Arctic Drift

Arctic Drift – Clive Cussler and Dirk Cussler

When Clive Cussler released this book, he was 77 years old.  He’s now 82, and he’s still churning out about four or five books per year.  The catch is that he co-authors all of these books with different writers now.  This leads one to speculate: Does he really have a big hand in writing these books?  Or is the co-author doing all of the work with Mr. Cussler just proofing the story?  Each one of his co-authors has a different hero and cast of characters, so it wouldn’t surprise me if this was the case.

Cussler made a name for himself, however, back in the 1970’s, with his nautical adventures featuring good ole’ Dirk Pitt.  Pitt was the original, and back then, Cussler didn’t need a co-author.  Not surprisingly, Cussler still manages to write a Dirk Pitt adventure every couple of years, however he now needs a co-author for these as well.  Again, not surprisingly, he’s chosen his son to co-author the Dirk Pitt adventures.  His son is named, get this, Dirk Cussler.

All of this is probably irrelevant to the actual story that is being reviewed here.  I enjoyed it.  I thought it was typical Dirk Pitt/Clive Cussler – we see many of the same things happen in all of these books, yet like your favorite roller coaster, it’s still a great ride.  There are some people that like his older stuff better, and they do an awful lot of whining about his current escapades, but I still enjoy them.

Being that this is the twentieth Dirk Pitt novel, it should be mentioned that there’s a small bit of linear progression throughout the books that might encourage a new reader to actually start at the beginning.  In the latter day Pitt novels (I don’t remember which book), he finally marries his Congresswoman sweetheart, and he discovers that he has a set of twin children from a romance years ago.  His children are grown up now (Summer is the girl, the boy is, yep, you guessed it – Dirk Jr.), and they have reconnected with dad.  Cussler finds good ways to interject the twins in the later books and make them relevant to the plot.  This is necessary since Dirk Sr. is now married, he can’t rescue a beautiful damsel in distress during the first few pages and make savage love to her at some point in the story anymore.

Oh, yeah.  The plot.  It seems that a rare element is discovered up in the Northwest Passage (that’s the water passage between Canada and the Arctic Circle.  You know, where it’s really cold).  This rare element actually has the power to stop global warming.  So the good guys want it to save the environment and the bad guys, of course, want it so they can sell it to the highest bidder and make millions.   Actually, the good guys need it to save the environment.  It seems like the U.S. in really bad shape these days. Gasoline is hovering at $10 a gallon! Yikes!

So just about every regular from the Pitt books is back, although with so many recurring characters, they don’t get as much page space as some of the earlier books.  The only regular that I find annoying is the “female” lifelike computer (I think her name is “Max”), that is used to uncover anything about everything, it seems, in the universe.  It’s pretty unbelievable. She would make Hal from 2001 seem like a retard.

There are a few instances in these books that I find mildly annoying, yet I take it for granted that this is just how it will always be for our heroes.  Example:  We quite frequently see Dirk and his buddy Al Giordino under water examining some sort of rare find, whether it’s a plant, sunken ship, or dead bodies from 500 years ago.  As they’re submerged thousands of feet under water, we’re always told things like: 

“Dirk and Al only had about 20 minutes left of air, but they kept going”
“They were now down to 5 minutes of air, but they kept going”
“Dirk an Al were now dangerously low on air, but they kept going”

I guess Dirk and Al feel they’re invincible or something.  Is it that difficult to go back to the ship, get more air, and go back down a second time?  It would seem to make a lot more sense, especially, when their carelessness gets them in big trouble.  All the time.  Over and over again. I don’t consider this a spoiler, because, again, it seems as though this happens so often.

At this point, the only other Cussler series I’ve read are his “NUMA Files” books, which deal with a slightly different set of characters, but the overall stories aren’t that different.  Maybe it’s my imagination, but the Dirk Pitt books seem slightly better, so you may want to choose a few of these before branching out.  Maybe it’s just my imagination, since Pitt is the original.