14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Doesn't live up to its promise, September 26, 2007
This review is from: Crusader Gold (Mass Market Paperback)
I thought Crusader Gold's premise had promise. Unfortunately, while I found the main characters interesting and attention-worthy, and the history was complex and fascinating, the rest of the book felt like tissue paper trying vainly to hold these jewels into some semblance of a whole skein.
The pacing was entirely off. Most of the book is loaded down with complex historical exposition disguised as dialogue. When excitement does happen, it feels sudden, jarring, and out-of-place. In particular, Crusader Gold see-sawed back and forth between over-explaining and repeating information and skipping over things as though the author suddenly realized he needed to speed things up; unfortunately he often skipped just the wrong information, leaving things confused.
There are two distinct "feels" in this book that don't jibe with one another. The over-explaining of historical and technical portions of the book gives the feel of an ultra-real adventure novel in which the author wants you to know that everything he writes is absolutely possible. However, everything having to do with the bad guys (the Nazis) in this book is one-dimensional and overblown---something you might be able to get away with in a brain-candy thrill-ride, but not in a 'realistic' adventure. In addition, the main characters find their way through the plot courtesy of just enough improbable coincidence and happenstance that such ultra-realism is similarly stretched to the breaking point. Crusader Gold really needs to be one or the other: quick brain-candy thrill ride with just enough information to make it somewhat real, or ultra-realistic info-fest with all aspects given equal attention. Speaking of Nazis, the bad guys are so utterly, completely one-dimensional that they might as well be rabid dogs.
As if all of that weren't enough, the ending is quite anticlimactic. Obviously I won't give away the details, but suffice it to say that just when you're sure you still have some interesting mileage left because the characters haven't yet found their objective, it's all cut short and solved through a little dialogue.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Mr. Brown, Mr. Cussler, meet Dr. Gibbins who is poaching on your territory, March 10, 2007
The website of David Gibbins, the author of "Crusader Gold," roars off with this boastful trumpet blast: "New York Times bestselling author and archaeologist David Gibbins, whose novels Atlantis and Crusader Gold have sold more than half a million copies since 2005 and are being published in more than 30 languages." Who am I to doubt a word of it? Gibbins holds a Ph.D. in archeology. He was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, but he has based his education and career in the UK. Throughout the 1990s he was a university lecturer who taught archaeology, art history and ancient history. He is now, we are informed, devoting himself to writing novels and carrying out archeological fieldwork on a full-time basis.
Dr. Gibbins' fiction inspires some pretty profound reactions. At the Amazon UK site, the first of the two spotlighted reviews for his previous book, "Atlantis," offered these comments: "This is quite possibly the WORST book I have ever had the misfortune to read. I stuck with it thinking it has to get better when they get to Atlantis.... Please for the love of God save your money and buy something else! This book is a thinly vailed [sic] Science [sic] lesson masquerading as an adventure novel!" The second said, "Despite the atrocious ratings that have already labelled this book a disaster, I personally think that it was not all that bad." On the back cover of the book the English newspaper, the Mirror, is quoted rhetorically asking, "What do you get if you cross Indiana Jones with Dan Brown? Answer: David Gibbons." One Amazon UK reviewer snorted at that, saying, "I rather feel that the Answer should have been more along the lines of `A complete waste of money'."
This is a "what if" type of book. The particular one here being what if Harald Hardrada, the Viking King of Norway who invaded England in 1066, hadn't actually died in the battle at Stamford Bridge at the hands of the defending Anglo-Saxons? Now Harald was a barbarian's barbarian; he'd been everywhere and done everything that a Viking thought worth going or doing. He was the kind of guy who would buy Conan the Barbarian a beer and maybe offer him a few pointers. As a youngster on the losing side of a Viking battle, he'd high-tailed it down to Constantinople, risen high in the Imperial Guard, then returned home flush with loot, murdered his brother Magnus and settled in to be a king.
What if, asks Gibbins, Harald had only been wounded in the battle? If he had recuperated at the Monastery at Iona, then sailed off into the western sunset? He even quotes Tennyson on that point, but not very appropriately, I'm afraid. Here's a much more pertinent jingle from the Poet Laureate: "Death closes all; but something ere the end, / Some work of noble note may yet be done / ... for my purpose holds / To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars , until I die. / ... Tho' much is taken, much abides, and tho' / We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are."
Gibbins' idea is a fine one: tracing Harald in his last work of noble note. His execution of the idea, though, is atrocious. The man simply hasn't a clue about dramatic pacing. The plot has the regularity and predictability of a Ferris Wheel: voyage, lecture, discovery, lecture, crisis; voyage (last crisis now virtually forgotten), lecture, discovery, lecture, crisis ... and so on to the end. The great final confrontation (you didn't imagine there would NOT be a great final confrontation, did you?) is neither more nor less than any of the half dozen or more crises that preceded it.
Gibbins' wordsmithing skills are on a par with his plotting. His lectures, oh, his endless lectures! Page after page, one character explains things to another character who by all the laws of commonsense ought already to know. The teacher should be bound, gagged and locked in a closet by the thriller writer.
His characters have no inner life. They exist solely at the behest of the plot and act only to forward it. Here is an example that is appallingly typical of the whole book:
"`It's twenty-three metres from the edge of the platform to water surface, give or take a few centimetres. We'll need to rig a pretty elaborate gantry to get the machinery operational.'
"`If they could do it in the 1950s, we can do it now. I'll trust your ingenuity.'
"`As it happens, I've designed just the thing.'" [Page 307 of the trade paperback]
There are other faults, but I'll content myself with just two. Gibbins is an archeologist. He taught archeology. Why, then, are his heroes such thorough-going treasure hunters and looters that they make Indiana Jones look positively respectable and scholarly?
And why, even this Da Vinci Code-mad age, must we have yet another sinister Vatican conspiracy? Consider this:
"`There's a kind of internal inquisition, run by one of the cardinals. It's always been there. But this is more sinister, as bad as it can get.... All I can say now is he's shockingly powerful inside the Vatican. He could squash me on a whim. I've got nothing to pin on him for certain but enough to put his activities in the spotlight when I go public about this.'" [Page 198]
Hm, let's see now. The book was published in 2006. We can safely assume that it refers to events no later than early 2005. This very powerful cardinal who runs an internal inquisition that's always been there, he's a member of a clandestine organization that is strongly associated with Germans. Now, who could that be?
It so happens that I am not Catholic, but I am getting truly tired of this sort of Dan Brown-style nonsense, all for the sake of selling thrillers. Why can't we find our sinister villains elsewhere? A Mennonite conspiracy carried out by a shadowy band of latter day Cathar knights--now THAT would be something!
Two stars. After all, the book has the undeniable virtue of not being by Dan Brown.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Pretty boring..., July 7, 2009
This review is from: Crusader Gold (Mass Market Paperback)
I really, really, really wanted to like this book. I like the whole concept behind it and the way it sets off on one of those globe-trotting adventures I'm so fond of reading.
Within 10 pages, this book had me yawning and wondering how long it would take to finish.
The problem as I see it is that Dr. Gibbins is a very technically proficient writer. All the paragraphs are perfectly ordered. The ideas and dialogue are presented in a logical fashion. The appropriate things happen at the appropriate times. But its all just wooden. The entire time I was reading this, I kept thinking that "this is the book a college professor writes to show his students how great he is even though he can't get published". The whole thing just feels too forumlaic and contrived. Almost like something a computer would turn out if you gave it a bullet point outline of a story.
Will I try another Gibbins book? Probably. But I can't say that I'll be looking too hard to find one.
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