Review: Dragon, by Clive Cussler

MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

As a reader of Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt novels I have long felt that Cussler hit his peak with his early 500-pagers--his first cracks at what book critics in the '70s were, in the wake of bestsellers like those of Frederick Forsyth and Robert Ludlum and Jack Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed, calling "super-thrillers." Those books were specifically 1986's Cyclops, 1988's Treasure, 1990's Dragon, and 1992's Sahara.

Of the four I have tended to think Dragon the weakest. In fact, where I read the other three straight through, cover to cover, on first picking them up, I remember skimming long stretches of Dragon--and only recently picked it up again.

I think I still like the other three better. But my impression of this one is more favorable than before--even if looking at the book again I am reminded of what I did not like about it so much. If there is vigor, briskness and ingenuity here, Cussler had also been very productive for two decades at the time he wrote this one and, like most writers at that stage of things, was reusing significant elements of his older work. The derelict ship in the book's opening sequence, the associated marine disaster, the involvement of Asian shipping in it, very obviously recall the plot of Deep Six. So does the structure of what follows--not least in its failings. The opening incident has a very great deal to commend it--a robust combination of suspense, action and gadgetry that includes the book's finest "set piece," with the manner of Pitt's involvement in the disaster giving a stronger than usual dramatic edge to his desire to get the culprits (it isn't just "Someone killed my favorite second cousin" this time), while also laying key groundwork for the finale. Still, at bottom the kind of thing that in a Bond film would probably be packed into the few minutes of the pre-credits scene, here it takes up almost a quarter of the book before the investigation and associated adventure properly begins. Moreover that adventure has a comparatively disjointed feel. An early display of self-assertion on Pitt's part apart, the book consists of a weary Pitt time and again being told to take a long flight out to some scene to perform some incredibly unlikely and hazardous task by government officials previously unknown to us who are the ones actually managing the crisis and solving the mystery as they send Pitt off after this clue or to perform that task. (Indeed, I could not think of any prior Pitt adventure which was not only so scattershot--a quality epitomized for me by the junket to Germany--but in which Pitt was so passive.)

Moreover, where such disjointedness in thrillers of this type is so often a matter of a writer trying to cram in more action than the frame of the narrative can hold, the book, while offering plenty of adventure, danger and violence, is relatively light on "action," if one thinks of this as physical confrontation, and especially interpersonal combat, between hero and villain. The good guys have their first proper brushes with the enemy only a third of the way in, and Pitt his first contact with enemy agents after page 200 of my 542 page paperback edition, after which there is still less than we tend to get in the bigger Pitt books. The principal car chase has Pitt pursuing a vehicle with no human inside it, while there is just one proper shootout, and that shoehorned in that action-cramming way (the villains electing to send what feels like a platoon of ninjas to take Pitt out, just because he seems "a threat," resulting in a set piece that could have been easily excised without doing the slightest damage to the narrative). Indeed, if Pitt's personal motive for "getting to the bottom of things" are stronger than usual, the way in which things play out mean that there is no final face-to-face confrontation with any of the villains, these in the end destroyed impersonally or left to others with which to deal. (The final fate of the figure set up as "the big bad" is very anticlimactic, particularly given that Cussler gives us a suitably Bond movie-like capture-the-hero-and-then-chat-with-him-over-a-luxurious-dinner scene before that.)

From the standpoint of flow and of focus the result is a far cry from what we got in, for example, Sahara, once the Calliope gets upriver. Still, if it does not work in every way on the whole it tends to work very well indeed. Disjointed as the narrative was, I still kept turning the pages, in part because Cussler keeps the pace brisk (helped in this by the frequent changes of scene the structure allows), while if feeling like a collection of bits the bits, even the shoehorned bits, tend to be very good (as with that shootout with the ninjas), such that the reuse of old elements is often to superior results (Dragon never dragging the way Deep Six often did). If that still does not quite put it on a level with favorites like Sahara, Treasure or Cyclops, it pleasantly surprised me again and again by reminding me just how good these adventures were at their very best, and still beats just about anything else in the Dirk Pitt series for sheer entertainment.