Customer Reviews

Caravan to Vaccares

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is an excellent, fast paced and reads like it was meant to be a movie script. How unfortunate the movie makers ignored the book. A tale of gypsies, smugglers and foreign scientists, with enough twists and turns to keep the reader occupied. Overall an excellent read, I give the full five stars.

Well you have to read this book if u r a fan of suspense and intrigue.......
this book has enough twists,turns and suspense.
i am sure that anybody who reads any of macleans books will get addicted to him......

I first read the book while in high school in Canada circa 1970. I was captivated by the story, by Les Baux de Provence, and by the Camargue. In 2007 I followed the path of the book, visited all of these beautiful story locales, and filmed and photographed them. The book descriptions are very accurate. The excellent and plausible story unfolds much as a Russian Easter egg. The dialogue is very clever. As I photographed in Les Baux, I showed my copy of the book to the Tourist Associates at the entrance to the Chateau premesis and to the Desk Clerks at the L'Oustau de Baumanière. They were happily astonished! This book is a true delight. Still looking for my Cecile, though!

Caravan to Vaccares is a well-plotted espionage tale set in Europe against the backdrop of a wandering gypsy caravan.

It's not without humor, and it's a fast moving story. However, the book lacks the characterizations of Maclean's earlier books, especially those dealing with World War II.

The books he produced after this novel seem hastily written. Pick this one instead of Seawitch and Way to Dusty Death.

Recommended, especially for Maclean fans.

Alistair Maclean's "Caravan to Vacares" opens with the pursuit to the death of a man somehow connected to annual Gypsy caravans to France. The scene then shifts to a restaurant where two young Englishwomen on holiday are seemingly by chance paired with a older French nobleman and gourmand and a younger man named Bowman, who claims no occupation at all. Maclean takes his time filling in the clues that connect these two events and this results in the somewhat unusual pacing of "Caravan."

At the heart of the plotline is a smuggling operation by the Gypsies that has attracted international law enforcement attention, but Maclean devotes most of the novel to the adventures of Neil Bowman. Bowman turns out to have both very unique job skills and the unfortunate knack of drawing murderous attempts on his life. His pairing with one of the young Englishwomen provides Maclean with the opportunity for a rather chaste romance and some sharp repartee between the two. The two must overcome various obstacles, including a nearly fatal encounter in a bullring, while stringing together the clues that will solve the case. As with any Maclean novel, very little is as it first seems. Unlike most Maclean novels, the twists and turns of the story are a little harder to follow than usual.

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

It's probably no accident Alistair MacLean's literary career rose to widespread prominence at the same time as commercial air travel. MacLean was the ultimate airplane fiction writer, someone whose picaresque, globe-trotting adventure novels could be devoured in a single sitting.

He might be remembered for thin characters and wooden dialogue, but it was MacLean's fast-paced narrative, often very alive and tactile, that gained him fans. Something else, too; he had a formula but a lot of creativity within that formula, an ability to develop gripping stories by putting his good-guy-bad-guy adventure yarns in unusual settings and situations. In that way he was a lot better than many give him credit for.

Unfortunately, MacLean's mobile imagination didn't always produce great fiction, which leads us to "Caravan To Vaccares." A mysterious fellow named Bowman shadows a group of mysterious, murderous Gypsies around the south of France. He jokingly explains his motives to his companion Cecile as being those of "a vengeful layabout," but what he's really up to is left opaque.

Adding to the chemistry of mood here is a group of mysterious women being held captive by the Gypsies, one with weals covering her back; a Chinese couple that appear and disappear at several points in the narrative, saying nothing but watching everything; a charging bull; and a French duke of marked appetite and hauteur who may not be as much of a neutral observer as he seems.

"Le Grand Duc," as he is called, is the most interesting character in "Caravan," and MacLean has fun with him. Bursting in on a budding hostage situation, he is told he can't just barge in.

"Nonsense. I am the Duc de Croytor. Besides, I never barge. I always make an entrance."

"Caravan" is nonsense, though fun at times around the middle when MacLean gets going with a clever reverse chase between Bowman and the Gypsies. He's chasing them chasing him. There's a good opening, too, of a Gypsy's murder, which MacLean paints darkly and well.

But as the story progresses, it becomes harder to follow. MacLean gets caught up in the sport of playing with reader expectations. You think one thing is going to happen, so something else does instead. Nearly every character has a hidden identity; one has two. The back end of "Caravan" becomes one confusing about-face after another, winding up in a too-cute tidy resolution with one character calling out "Encore!" No thanks.

Also weak is the Gypsy angle, which is never explored in any great depth. You feel like he made the bad guys Gypsies just because it would make for good cover art.

I was amused by some of this book, and enjoyed its first half pretty well. But a thin setting and confusing narrative really brought me up short. I had no problem reading the book; it's MacLean, and something to make a flight pass quickly. But "Caravan To Vaccares" is the kind of book that gives airplane fiction a bad name.