The Guns of Navarone in The Complete Idiots Guide to the Ultimate Reading List

Oct 08, 2011 Lisa (Harmonybites) rated it liked it

Shelves: suspense, ultimate-reading-list, fiction, mystery, novels

The novels involves an Allied commando raid against a fortress off Turkey. A team of five men led by Captain Keith Mallory of New Zealand and including the Greek resistance fighter Andreas and an American demolitions expert Corporal Dusty Miller must climb a sheer cliff of 400 feet considered unclimbable, infiltrate a Nazi fortress and sabotage her guns to allow through a British fleet. At stake are the lives of 1,200 British soldiers stranded on an island. The novel takes place in the course of The novels involves an Allied commando raid against a fortress off Turkey. A team of five men led by Captain Keith Mallory of New Zealand and including the Greek resistance fighter Andreas and an American demolitions expert Corporal Dusty Miller must climb a sheer cliff of 400 feet considered unclimbable, infiltrate a Nazi fortress and sabotage her guns to allow through a British fleet. At stake are the lives of 1,200 British soldiers stranded on an island. The novel takes place in the course of three days during World War II.

I've been working my way through a list of suspense novel recommendations, and of the twelve I've read so far, I liked this one the most. I have a friend who calls the thriller genre "dicklit" and goodness, it's true that too many of this sort of novel suffer from testosterone toxicity. Of those dozen novels, even though this is the one without one female character and this is the only real war novel, ironically this is the one without the macho posturing, which is something I found refreshing.

Maybe that's because MacLean as a World War II veteran has known war. Unlike the protagonists in novels I read by Lee Child, Vince Flynn and Ted Bell, his commandos come across as human. They all feel fear. The young lieutenant Andy Stevens particularly struggles with his fear of fear that could prove crippling or shaming. They don't revel in violence--or at least the good guys in this novel don't. They try to avoid taking life if they can, and regret it when they can't. They use their heads not just their fists. Which makes these characters for me both more sympathetic and more heroic than the cool he-man counterparts in the genre I've read so far.

This is also well-crafted and well-written. Not only does MacLean have a fairly strong prose style, he understands that the principle of a good suspense plot is "and then it got worse." It's a suspenseful novel that's a quick read, a real page turner. If I don't rate this higher, it's that in the end this doesn't make me want to pick up more of MacLean, or keep this novel on my bookshelves. But this is a good read, and if you're drawn to military fiction, this is certainly a well-done example of that genre. ...more

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