Customer Reviews

Bear Island

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I think the previous reviewer from California has this novel confused with some other book. I certainly wouldn't give Alistair Maclean's Bear Island to a small child and I'm not aware of any illustrated editions.

The book in question does, however, feature multiple murders committed during a trip to the arctic circle. A group of filmakers are going to Bear Island (a snow covered wasteland) to make a new movie, but only the producer and screenwriter know what the script is. Poisonings and drownings give way to blunt instrument trauma as the cast and crew diminishes quickly. Only the film crew's doctor can investigate the mysterious occurences. Except he's not all he seems, either.

I usually enjoy Maclean's writing and that's true here as well. The only problem I had with Bear Island was that it bogged down in the middle when the shipboard deaths had already occured and they still had not reached the island.

All in all, though, a good solid read.

"Bear Island" is a solid thriller by master story-teller Alistair Maclean. A converted fishing trawler carries a movie-making crew across the Barents Sea to isolated Bear Island, well above the Arctic Circle, for some on-location filming. En route, members of the movie crew and ship's company begin to die under mysterious circumstances. The ship's medical officer, one Doctor Marlowe, finds himself enmeshed in a violent, multi-layered plot in which very few of the persons aboard are precisely whom they claim to be. Dr. Marlowe's efforts to unravel the plot become even more complicated once the movie crew is deposited ashore on Bear Island, seemingly beyond the reach of the law or any other help.

This novel is a closed house murder mystery with the added twist that the scene of the crimes is the high Arctic. The murders continue ashore, and Dr. Marlowe discovers they may be related to blackmail and to some forgotten events of the Second World War.

"Bear Island" was not Maclean's best effort; the plot seems overly contrived and many of the characters are no more developed than cardboard cutouts. Nevertheless, Maclean was a polished writer and a past master of the twisting storyline; even his lesser efforts are fascinating reading. Readers will be kept guessing as Maclean slowly unspools the clues and frames the story for an exciting ending.

This book is highly recommended to fans of Alistair Maclean and to readers looking for an entertaining story.

Hm, I'm a little disappointed in the reviews, here. I suppose everyone expects a classic thriller par MacLean.

Bear Island is less a thriller than it is a mystery, which explains the somewhat slower-than-usual pacing. MacLean brings back Captain Imrie (from When Eight Bells Toll) who is a good guy this time. Rather, he's a sub-character, piloting the Morning Rose to Bear Island. Aboard is a film crew and the producers/directors of the most anticipated film of the year.

And then people start dropping like flies. I love it! It's very reminiscent of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None or William Dietrich's more recent Dark Winter. The classic premise: a bunch of people somehow completely isolated, and it's just not the best week for any of them.

Bear Island is written in first-person (an immediate MacLean favorite), written with that ubiquitous dry wit found in his other novels. Despite the obvious -- more whiskey and scotch downed than there is water in the ocean, and that Bear Island only appears halfway into the book -- I found myself enjoying every page. And it turns out Bear Island is actually a very beautiful island. I recommend Googling for images (see "customer images" for book cover). Don't expect MacLean to describe it too well, since it's dark, cloudy, windy and rainy during the tale.

"Bear Island" may be long on atmosphere and short on plot, but that is a far from fatal situation with author Alistair MacLean employing some of his crispiest dialogue and most descriptive prose. If you like mysteries that use humor and suspense in near-equal amounts, this 1971 novel will entertain you most of the way through.

Dr. Marlowe is the ship's doctor aboard the Morning Rose, a converted trawler presently being used as a kind of private yacht by megalomaniacal film director Otto Gerran. The ship is plowing the icy Barents Sea en route to Bear Island, an arctic Norwegian territory of steep and rugged coastline where Gerran plans to shoot a movie. En route, people begin dying mysteriously, a situation that continues after they make landfall. Dr. Marlowe has his hands full finding out who's responsible.

Right away, MacLean sets the book's tone of black humor, not only with the varied reactions to the opening murder but the backstory involving a somewhat inept movie production replete with more cattiness and fragile egos than "All About Eve." No one has a kind word about Otto, for example, even as they cheerfully avail themselves of his private stock of Scotch.

MacLean at times seems to be channeling Joseph Conrad, what with the narrator's name and his writing of a sea swell, "black and veined and evil," that breaks across the Morning Rose's beam at a dramatic moment. His writing is that good, especially early on. Bear Island comes alive less as a setting on account of the near-constant October darkness, but one gets a feeling of being here as well at odd times, with beetling cliffs that plunge straight down into icy waves, offering shelter only for the hardiest sea bird.

"Bear Island was black," he writes, "black as a widow's weeds."

