Stop cringing. Everyone likes Clive Cussler. If you’re ever in doubt about what to get your Dad for Christmas, you can bet the new CC action/adventure thriller will be just the ticket.

Clive Cussler writes boy books. Strong heroes, damsels in distress, lashings of cutting edge military hardware and, of course, cool cars.

Do I even need to mention the plot? Dirk Pitt, adventurer extraordinaire (and one-man army when his dander is up) discovers the ruins of Atlantis. The Nazis have got there first however, and working from a secret base in Argentina they’re cooking up a new plan for world domination. Naturally, Dirk tears them a new arsehole. Just like in real life.

Clive Cussler books are tailor made for a rainy winter’s afternoon. That’s about how long they take to read, too. They’re the book equivalent of an Indiana Jones movie and I love them.

4 stars.

I should hate this book. Indeed for several years I did hate this book, although I hadn’t read it.

I hated this book because everyone told me I should read it. Perhaps I should explain. I have no problem reading books that are considered difficult. ‘Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell’ for example, or ‘Against The Day’ by Pynchon. I read these books because the plots excite me, and I’m advanced enough as a reader to not let the difficulties and challenges of the prose overcome me. However, people don’t realise this, and instead they think that I like reading books simply because they are hard. Invariably, people start telling me to read Ghormengast. In the last few years however they’ve been telling me to read Perdido St Station.

I finally picked it up because my book club were reading ‘Unlundun’ by the same author. I couldn’t find that, so I folded and bought PStS instead, to compare.

Wow.

This book is fantastic. I don’t know a lot about China Meiville, but he (or she) is a serious writer. The book just seems to exude mood. When you boil it down, the plot is straight out of a Pratchett novel: big bad things attack the big, self-enveloped city, mad loner and handful of misfits have to stop it. But the beauty of PStS is not its plot. If you picture the plot as something to hang characters and colour from, then Meiville uses it to perfection. I would almost say overuses: the scope of this book is encyclopaedic, but it works. It’s a lengthy tome, 867 pages in paperback form, but there’s something new on every page.

I will be hunting down more of Meiville’s work. PStS has merely served to whet my appetite, and I think that’s the best thing anyone can say about a new author.

4 stars