Customer Reviews

Golden Buddha (Oregon Files Series)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(19)
1 star:		(46)

 

 

Cussler is one of the few authors who have NEVER disappointed me and I buy his books day of release without fail. I even liked his collaborations with Dirgo as it always seemed to me to be a Cussler book, UNTIL NOW. I totally agree with the reviewer who wrote that the book just died. Reading about the Dali Lama got me hooked as i thought there would be a few plots going on at once and the Dali Lama part could be quite intriguing. Did Cussler even see the book before Dirgo went to publisher?

I kept waiting for something other than the one event to happen. All these uninteresting characters that were not developed and no place for them to go. Who cares about this caper? I am on page 300 now and i couldn't believe that it took 300 pages to get to this point in the story so i came to Amazon to see it if was just me. It's not. I am only finishing this book because the name Cussler is attached. If this had been an unknown author, I would have stopped a long time ago as it is a terrible story, terribly concocted with only the first chapter or two having any interest. This is SO NOT CUSSLER. The writing is repetitive and boring as if he is trying to be Cussler but failing miserably. Ok, done. Wish the book was.

There comes a time when authors "jump the shark." Tom Clancy's was when he began "writing" the Net Force series (which I fondly call Net Farce); John Grisham did it with The King Of Torts; Kathy Reichs latest, Bare Bones, comes close (her rant at the end is out of character for the main character, Tempe Brennan). For Clive Cussler, it's Golden Buddha.

Although his name is prominent on the cover, this latest book is co-written with Craig Dirgo, who's written with Cussler before on The Sea Hunters books. In those, you can obviously tell which parts Cussler wrote and which Dirgo wrote - Dirgo's parts did not flow as well and sometimes contained inaccuracies in the facts. He should take a writing class.

Golden Buddha is a new series called The Oregon Files, featuring a main character named Juan Cabrillo who is tall, blonde and blue-eyed (much like Kurt Austin in the other spinoff series by Cussler and Paul Kemprecos). He and his crew of the ship Oregon take on "jobs" that most mercenaries wouldn't touch. They all showed up in a previous Dirk Pitt novel , Flood Tide, and I guess Cussler thought it would be a good spinoff. It could've been, but it isn't.

First of all, the book is about putting the Dalai Lama back in power in Tibet, which is why a very large golden Buddha must be recovered - there is a secret compartment in it with important information. I wish the Dalai Lama character hadn't been based on a real person - this made the entire story very unrealistic (if it does come true by 2005, the date in the book, I'll eat my hat). A fictional religious leader would have been a better bet. Also, Russian President Putin is named, but the President of the USA is not - he's just called the President. Who says Putin will still be in power in 2005? These inconsistencies drove me nuts.

The book reads like a TV movie waiting to be made. There are way too many characters to keep track of (even with the listing of each character's name and function at the beginning of the book) and the writing could have been much better, if Cussler had written more of it. You can tell which parts he wrote versus Dirgo - Cussler's flows beautifully, while Dirgo's is choppy and often contained odd words (the worst was "containerized ship" - as far as I know, they're more commonly known as container ships).

Characters use cutesy comments way too much - I don't know anyone in real life who talks like these people.

Scenes jumped helter skelter and I began getting confused, so I started skipping parts.

The best part of this book was near the beginning when Cabrillo and his crew have to recover the golden Buddha from a party in Macau. That was well done and exciting.

I love the Dirk Pitt adventures and the Kurt Austin books, but if the next Oregon Files is "cowritten" with Dirgo, I'll pass.

As far as I can tell, I've read every novel that Clive Cussler has written. These include: THE MEDITERRANEAN CAPER,ICEBERG, RAISE THE TITANIC!, VIXEN 03, NIGHT PROBE, PACIFIC VORTEX, DEEP SIX, CYCLOPS, TREASURE, DRAGON, SAHARA, INCA GOLD, SHOCK WAVE, FLOOD TIDE, ATLANTIS FOUND and VALHALLA RISING. I have also read, three novels he wrote with Paul Kemprecos which include: SERPENT, BLUE GOLD, AND FIRE ICE. His most recent novels (particularly the ones he coauthored) fail to meet the richness found in his earlier work. In a long process of excruciating reflection, I have drawn three conclusions regarding GOLDEN BUDDHA (coauthored with Craig Dirgo) that focus on changes in my personal enjoyment of Cussler's recent collaborative writing.

