Customer Reviews

The Lonely Sea: Collected Sea Stories

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Alistair Maclean published 28 adventure novels in his working lifetime, many of them bestsellers. The most enduring of his titles may be "The Guns of Navarone" and "Where Eagles Dare", thanks in part to successful movie adaptations. Readers may therefore be surprised to know that MacLean actually cut his teeth as an author on short stories. The first item in 1985's "The Lonely Sea" is a short story that won a newpaper competition in 1954 and launched the former Royal Navy sailor and school teacher on a professional writing career.

The stories in "The Lonely Sea" cover a wide gamut of plots whose connecting thread is an association with the sea. "The Dileas" is the heartbreaking story of an aging West Highland fisherman who puts to sea in a terrible storm to rescue his two sons. The dialogue is authentic to the Highlands, and a plot twist at the end is typically MacLean. Several of the stories are thinly fictionalized accounts of wartime battles or disasters, such as "The Sinking of the Bismarck" and "The Lancastria." A few, such as "MacHinery and the Cauliflowers" are off-beat sea-going crime stories. "St George and the Dragon" is actually a rather whimsical love story.

The book includes a newspaper article in which MacLean offers his rather blunt opinions on the rewards and responsibilities of a successful writer. The article reflects MacLean's view of himself as a teller of stories for the entertainment of his readers rather than a novelist offering compelling truths to critics. The collection in "The Lonely Sea" displays MacLean's undoubted gifts in a short story format that may not be familar to many of his longtime fans.

"The Lonely Sea" is highly recommended to fans of Alistair MacLean.

Released near the very end of his career, when he was about a decade into his decline, `The Lonely Sea' provides a welcome collection of short stories from Alistair Maclean. Unlike the increasingly dull novels he wrote in his later life, these stories are all engaging and entertaining, and sometimes quite emotionally powerful. Either they were all written many years earlier, or Maclean was still focussed and disciplined enough in the 1970's and 80's to sustain a short story (if not a full-length book). As the title suggests, all the stories are connected in some way to the sea, but there is a wide range of subject matter. There are tales of wartime battles, heroic rescue attempts, cunning smugglers, clumsy yachtsmen, and waterproof watches.

About half the stories here are non-fictional accounts of wartime naval encounters, the highlight of which described the hunting and sinking of the Bismarck. Elsewhere, there are tales of courageous sacrifice (`Rawalpindi', `The Jervis Bay'), heroic civilian survival (`Lancastria', `City of Benares'), and tragedy due to military incompetence (`Andorra Star', `Meknes'). On the last point, Maclean pulls no punches in criticising the pig-headedness of the authorities who refused to remove barbed wire from the `Andorra Star', or who forgot to inform the Germans that the `Meknes' was a harmless passenger vessel.

The other stories are fictional, and again there is considerable variety here. Some are quite light-hearted (`McCrimmon And The Blue Moonstones', `McHinery And The Cauliflowers'), with a couple descending into near farce (`St George And The Dragon'). Others are more serious, such as the wartime descriptive piece `They Sweep The Seas', as well as `Rendezvous', which is my personal favourite, and apparently judged good enough to be converted into a full-length novel after Maclean's death. Special mention must be made of `The Dileas', a remarkably strong and affecting piece of writing for someone who at that time had no intention of becoming a full-time writer.

Also included is a short reflection by Maclean himself on `The Rewards And Responsibilities of Success', which is interesting enough if not particularly revealing.

In all, it's a solid collection of "vintage Maclean", and a reminder of how good this adventure writer once was.