What first gave you the reading bug, my guess would be that it was a suitably gripping opening line, something a little more exciting that that old favourite ‘once upon a time.’
If so then this latest novel from veteran author Clive Cussler, which begins with the following: ‘It rose from the depths like an evil monster in a Mesozoic sea’, will do much to remind you why you fell in love with books in the first place.
The ‘it’ in question is a steam locomotive being winched up from the depths of Flathead Lake, Montana in 1950, the action then jumps back to 1906, a year when the western United States was being terrorised by the splendidly named ‘Butcher Bandit,’ a bank robber so ruthless he leaves no living witnesses to his crimes. Hot on his tail is Isaac Bell, a square jawed detective with a steely determination to get his man.
The Chase is an old fashioned adventure novel in the very best sense, all the well loved elements of the genre are present and correct from the lantern jawed hero to a villain so evil it isn’t hard to imagine readers feeling obliged to boo and hiss whenever he appears and a plot that moves along with the death defying pace of the sort of silent movie in which Mary Pickford seldom got to the end of the second reel without being tied to the railroad tracks as an express train bore down upon her.
If you think this is going to be an ironic review of the sort of novel often categorised as ‘airport fiction’, think again, this is one of the most enjoyable books I have read in the past five years.
Cussler takes pleasure in the simple delights of entertaining his readers with a plot that moves along at a lightning pace and culminates in a brilliantly conceived chase involving steam locomotives. The book also has a distinct, but never obtrusive, moral sense, in Cussler’s world the good guys are always on the side of right and the bad guys are, well, just plain bad, it is also refreshingly free from bad language and gratuitous violence, making it accessible to anyone between the ages of eight and eighty eight.
Clive Cussler would, I am sure, be the first to admit that his books aren’t great works of literature, he tends to tell his readers things that a more literary writer would have shown them, but that doesn’t really matter since the reader is usually having too much uncomplicated fun in his company to care.
This is the ideal sort of book to give to someone who doesn’t much care for reading, unlike a more self consciously literary novel it serves to remind its audience that books aren’t just dry, dusty things that are ‘taught’ in schools, they are, in the hands of writers like Clive Cussler, escape hatches into an alternative and infinitely more exciting reality.
The Chase is published by Penguin.