MacLean also gets good mileage from his characters, not only Marlowe with his double-sided persona but Otto and the many others along for the ride. Everyone seems to have a secret or two, and for once in a MacLean novel, this actually amps up the story rather than detracts from it as being too contrived. One of my favorite lines in that vein could almost be a song lyric: "She gave me a little smile but there was a touch of winter in it."

Though it loses steam near the end, and is wrapped up with MacLean's customarily overneat quickness, "Bear Island" is a solid showcase for what makes the author so much fun.

I read this book because I'm attracted to stories set in windswept arctic places, and had also read and liked one of the author's previous books, "The Guns of Navarone." I found Bear Island to be very much a second rate thriller. There are a lot of characters, most of whom are not very well fleshed-out (I found myself confusing one with the other, and wishing for a scorecard). They spend most of their time sitting around and drinking hard liquor (especially Scotch). While I don't know anything about Alistair MacLean, his fixation with alcohol in this book seems to suggest he may have had a drinking problem, himself. Two of the female characters are constantly referred to as "Mary dear" and "Mary darling" respectively, a usage which I found patronizing and annoying. The plot, involving several murders and an illegal quest for Nazi gold and securities, is not as interesting as it sounds. Although the book is short (243 pages), I found I had to work to finish it. In conclusion, unless you're really hard up for something to read, don't bother with this one.

This is not a great book by any means and suffers from some major flaws. I read it not long after "Ice Station Zebra" and right away noted the similarities. A British professional who may or may not be all he seems finds himself trapped on a small ocean bound vessel that is suddenly beset by a series of suspicious deaths and "accidents" that aren't accidents.

In this case, "Dr" Marlowe, our hero, is working as a ship's doctor on board an old converted trawler that is off to the remote Bear Island to do some filming. Barely have we been introduced to the more than two dozen other characters than they are expiring, many in a nasty way. Here's the first problem with the book -- there are so many people floating around that you don't know who is who and therefore don't care when they turn up dead.

The scenes on the boat drag on forever and involve a vast amount of alcohol. No one seems to drink anything weaker than bad Scotch. In fact, barely two pages of the book go by without someone getting drunk. This is unconvincing. Once they get to the island the deaths continue and the storyline, never strong to begin with, gets ever more lost in stories of World War Two and lost treasure and long-ago fatal car crashes and who was behind the wheel one night when the family of one two-dimensional character -- or hang on, did it belong to another of the two-dimensional characters? -- suffered great tragedy and don't bother with that because here's an even more unbelievable story of blackmail and intrigue and . . .

And you're best off just forgetting it. The ending is flat and in some ways even less convincing than the highly confused 100 pages that come before it. The work is also grossly padded. This is not a great book.

Bear Island is an entertaining mystery/adventure. Right from the start, the suspense bubbles beneath the action. Characters great. Setting vivid. Island remote. The pace a is bit slow at times, but the mystery kept me reading and guessing.

Roger Weston, author of The Golden Catch

Great old book, I have read it on and off for a few years while working on boats in and around Alaska, A GREAT read when a storm is brewing.

Hm...what I learned from this book. Well, first of all, I like the movie "Bear Island" much better than I liked the book. I suppose that's unusual to begin with. Anyway, as for the book goes, it is a pretty typical Alistair MacLean offering. Though I've read only a few of his books, maybe this is the second, they seem to follow a similar pattern of presentation. It goes something like this...

The first 100 pp or so of the book are spent introducing characters, seeing some of them drop off right and left to a variety of villanous acts, and some just disappear. There seems to be no common thread amongst these deaths, and the reader is left wondering, perhaps wallowing, in an effort to make sense of things. Before long, however, one character emerges as being quite clever, and not who he is painted to be in the beginning. Then, once you hit about 3/4 of the way through the story a few, then a building momentum of revelations start to be offered. Finally, at the end, one of the characters engages in a prolonged monologue (15-20 pp) that explains what happened, who did it, and why, to the readers who are not at all likely to have figured it out on their own. I know I couldn't have come up with the whole story without the monologue.

If you like mysteries you may like this one, but I plowed through, mainly because I wanted to see how the book ended up, compared to the movie of the same name Bear Island [VHS](starring Donald Sutherland). Thus the luke-warm rating of three stars...it was "OK". Cheers.

"Bear Island" is a mystery novel set on a boat heding for the remote Bear Island (Bjørnøya) in the Barents Sea. The ship is carrying a film crew and actors who plan to make a movie on the island. The novel is narrated in first person by the ship's doctor. A number of people die from apparent food poisoning, but Dr. Marlow suspects murder.

The story tends to drag a bit before they get to the island, but not too much. Once they get to the island, MacLean throws in a nice plot twist and the pace picks up. This, and the humorous narrative helps it earn 4 stars. I also like MacLean's description of Bear Island. Even though I hate when it's cold, it almost made me want to go there.