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

Whoever Henry Treece is, he clearly has some issues to deal with.

Recently I came up with the idea of writing a novel about Jason and the Argonauts, and so I thought i’d better read up on the subject. I found “Jason” by Henry Treece for $1 at a library sale and bought it thinking it would be just the ticket. It wasn’t. I thought that historical revisionism only started in the 70s with “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” but good ol’ Henry proves that it was alive and well in 1962. His “Jason” is a gritty, down to earth depiction of the old Greek myth with all of the mythology taken out. There are no gods, Jason is just a prince, and Hercules (or Heracles) is just some big fat guy.

It doesn’t work. Medusa (or Medea) is just some woman, The Golden Fleece is just an old sheepskin with bits of alluvial gold stuck in it and the biggest mystery of all is why I even finished this crap. I wanted a tale of gods and heroes and I got Days Of Our Lives.

With one difference. Henry Treece appears to have a bit of a problem with women. Every female in his novel is evil. Jason was concieved by his mother with a hermit out of spite for her husband, the King. Jason’s life is spent not in fear of ‘the mother’ Hera, but of the wicked priestesses who do her bidding, and Medea is scheming and spiteful. This depiction of women starts off innocently enough but by the middle of the book I had realised that I was dealing with real, actual hatred. Possibly Mrs Treece had just divorced him. Who knows? I would have.

Avoid this book.