time, went into a precipitous decline beginning in the 1970s. "Bear Island" (1971) is the last of his stories that can hold a candle to his great work of the 1950s and 1960s. From that time on, the decline is relentless, with each book being worse than its predecessor.

"Santorini", published in 1986, is the last sad evidence of this prodigious talent in decline. The book is static and talky, with no adventure, no suspense, no tension. And, worst of all, virtually all of the action takes place "off screen" and is reported to our nominal heroes as they converse in brave understatement meant to convey the greatest heights of modest heroism. Upper lips don't get any stiffer than those of Commander Talbot and his Number One Officer.

In "Santorini" MacLean expends all of his energy laying on very thick the cataclysmic consequences that would result from the explosion of the atomic and hydrogen bombs that lie in the hold of an aircraft lying at the bottom of the sea. This is typical of his latter work: he tries to create suspense by escalating to nearly world-ending destruction the consequences that would befall mankind if the villain has his way. At the same time, in the latter books, MacLean creates heroes that appear to be supernaturally talented and cunning - so much so, that never for a moment does the reader believe that the villain - a "genius", according to the author - has a chance of succeeding.

In his latter works, his tendency to hyperbole clearly gets the better of him. His protagonists are supermen, and his villains are the earthly manifestation of evil, making Satan himself seem like a choirboy by comparison. Their boundless evil provides justification for the ruthless tactics of the protagonists. In the black-and-white moral universe of MacLean's latter stories, the only way to defeat such villains is to replicate their ruthlessness in the name of "good". This is not a very becoming trait in a writer, especially when it is dwelled on as much as MacLean tends to in some of this books. "Goodbye California", for example, is an ugly piece of work that - if it could for a moment be taken seriously - would deserve the label "fascist literature".

There is laziness about even his early work that simply goes out of control in the latter books. In "Santorini", for example, every character uses the word "inevitably" - not because it makes sense for them to do so, but simply because the author is too lazy to come up with dialogue that distinguishes one character from another.

"Santorini" ranks below such abysmal efforts as "Goodbye California", "Floodgate", "Athabasca", and "Partisans", and stands, to my mind, as the worst of an outstanding writer's work.

Anyone interested in good adventure stories should steer clear of MacLean's latter work. Read the outstanding tales he wrote in the 1950s ("HMS Ulysses", "The Guns of Navarone", "Fear Is the Key") and the 1960s ("The Satan Bug", "The Dark Crusader", "When 8 Bells Toll").