First is intensive character development. Within Cussler's Dirk Pitt series, I gained a great deal of reading enjoyment by viewing the character development. He was able to offer his readers an intensive psychological profile of the main and secondary characters. This process made the characters come alive by having an in depth understanding of their individual and often conflicting motivations. In addition, Cussler was able to move the characters through their aging cycles and thereby produced changes within their psychological profiles. I don't see this intensive character development in GOLDEN BUDDHA or in the other novels Cussler has coauthored. I miss that aspect of this writing.

Throughout the Dirk Pitt series, the impossible seemed possible. Cussler was able to pull together a series of strange and twisted elements within a story. These plot twists and turns emerged from the character's thought processes, dialog, and the reader's knowledge of history and archeology. Within GOLDEN BUDDHA, the characters do very little thinking. They merely heave money at problems. For example, I became annoyed with the sewage system used to transport the Buddha. I don't consider myself particularly creative, but I immediately thought of a more efficient, cheaper, and much less hazardous mode of transit. Dirk Pitt used his head to problem-solve. The characters in GOLDEN BUDDHA merely purchased stuff and staff to achieve goals. I want to read about a character's action, not his use of nearly unlimited financial resources.

In Cussler's earlier work, there was always a surprise element. This is not to suggest that the endings were a surprise but the process to get to the preordained happy ending was nerve-racking. The description of the escape from the Cuban prison in GOLDEN BUDDHA had me sitting on the edge of my chair, but it lacked the intellectual initiative. In addition, it demonstrated that the future challenges within the storyline were going to be solved financially rather than intellectually. Thus, when one reads the description of the Cuban prison escape in GOLDEN BUDDHA, the process for all the other tense moments become anticlimactic. No more edge-sitting.

I suspect that the GOLDEN BUDDHA will be my last Clive Cussler novel.

Having been a long-time Cussler fan, enjoying the Dirk Pitt series, as well as the Kurt Austin series, I eagerly picked up Sacred Stone when I saw it a the local Costco a few months ago. I found it to be a pretty good read with an interesting subject forming the basis for the story. I decided to give Golden Buddha a read. I have to go along with the consensus here that this is simply a terrible book. I think it should be listed as authored by Craig Dirgo and Clive Cussler, instead of the other way around, because clearly most of this book was not written by Clive Cussler.

Throughout all of the Cussler books, there was never a need to insert a cast of characters before. This book actually benefits by it due to the fact that there is virtually no character development that would make the reader take interest in them. Cussler continues his homophobic trend, started early in the Dirk Pitt series, of butch lesbians and "light in the loafers" males. (Funny how none of his major protaganists ever bothered to marry).

The book is also poorly edited. It is often confusing. It is a choppy read, with unnecessary foreshadowing, as pointed out by another reviewer. The part about setting up one of the Corporation's dummy businesses (and we'll go from Andorra to San Marino to Lichtenstein, to Luxembourg, blah, blah, blah) was especially difficult to get through and superfluous to the story.

All of Cussler's work stretches credulity; this book goes far beyond incredulous. The conspiracy with the Russians to set a ruse with the Chinese was simply ridiculous. I guess I just don't find any members of the Corporation to be interesting, nor do I find their mercenary deeds to be noteworthy.

All in all, a book which had a potentially interesting concept, but which fails to be a compelling read.

Imagine a bunch of rich, perfect, shallow guys and gals dressing up as a cover-rock band so they can steal a piece of art...they have high-tech gadgets, they spew one-liners, they are completely unlikely. This is a Disney-meets-Bruckenheimer film in type. Maybe the worst book I've ever read. No sense of reality, no sense of place, no real characters, and NO intrigue.

Like most Clive Cussler fans, I wait around for his next book like a junkie waiting for his next fix. When I heard that he was teaming with Craig Dirgo (who wrote the rather entertaining 'Einstein Papers') for another series called, 'The Oregon Files', I just KNEW it was going to be every bit as great as anything and everything Clive had already written. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

