Customer Reviews

When Eight Bells Toll

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

"The Peacemaker Colt has now been in production, without change in design, for a century." An inciteful beginning to MacLean's first tale in three years, after Lawrence of Arabia: A Biography (he also released Ice Station Zebra in '63). This sentence is a perfect example of the humor (you'll know it's humor soon enough) MacLean writes into our hero's personality.

While I've noticed MacLean's first-person narratives contain fair amounts of his dry wit, When Eight Bells Toll is the first book of his that has made me laugh out loud on several occasions. My favorite part was when Philip Calvert, the hero, is running through trees in a heavy downpour, and he can't see where he is going, so he keeps running into trees. His thoughts as this is happening is simply a delight to read! A British secret service agent with a sense of humor.

Of course, MacLean's book is not all laughable. Calvert and his boss must figure out why ships and their crews are disappearing - and each vessel had been carrying valuable cargo. I enjoyed reading Captain Imrie's doppelganger (he's a far nicer character in Bear Island).

MacLean isn't afraid of killing off characters. And he throws in the usual dash of twists to toss the reader off his seat, although it has fewer than some of his other books. The book is also loaded with exposition. I found myself dragging my eyeballs over some of the pages, unfortunately.

While the book kept me guessing to the very end -- and you're guessing about an extraordinary amount of things -- I didn't feel it was MacLean's strongest work. This is on a sliding scale, of course, as I feel MacLean's tales are more complex in design and more realistic than many modern books published today.

The title refers to seafaring vessels and crew who keep track of time by ringing bells. Eight bells represents six different hours of the day, one of which is midnight. Of the time-span each chapter represents, I noticed chapter six (8:40 pm - 10:40 pm) is the only chapter that takes place between the three bells and six bells of the first (evening) watch, meaning eight bells never "toll" during this chapter. Unrelated, but interesting to note, is that a Christian church will ring a bell nine times for the death of someone.

Mr. MacLean also slightly rewrote the story for the 1971 film with Anthony Hopkins.

I was first alerted to this book when as a young boy I saw the 1971 movie adaptation starring Anthony Hopkins and Robert Morley on the BBC. Fans of MacLean should know what to expect here as he enters into James Bond territory with a naval secret service officer named Calvert investigating gold bullion pirating in the Irish Sea. This case takes him to Scotland. The pace is relentless and the suspense breathtaking. I highly recommend this book, its one of my favorite reads. I notice that a DVD of the movie is available in Region 2. Here is hoping that it appears one day soon here in the USA.

"When Eight Bells Toll" is a well written adventure involving modern day pirates stealing gold and diamonds from cargo ships. It's up to Philip Calvert and his team to find the thieves. But things haven't worked out quite as Calvert planned and several people end up dead.

This is a very quick read at just over 200 pages, so it never gets boring, but the story is only mildly interesting. There are some, but few, good suspense sequences and the ending is somewhat anticlimactic and clichéd.

Strong three star rating. It's an enjoyable but not great adventure that can be read in a short time.

"When Eight Bells Toll" is a first-rate crime drama by famed story-teller Alistair Maclean. The story is built around the pursuit by British Treasury agent Philip Calvert of a murderous gang of maritime bullion hijackers operating out of the rugged coastline of Western Scotland.

Calvert is a highly experienced agent who may be in over his head in this tense tale, attempting to parse a plot obscured by cover stories, lies, kidnapping, murder, and treachery. The plot includes a wealthy shipping magnate, his former actress wife, a group of very ruthless killers, and various inhabitants of the West Highlands whose cooperation has been coerced or bought. When Calvert's cover is blown early on, he is forced into a desperate race against time to locate the hijackers before they can kill their hostages and escape. His search by air and sea takes him over the remote isles and sea lochs and forces him to make allies of some unlikely locals. The double-crosses continue to the very last page.

Maclean's gift for understated and ironic dialogue, bothin which Calvert faces an opponent armed with a Colt .45 revolver in the cabin of a ship he has just stealthily boarded. The scene sets a sardonic tone for the remainder of the story. Calvert is a typical Maclean hero, world-weary and sometimes cynical, yet ultimately honorable, who must battle bureaucracy as well as the bad guys to solve the crime.

Maclean was born and raised in Scotland, and spent part of his childhood in the Highlands. Maclean brings that experience richly to bear in capturing the setting and characters of "When Eight Bells Toll". The rugged weather and terrain of Western Scotland are authentically portrayed, as are the ways of the West Highlanders themselves.

The plot becomes almost too complicated to follow at times. MacLean resorts to some brute force exposition late in the story to ensure his readers are still with him at the showdown climax in a boathouse on a remote island. A love story involving Calvert and one of the suspects seems forced and perhaps a little too convenient to the conclusion. On the other hand, MacLean was a highly polished writer by this stage of his career and portions of the book fairly crackle with suspense.

This book is highly recommended to fans of Alistair Maclean's work and to others looking for a enjoyable reading experience.

This is my favorite of all of MacLean's thrillers, and not just because it is set in my native Scotland.

