Goodbye California [Large Print] [Hardcover]

Alistair MacLean (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1979 | Series: Ulverscroft large print series. [adventure, suspense]

The classic tale of terrorism, where a criminal fanatic is hell-bent on blasting San Francisco into the ocean, from the acclaimed master of action and suspense.The classic tale of terrorism, where a criminal fanatic is hell-bent on blasting San Francisco into the ocean, from the acclaimed master of action and suspense. 'Earthquake country,' said the Professor. 'San Francisco is geologically and seismologically a city that waits to die. Los Angeles is ringed by earthquake centres - seven massive quakes so far. We have no idea where the next, the monster, will hit…' '…until a criminal fanatic kidnaps a nuclear scientist and builds his own atomic bombs. If exploded on California's fault lines they could trigger off the mightiest earthquake of them all - killing half its population and dumping the entire city of San Francisco into the sea. Goodbye California.

--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 577 pages
• Publisher: Ulverscroft Large Print Books Ltd; Large Print edition edition (June 1979)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 070890310X
• ISBN-13: 978-0708903100
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Low Point in MacLean's work, July 26, 2000

By 

Duane Schermerhorn - See all my reviews

This review is from: Goodbye, California (Hardcover)

It is a bit depressing to read the novels of Alistair MacLean written after 1971, especially for someone like me who got so much pleasure from so many of the stories he wrote before that year. After "Bear Island" (1971) each of his books becomes more turgid and perfunctory than the previous. It is not much fun to follow a great adventure story writer's decline into near self-caricature, and reading "Goodbye, California" (1978) is certainly not fun.

In his early books MacLean heightens the excitement by making the reader care about the fate of the characters. In his best books, he puts us inside the head of the protagonist (most successfully when the protagonist is the narrator), and we experience the roller-coaster ups and downs of emotion, frustration, and physical exhaustion as our hero engages in a battle of wits and endurance against a deadly enemy.

In the post-1971 books, MacLean increasingly leans on a different device to try to heighten our excitement and involvement in the story. He escalates the threat, presumably with the idea that the sheer immensity of the danger will increase our involvement in the fate of the characters. This simply doesn't work. Threat is only really meaningful if directed at specific characters we care about; increasing the destruction and number of potential victims is too impersonal - too academic, in a sense - to get us involved.

In "Goodbye California" the threat is the placement of nuclear devices on the San Andreas Fault in such a way that their detonation will cause an earthquake that will send major portions of the state into the Pacific Ocean. The narrative suffers from most of the faults of MacLean's latter novels - the story is mostly talk, very little action, with key events taking place "off camera" and later reported to our ostensible heroes. The few scenes where the protagonists actually take action - instead of jawing away in boring elaborations of how deadly the threat is - are handled in a perfunctory way, and we never have the feeling that the heroes are not in complete command of the situation. We never experience the excitement of a threat to any of them - we simply read with a lack of interest as they overcome the easily outwitted villains.

As boring as this books is, however, the worst aspect of it is the occasional borderline-fascist sentiment expressed by the author when the protagonist laments such aspects of democratic society as free speech and freedom of information because they can lead to crises like the fictional one at hand. Truly distasteful.

"Goodbye, California" ranks as one of the absolute low points in the career of a great adventure storywriter.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars MacLean a prophet? This one may qualify him., December 31, 2006

By 

Indiana Jeff Reynolds "Preacher Jeff" (Indianapolis, IN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Goodbye California (Mass Market Paperback)

For me, reading MacLean is like a visit with an old friend. I look forward to reading his books, and this was a prime example.

Some of his books are great at being mysteries, leaving you wondering who the bad guys are, and who the good guy really is. This book does not qualify. You quickly learn who the good guys are, and you learn who the bad guys are.

This book deals with the threat of nuclear weapons setting off a massive earthquake. MacLean did plenty of research concerning the geological status of California, and he shares it in a preface.

Another thing I found interesting, though. This book was written in the late '70's, before I heard a lot about Islamic Terrorists. MacLean dealt with that before its time.

This is one book that reading the blurb took away from the story, which I regret.

One reviewer called this a low-point. I'm not sure I agree: I found this superior to later novels like "Partisans" and "Floodgate." I'm at the point, though, that I'd rather read a poor MacLean novel than not read a MacLean novel.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent detective/drama, June 19, 2000

By 

Ken Coar "Rodent of Unusual Size" (in 1.0 AU Solar orbit) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Goodbye, California (Hardcover)

MacLean really does this story up brown. All of the characters come to life and are eminently believable. The information that alarms them should certainly alarm us (if true, and I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it were). Tension builds steadily and quite satisfactorily until the denouement. The main character's unshakeable integrity and implacability had me cheering for him every step of the way. Get a bag of pretzels, a good reading light, and read this book!