'Golden Buddha' is unlike ANYTHING that Clive has done before. At least with the Kurt Austin stories, Clive & Kemprecos followed the tried & true formula which had served so well over the course of the Dirk Pitt tales...however the Oregon Files treads over different ground. I was encouraged -- at first -- that the beginning started off as so many of the Cussler novels do with a re-telling of an event that happened decades before as the Dali Lama is forced to flee into exile from Tibet -- but this is where ANY similarity to previous books ENDS. As I began chapter 1, I had the distinct feeling that I had walked into an action movie 20 minutes AFTER it had started. The story was already in motion making me feel as though I had missed some critical details into the plot. As the story unfolds, the Corporation running the Oregon are hired to steal the Golden Buddha, which had disappeared when the Dali Lama had fled from Tibet into India many years before in an attempt of a good-will gesture to gently nudge China into giving up control of the country they cannot afford to run any longer anyway. It IS an imaginative caper, I assure you -- but it is VERY difficult to follow. There are a LOT of chapters in 'Golden Buddha', and MANY even smaller segments within each chapter, forcing the story to jump from one scene to another. Now I'm certain that this was intended to move seamlessly, but unfortunately, the story moves from one location to another so often and so choppy it was quite a chore to remember where things were if you put the book down for just a few minutes, let alone pick it up after a day of sitting on the shelf. There are a LARGE assembly of characters to keep track of, and even with the help of a Cast of Character List at the beginning of the book, I found myself wondering just WHO this or that person was. Part of this problem was due to the Corporation characters taking on the alias of other people, and within certain segments of the chapters, the authors refer to them with their alias names as well as their real names, thus confusing me even MORE. I pride myself on being able to follow complicated stories and convoluted plots with reasonable ease, but 'Golden Buddha' had me wondering which way was up many times.

While I have HIGH hopes that the next Oregon Files story will be easier to follow, reading this latest Cussler tale turned out to be a bit more of a challenge than I had originally figured it to be. With that said, I still found 'Golden Buddha' to be a fun story (provided you could follow what was going on) and although not on par with Dirk Pitt or Kurt Austin, the tales featuring Juan Cabrillo and the ship Oregon just might end up scoring Cussler an even larger following than he already has. I fervently look forward to the next Pitt tale, 'Trojan Odyssey'. Judge for yourself, but remember that just because this story says Clive Cussler on the front, does NOT mean that you will get a novel that even remotely resembles anything he has written before. I think that starting 'Golden Buddha' with this knowledge up front will make the story easier to digest and enjoy, which I did -- just not as much as I would've liked.

Even though I bought the paperback book at HalfPrice Books for significantly less than its $15 cover price, I still feel like I wasted my money. I have enjoyed all of Cussler's fiction (except the books he wrote "with" Paul Kemprecos) but this one is definitely NOT a Cussler book. Tedious, lengthy descriptions, a total lack of character development and weak dialog make this book painful to read. In fact, I put the book down eighty pages from the end -- I just couldn't stand it any more.

I guess I'll forgo any more Cussler books until he returns to writing them without "help" from other authors.

I have been a Clive Cussler fan for over 20 years and thoroughly enjoyed all of his Dirk Pitt novels. The character development in this story was horrible, the plot was inplausible and hard to follow. I kept reading and hoping that it would get better. The base concept of "The Corporation" is excellent, but was very poorly developed and communicated. The authors tried to accomplish too much in the story line without fleshing out the characters. Do not waste your time on this one!!!

I NEVER thought Clive Cussler would have an awful book. But I doubt he wrote this one anyway. His art of switching scenes while keeping interest is not here. This is a hodgepodge of......something. Complicated story. Outright low morals (gee, professional hookers???) were a surprise. I'll pass on future co-authored books.

How sad! I'm a Dirk Pitt fan from way, way back. For my money, Clive Cussler is a former heavyweight world champion in the thriller department! But in Golden Buddha, he's reduced himself to the status of an overweight, out of shape punch drunk fighter that just doesn't know when to hang up the gloves and retire!

As a musican and former guitar teacher I took personal insult at one point in the story! Cussler would have his readers believe it is possible for a collection of non-musician mercenaries to substitute themselves for a professional band, lip-synch three sets of rock music and fake the instrument playing sufficiently well to stand up to the scrutiny of a few hundred people in close proximity at a private party! Give your head a shake, Clive!

For Juan Cabrillo, the chairman of the Corporation, a collection of high-tech wizards and mercenaries, think Mr Phelps of former Mission Impossible fame! Monica Crabtree is a slutty version of Barbara Bain with boobs on steroids! If that comparison seems a little silly, keep it in mind when you try reading Golden Buddha if you feel like you've got a few hours to blow on something that just doesn't make the grade! Some of the one liners will give you a wan smile or two but, frankly, I was generally uncertain as to whether Cussler was trying to be serious or trying to satirize himself and the thriller genre. It doesn't matter - whichever one you believe it is - Cussler didn't succeed anyway!

The thing that makes me angrier than anything else is that I've already purchased The Trojan Odyssey. So I will read it but unless Cussler pulls a real rabbit out of his hat, he's off my list! Maybe I can persuade a second hand book store to give me a buck or two to take them off my hands.