MacLean's books often rely of a big twist near the end. In many of the lesser books, Bear Island for example, you can see it coming from far away. But in WEBT, he keeps things taut, and the action moves so fast and furiously it doesn't give you time to think.

The other great thing about this one is the beginning. It starts right in with a great suspense scene, and just ranks up the tension from there.

As the title suggests this is a standard alistair maclean book. It is a simple stoty about a secert service agent who hunts down a gang of bullion pirates. The pirates are ruthless and will kill anyone who comes in their way. In course of his investigation agent Calvert losses a number of his associates. A beautiful girl is sent by the pirates to keep watch over the agent. She is out smarted by Calvert. There are some efforts at puuting comic relief by means of Calvert boss and some of his associates. A book that I have read every second year for last 7 years and still I keep reading it...

A great story! Although written in the 1960's, the mixing of technological devices with basic human traits in a government agent works just as well today. If you make a few substitutions (such as cell phones for radio aerial in a mast), this novel would be a best seller in the 21st century. In any era, the man pulling the trigger must still justify his actions.

For what it is, this book is really pretty good. First of all, you need to be aware of the fact that this book is about four decades old, and with that in mind expect to be greeted by many dated ideas. Foremost among these is the sense of chivalry that occurs between thieves and Calvert, the hero. If you read a lot of contemporary thrillers, these villains are not very ruthless in comparison.

That aside, this book is very well crafted. A little far fetched in its scheming, but a nice little puzzler that you will be pressed to uncover. The book was written in the hey-day of Ian Fleming's popularity, and James Bond oozes out of the pages all over the place. But what is so great about this book is that where Bond is as dynamic as a cardboard tube, Calvert is constantly berating himself and questioning his own senses. What transpires is in essence a very good Fleming thriller with a little something extra thrown in with this enjoyable character.

OK, this book is not a pugilistic prose novel on par with Pynchon or Updike, but it was a fun read that will keep you engaged and while away a pleasant afternoon.

"When Eight Bells Toll" is a novel that attempts to weave together two different threads - spy fiction of the James Bond school with an Agatha Christie mystery plot. Where it succeeds, its a great example of what makes Alistair MacLean an entertaining writer. But a painful lack of plausibility cuts deep here, especially at the end.

Somewhere amid the skerries, overfalls, and craigs that play havoc with those sailing the deep lochs and firths of the Scottish Highlands, a ship carrying millions of dollars worth of gold ingots goes missing. Hot on its trail is Philip Calvert, an honest but refreshingly sardonic British agent.

How sardonic is Calvert? Sardonic enough to crack wise when we first meet him, as he finds himself with a man pointing a Colt Peacemaker at Calvert's leg. "Unconsciously, almost, I braced my right leg to meet the impending shock. Defensively, this was a very good move, about as useful as holding up a sheet of newspaper in front of me. I wished to God that Colonel Sam Colt had gone in for inventing something else, something useful, like safety pins."

There's a lot of wisecracks like that in this, one of MacLean's more amusing efforts. There's also some taut dramatic moments, like the one when Calvert finds himself inside a helicopter sunk deep beneath black waters, gunmen circling overhead, drowning as his head feels "as if it were being pumped full of compressed air...my bursting lungs as if someone had filled them with petrol and struck a match."

Despite moments like this, "When Eight Bells Toll" doesn't always work as a thriller, and hardly ever as a mystery. It's too obvious too quickly who the bad guys are, and Calvert's canvassing the neighborhood, while occasionally colorful, doesn't really make one wonder much of anything other than how many times MacLean must have watched "The 39 Steps."

The ending is the weakest part of the book, not to get into spoilers except that his penchant for double identities is on typical, uncomfortable display. In another review here, C.S. Loucks talks about having to drag his eyeballs over the exposition scenes, and I had to chortle in agreement there. You don't get villains anymore that will happily expound on the intricacies of their villainy to a hero they are about to kill, except maybe in Austin Powers movies.

"When Eight Bells Toll" isn't quite that. It's good, very good reading at times, and fans of MacLean's "Puppet On A Chain" will enjoy this for the author's similarly successful use of narrative humor. It's just a bit of a disappointment, though maybe solid humor, thrills, and coherence is too much to expect from MacLean in the same book.

One thing about an Alistair Maclean novel is that they are always informative. In the opening page of this novel we lean about the Peacemaker Colt. So called, I would guess, because if it's fired at you it will blow an ugly hole in your body. Whatever anger you may have had will be gone after the bullet rearranges some of your body parts. Suddenly at the end of page one we learn that the hero has one pointed at him as he tries to calculate his changes of getting out with his body parts intact. Will he survive, of course; otherwise there will be a lot of blank pages in the novel.

The rest of the novel gets violent at times, but moves at a steady pace through some interesting characters who as one might suspect are never what they pretend to be. A lot of MacLean's novels (e.g. The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare and Puppet on a Chain) were made into a movie. His books are high adventure stuff with scenery made for an outdoor adventure flick. This novel set in western Scotland and the Irish Sea captures a rugged landscape that is both bleak and beautiful at the same time. If you like high adventure with a mystery to figure out, an Alistair MacLean novel is worth reading.

R Hemingway Past Twilight