Athabasca [Hardcover]

Alistair MacLean (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1981

The nail-biting tale of sabotage set in the desolate frozen wastes of two ice-bound oil fields, from the acclaimed master of action and suspense.SABOTAGE!THE VICTIMSTwo of the most important oil-fields in the world - one in Canada, the other in Alaska.THE SABOTEURSAn unknown quantity - deadly and efficient. The oil flow could be interrupted in any one of thousands of places down the trans-Alaskan pipeline.THE RESULTCatastrophe.One man, Jim Brady, is called in to save the life-blood of the world as unerringly, the chosen targets fall at the hands of a hidden enemy…

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 430 pages
• Publisher: G. K. Hall; Ex Lib. edition (1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0006164579
• ISBN-13: 978-0006164579
• ASIN: 0816131473
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Plenty of Ice But No Zebra, April 10, 2002

By 

An Audience of 12 (Bellevue, WA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Athabasca (Mass Market Paperback)

Maclean lost his battle with alcoholism later in life, and it adversely affected his output. His novels became shorter and their characterization flatter, and in Athabasca, he presents one character's alcoholism in virtually a positive light. The plot of this story is forgettable too and there's only about ten pages near the end where 'master of suspense' can be applied to the writing. A sad decline for someone who was the Tom Clancy of his day and is virtually forgotten barely fifteen years after his death. As for this book, read Ice Station Zebra if you want to play in the snow!

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Frozen Stiff, April 14, 2005

By 

Bill Slocum (Norwalk, CT USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Athabasca (Mass Market Paperback)

The moment I realized "Athabasca" had to be one of the worst suspense books I ever read came when one of the heroes found himself chained to a steel ring set in concrete while a "dragline," in essence a giant tractor, is set in motion to run over him, very slowly.

"Goodbye, Mr. Dermott," says a bad guy before leaving. "You have two minutes to live."

What follows is one of the slowest performances of the adventure yarn's oldest cliché, the rescue of the damsel from the railroad tracks, except here the damsel is doing the rescuing. For all its faults, this is "Athabasca's" one moment of genuine action, even if it moves like molasses.

"Athabasca" is a sad, dispirited-feeling book from an author who did much better work. As Joseph Shembrie noted here, Alistair Maclean had his battle with the bottle, and it's no trick guessing which was winning when he wrote this. The heroes avail themselves of alcohol at every spare moment, retiring for some belts of whiskey, even daiquiris at times, when they could instead be acting on one of the many hunches they get about who is sabotaging oil-processing facilities in Alaska and Alberta, a plot they have been hired to foil. The drinking here is as copious (if not as entertaining) as "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?", yet Maclean treats this as if it were not only natural but edifying behavior.

The jocundity of this besotted band is a little tough to take as the bodies start dropping. After meeting one character, the leader of this band, Jim Brady, observes "Pity he acts so suspiciously - otherwise he'd have made a splendid suspect."

This casual air taken by the heroes to their work might be even more frustrating if the story was easier to follow. But you never really cotton to what's going on. You have two plots set in motion at two very different oil facilities run by two different entities, apparently for extortion purposes, yet until the last 60 pages there are no demands made. The bad guys instead kill people and blow things up to make the point they are serious. We know the same people are responsible in both cases, but why do they spread themselves so thin by covering such a large section of the icy North American outback? And why do they persist in their destruction for so long before asking for money?

Several times the author seems to lose track of his plot. At one point, much attention is given to the broken finger suffered by one of the novel's four corpses (all the killing takes place off-screen, as it were; the narrative consists largely of wooden dialogue.) Yet the explanation for the injury, when given, makes no sense. Also stretching it are two breaks in the case, one when a woman is dropped 100 feet from a helicopter and just happens to land on a snow drift, and another where a hostage passes on some vital information. Brady breaks the case by letting himself be captured so the bad guys in their mistaken smugness will spill their story.

Keeping track of all the interchangeable minor characters presented as suspects is not only impossible but pointless. The heroes don't act on their suspicions about which are the criminals as it would interfere with their drinking time, and when the evil gang is at last revealed, the big "A-ha" moment is considerably dampened by the fact they are mostly either obscure or unknown to the story as told to that point.

In essence, "Athabasca" is as torpid and unwieldy as that menacing dragline, and a poor representation of Maclean as one of the great adventure writers of his day.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Average MacLean., August 17, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Athabasca (Mass Market Paperback)

Not much to say about this book. It was very average, and left me feeling like I could have better spent my time re-reading "Ice Station Zebra" or "Where Eagles Dare" if I really wanted to read Alistair MacLean. The book is out of print currently; don't bother going to too much trouble to find it.