“Arctic Drift” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 515 pages, $27.95), by Clive Cussler and Dirk Cussler
Everything you’ve heard about global warming is true, and it may already be too late to save humanity from mortal peril. The world is on a crash program to curtail its greenhouse gas emissions, driving gasoline prices through the roof. And Canada is about to declare war on the United States.
Such is the premise behind “Arctic Drift,” the new adventure thriller penned by best-selling author Clive Cussler and his son Dirk. It’s the 20th novel starring Dirk Pitt, Cussler’s globe-trotting hero recently portrayed by Matthew McConaughey in the eponymous movie based on Cussler’s 1992 book “Sahara.”
The good news is a scientist has discovered a method that could reverse the slide toward ecological calamity. Unfortunately, the process depends on a very rare mineral. To obtain enough to save the world may depend on finding the remains of a doomed 19th-century sailing expedition to the Northwest Passage. The ships allegedly were loaded with the stuff.
As director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency, the task falls to Pitt and his comrades, who include his two grown children, Summer and Dirk. (Yes, there are two Dirk Pitts running around in this book, which becomes a little confusing at times.)
But Pitt and company are up against more than the unforgiving elements of the Canadian arctic. Racing them to the source of the mineral is a sociopathic assassin and his employer — a two-faced tycoon who publicly champions environmentalism while secretly wrecking the planet with his illegal business practices.
Fans of Cussler have been here before and know what to expect: exotic locations, ruthless villains, and many narrow escapes and derring-do by Dirk Pitt, oceanography’s answer to Indiana Jones.
For the rest of us, “Arctic Drift” requires a certain suspension of disbelief. The threat of war between the United States and Canada — for reasons that are never fully explained — is so hard to take seriously that John Candy once starred in a comedy about it, “Canadian Bacon.”
You’ll have to also resist questioning how the seas can be teeming with ship traffic when gasoline is up to $10 a gallon. And dry ice is used as a murder weapon in one scene that must be seen to be believed — or not.
Furthermore, character development is treated as a formality that is easily skipped, and Cussler has a way of providing background in long blocks of expository dialogue that make it feel like the characters are addressing the reader and not each other. One early finger-wagging lecture in which the nation’s president explains how the world got into this mess through government inaction is particularly cringe-inducing.
And the prose often packs the nuance of a monster truck. Cussler may be the only writer in America who can get away with a line like this: “Miller struggled desperately, then let out a final deep gasp as the icy hand of death beckoned him to let go.”
Jack London, it isn’t. But Cussler’s fans come for swashbuckling, not word craft. That, he delivers.
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