Iceberg - Clive Cussler (Audiobook)

Audiobook Reader:  Michael Prichard

Books on Tape, 1992

Originally published by Simon & Schuster, 1975

Listened to October 2011, at age 33

First time listened to, but I read the novel many years ago.

This is the second book in the “Dirk Pitt” series of novels. These books don’t need to be read in order, though, so if you want to start here, go nuts.  I’d pick a later book to start with, just because the author gets a lot better at writing women in his later works. 

Publisher’s summary via Amazon.com:

 Frozen inside a million-ton mass of ice – the charred remains of a long-missing luxury yacht, vanished en route to a secret White House rendezvous.  The only clues to the ship’s priceless – and missing – cargo: nine ornately carved rings and the horribly burned bodies of its crew.

DIRK PITT, intrepid hero of Clive Cussler’s smash bestse….blah blah plug plug… confronts the most lethal network of intrigue and murder in his war against international crime.  Only his strength, skill and daring can thwart a supercharged scheme that could blow every fuse on earth!

Wow.  That’s a terrible blurb.  Reactions below (with spoilers):

Overall:

The pacing and overall plot were good, but the chauvinism, the horrible gay stereotyping, and the  way that transgenderism was handled completely overshadowed the story.  Further, the mystery was clumsily handled – the main character solved things by knowing things that weren’t passed through to the reader.  I don’t remember picking up on any of this on my first read-through, years ago, which I’m somewhat ashamed to admit.  I must be getting a bit more attuned and sensitive in my old age.

Rating: 2

Setting:

The book was set in the seventies, in Iceland, among other places.  The setting was vividly depicted – it made me want to go and see Iceland.

Characters:

Dirk Pitt and Admiral Sandecker were all right.  They never change.  Tidi, Sandecker’s secretary, was a bit of fluff from the Moneypenny school – however, the only competencies that she had were typing, stenography, and making coffee.  Oh, and the “feminine intuition” which she had by nature of being female, of course.  She was a sympathetic eye for whenever Dirk got hurt, and a bundle of worry whenever he did something remotely dangerous.  Her treatment , both by the author and the characters – a slap on the ass as she goes to make coffee after a gunfight, among others, was one of the reasons that I was cursing out loud to the radio throughout this book.  

The adversaries were broadly painted and similarly not so believable, with the notable exception of Kirsti Fyrie, the main love interest for our intrepid hero.  She was generally well done.

Plot: 

There was an interesting mystery/action story with some fun moments, and some moments that were way over-the-top.  The bad guys were Big Corporate Money, and the story worked better than The World is not Enough, so that’s all right.  But there were also many moments that had me complaining out loud to the car-radio.  They mostly had to do with either Tidi, as discussed above, or with the Dirk Pitt disguises himself as a caricature of a gay man, because someone who is gay obviously can’t defend himself, or think, or… do anything other than paint and be outrageous.  What compete rubbish.  The treatment of transsexuals, which was also a major plot point later in the book, was similarly unsympathetic.  It may have been a sign of the times – showing how far we've come in terms of women being seen as competent people, acceptance of diversity in sexual identity and preference, and so on, since the seventies, but it was infuriating.  It completely overshadowed the actual storyline to me.

Audiobook reader:

This time, the Audiobook reader seemed ok.  I’m not sure if that was because there wasn't an Al Giordano in this book to be all jocular with, since that was where the reader really fell flat in The Mediterranean Caper.  In this book, the awkwardness seemed to fall fully on the author.  The dialogue was terribly over-written  “Our Air Force transportation has arrived” – people just don’t talk like that*, and it was pervasive through the whole book, not just one character who happened to be terribly pediantic.

*I understand that dialogue in books can’t be remotely like conversational English, but the illusion still needs to be there.  And it really, really, wasn't.

Other Opinions:

Audiobook Heaven

Understated in tone, but really not positive.

The Alfmeister

Not understated in tone at all, and not positive.

Chamber of Reviews

Good plot summary, not much for opinion.

Beauty in Ruins

Kind of ambivalent.