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The Month of Love: The Guns of Naverone
Feb. 2nd, 2009 11:19 pmIn junior high I discovered one of my favoritest books in the world: The Guns of Naverone by Alistair MacLean. We met by pure accident--I had actually been looking for Force 10 From Navarone, because the movie version had just come out starring Harrison Ford and, well, Harrison Ford. My jr high library didn't have Force 10, but it did have Guns, so I checked it out instead. (I never did manage to see the movie of Force 10, and I don't even know which character Ford played. But if I was casting a remake of Guns, I would put him as the tough, slightly world-weary Mallory. Type casting? Maybe. But it is such a good type for him!)
Having gotten the book I settled down to read. At the time I knew very little about WWII and nothing on the finer (or even large scale!) points of naval warfare, so the exact reason why Navarone was so important didn't quite take with me. It didn't matter. From the first page I was utterly absorbed, and no sooner had I finished it than I turned back to the first page and started over. I read it three or four times before I had to give it back to the library, and then I checked it out a few more times after that. (Eventually I got a copy of my own, along with a lot of other MacLean books--my love of used book stores flowered early in life.)
It's difficult for me to say exactly what I found so gripping about it--I haven't reread it since I started writing seriously, so I've never read it with my writer-brain engaged. The fact that it has a first-class roller coaster of a plot probably helps. (Unlike, say, Where Eagles Dare, whose denoument makes me want to throw it with great force.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
yhlee, do not, under any circumstances, read that book. There are not enough sporks in the world for it.) And there is also that Guns presented a world that I somehow hadn't noticed before, a world where people made decisions that mattered and lived and died by inches and errors and ideals.
But over all this, when I sift through my memories, what impresses me most is the amazingly textured gorgeousness of MacLean's writing. A sun-washed dock in the Mediterranean, with the wild hills of a Greek island in the background; the cellar of an ancient manor house; the smokey insides of an island taverna; all of it is rendered in a loving detail that would give Tolkein a run for his money. People don't just drink wine, they drink hock or Moselle or retsina and they don't eat food, they eat olives and figs and bread, and when they stop to smoke you hear the flare of the match and see how the fire makes their face more visible in the darkness as they light the cigarette.
Somewhere in the maze of boxes that is my apartment is my copy of this book. If that isn't an incentive to finish unpacking I don't know what is.
Having gotten the book I settled down to read. At the time I knew very little about WWII and nothing on the finer (or even large scale!) points of naval warfare, so the exact reason why Navarone was so important didn't quite take with me. It didn't matter. From the first page I was utterly absorbed, and no sooner had I finished it than I turned back to the first page and started over. I read it three or four times before I had to give it back to the library, and then I checked it out a few more times after that. (Eventually I got a copy of my own, along with a lot of other MacLean books--my love of used book stores flowered early in life.)
It's difficult for me to say exactly what I found so gripping about it--I haven't reread it since I started writing seriously, so I've never read it with my writer-brain engaged. The fact that it has a first-class roller coaster of a plot probably helps. (Unlike, say, Where Eagles Dare, whose denoument makes me want to throw it with great force.
yhlee, do not, under any circumstances, read that book. There are not enough sporks in the world for it.) And there is also that Guns presented a world that I somehow hadn't noticed before, a world where people made decisions that mattered and lived and died by inches and errors and ideals.But over all this, when I sift through my memories, what impresses me most is the amazingly textured gorgeousness of MacLean's writing. A sun-washed dock in the Mediterranean, with the wild hills of a Greek island in the background; the cellar of an ancient manor house; the smokey insides of an island taverna; all of it is rendered in a loving detail that would give Tolkein a run for his money. People don't just drink wine, they drink hock or Moselle or retsina and they don't eat food, they eat olives and figs and bread, and when they stop to smoke you hear the flare of the match and see how the fire makes their face more visible in the darkness as they light the cigarette.
Somewhere in the maze of boxes that is my apartment is my copy of this book. If that isn't an incentive to finish unpacking I don't know what is.
