Been a while, a really long while, since I read a Cussler. When I stumbled on this book, the title caught my fancy and halfway down realized that the name of the hero, Dirk Pitt, sounded familiar. It all came flooding back, literally and figuratively, with “Raise the titanic” that I had read almost 25 years back. Clive Cussler is probably the inspiration, hoping he started writing earlier, to James Rollins and Mathew Reilley kind. His books, majorly centered around sea and underwater adventure, for the hero himself is based on marine division of USA, have a fantastic premise, mixing up mythology with science. The endings are always rushed and way too simple. Guess Rollins and Reilley have encashed on this concept big time with their own sigma series and Jack West series respectively.
This book, like most of his other novels, is quite voluminous, running to almost 600 pages. But the pace with which the story moves, it never makes a dull reading. The story begins with a catastrophe, on the scale of 2012 movie, where a comet strikes earth and everything is doomed. Geographies change. Mountains get flattened. Oceans change places. Weather patterns get confused. Deserts get flooded while wetlands go dry. That says little about negligible living organisms like humans who get wiped off like a fly hitting the windshield of a cruiser on highway. But again, humans are cunning little fellows aren’t they? There are lot of inscriptions and high end constructions that outlast them and leave behind clues to those generations and civilizations who may eventually regroup and flourish several millennia later. The superior human race that got destroyed, happen to thrive on a land area, presently called as Antartica, where in, the crazy weather patterns that followed the comet catastrophe, embalmed the entire city under ice. All this happens within first 50 pages of the book. Then the story switches to couple of centuries prior to present day, where in sea faring East India company men (same guys who enslaved us) discover some relics. The story shifts to one century to present day where in an American whaling ship finds the then missing East India ship. And then the story shifts to present day where in right from introduction scene, the hero fights and fights with villains across cities countries and continents. The villains happen to be left over Nazis who had escaped the Allies with all the loot, having settled and thrived in Argentina with billions and billions of money, are hell bent on launching fourth Reich. Their plan is to re-enact the cataclysm happened via the comet crash manually, by blasting the antartic ice shelf. They even pour in all their wealth in building 4 big skyscrapers of ships, similar to Noah’s ark, fully confident of their world beating plan. Only to have our hero not just put a spanner on their works, but literally bulldozing their setup using a snowmobile of a machine, built during world war 2 that surprisingly was never used for 5 decades but still saves the day.
Personally I felt the book could’ve been trimmed by at least a 100 page. The same catastrophe is described at least 4 times on the book in equal detail. Also, some of the scenes involving chasing behind ancient artefacts have no bearing on overall story and could’ve been removed. But the book is nothing but a page turner. Quite interesting read despite the mokka ending.
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By the way, Gilsu must have been very sleepy when he wrote this post. He claims to have read Raise the Titanic 25 years ago. That many years back, Gilsu wasn't even born :)