Alistair MacLean has … [little] emotional involvement in his tales. Many years and many books ago, he found a selling vein; and he has been opening it, bloodily, ever since. But Mr MacLean's violence has no real suggestion of pain; it is the 'Bang bang you're dead' violence of children's games. The impression is heightened by the constant reversals and counter-reversals of fortune, captures, escapes and recaptures, that keep the plot steaming along: either Mr MacLean's supermen are stunningly incompetent, or we are in the convention of Cowboys and Indians.
There is probably little point in running through the plot of Seawitch: those who read Alistair MacLean will read it, and those who do not need no encouragement. This time, it's about oil: the central protagonist, Lord Worth, is everyone's fantasy of a ruthless and arrogant billionaire (brought down a peg or two in the end, of course); and there is the usual cast of inhumanly skilful and talented villains and heroes, each with his identifying trait to minimise confusion. The only outstanding question is whether there may not be a sense in which fantasy violence is more vicious than violence which is at least conscious of suffering. (p. 23)
Nick Totton, in The Spectator (© 1977 by The Spectator; reprinted by permission of The Spectator), January 22, 1977.
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