Customer Reviews

Seawitch

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"Seawitch" was the first Alistair MacLean book that I ever read, and it was good enough to get me hooked on him. To my delight, I discovered that most of his earlier books were even better.

The plot of "Seawitch" is a little less convoluted than typical MacLean: Lord Worth, fabulously wealthy and quite ruthless, has made a lot of enemies in the oil business because of his cutthroat attitude. His drill rig, named Seawitch, will put the final nail in the coffin of his competitors, as it will allow him to drill at will in the ocean. His competitors decide that while they hate one another, they all hate Lord Worth even more. So they hire a ruthless "troubleshooter" to fix their problem. They don't need to know how, don't even want to know how, they just want it done.

Fortunately for Lord Worth, his two daughters (one blonde, one brunette) are in love and loved by two former police detectives/now private investigators. These two guys are your usual MacLean heroes: tough, resourceful, insubordinate (which is why they are ex-police detectives), hopelessly upright. From there, it's a cat and mouse game between the two sides to see if Seawitch gets destroyed. There's a lot of sneaking around, some violence, and a satisfying climax.

Still, by 1977, when he wrote "Seawitch," MacLean was starting to lose his talent, and after this, his books range from mediocre ("Athabasca") to dreadful ("River of Death", "Partisans"). You would do yourself a favor to go back to read books MacLean wrote between 1959 and 1971, when he kicked out an amazing string of mostly Cold War thrillers, the best of which are "Ice Station Zebra," "The Golden Rendezvous," "The Black Shrike," "The Satan Bug," "Bear Island," "Puppet on a Chain," "Where Eagles Dare," and "Night Without End." Those books -- many of which were made into movies -- are tight, tension-filled, unpredictable reads.

This book is about oil rigs and one man, Lord Worth, who owns one of the biggest, the Seawitch. To destroy it and therefore be able to inflate the price of oil, the competitors get together and send one man to deal with Lord Worth. He, unfortunately (for him, that is), has a personal score to settle with Worth and sets about kidnapping his daughters. Enter our heroes, Mitchell and Roomer, former cops and betrothed of the girls. They set about foiling the villain's plans and try and save Worth and his daughters from certain death. Why, you ask? Oh, I must have forgotten to mention that the Villain robbed a nuclear weapons armory, and that he intends to leave Worth and all his people on the rig when he destroys it with the nuclear weapon! A first-class book!

Having read Night Without End, Ice Station Zebra and Bear Island, Alistair MacLean seems to have tried something new with Seawitch. Unfortunately it doesn't work out. This book breaks from his usual mystery/action/drama formula. There is no "traitor amongst them" story, no mystery and dull action. The characters have no depth. Two fired cops, a billionaire with his two daugthers and a disgruntled oil well fire-fighter. This doesn't make for a gripping story. It looks like Alistair MacLean had a bill due so he churned out this snoozer in a week's time. I really like Alistair MacLean (so far), but Seawitch lacks in so many ways.

1977's "Seawitch" came at the latter end of storyteller Alistair MacLean's writing career. It features an exotic storyline about a plot to destroy a Gulf of Mexico deepwater oil rig owned by a bucanneering Scottish billionaire. It isn't MacLean's best work, but it is reasonably entertaining.

A group of international oil magnates gather to plot the demise of Lord Worth's Seawitch oil rig, which is producing cheap oil and undercutting the world price. The oilmen hire the ruthless Cronkite, at a price of ten million dollars, to accomplish the deed. Cronkite, it turns out, has his own deadly agenda, and is prepared to do anything to accomplish it.

Lord Worth, alerted early to the plot, will make his own countermoves to defend the Seawitch. When Cronkite kidnaps Lord Worth's two lovely daughters as leverage, Worth will have no choice but to unleash two ruthless men of his own. Mitchell and Roomer, ex-cops and hardnosed private investigators, have their own motivation and no one to answer to for their tactics. The stage will be set for an final dramatic confrontation at sea.

The storyline is implausible in its details and too many of the characters are cardboard cutouts. We never do find out the real reason for Cronkite's implacable fury against Lord Worth. However, damaged oil rigs are again topical in the aftermath of the Deepwater Challenger incident, and readers who suspend their sense of disbelief can have fun with the story. "Seawitch" is worth a look as light summer reading.

I remember having read this novel once as a teenager, so recently I thought I'd reread it.

Suffice it to say, I've aged far better than this story has. The characters' sexist, racist attitudes and the dialog between the male and female characters range from the trite and somewhat silly to the off-putting and absurd; virtually all of the characters (especially the women) are stereotyped and two-dimensional. As an example of 1970s pulp, I suppose it could be considered a pretty typical example, and if read in the proper historical context (think 70s James Bond movies) one may get some entertainment value from it. It is not one of MacLean's better novels, though.