Maclean At His Best

If you take it apart and examine it in the light of work-a-day reasons, parts of Alistair Maclean’s “Ice Station Zebra” may be far fetched; it is nevertheless the best thriller fare of the year.

MACLEAN made the best-seller listing with his war-time novel of the Arctic convoys HMS Ulysses and topped it with another war-time thriller, The Guns of Navarone.

Since then he has produced thrillers at regular intervals but until now has never quite recaptured the genius of the early stories.

His new novel has much of the quality and quick pace of the Guns of Navarone but some new gadgets —to wit, a nuclear-powered submarine. Again, the author scorns the gimmicks that make so many cony i , I??* i?Ji£

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no women in this story of a submarine’s journey under the Polar ice in a desperate bid to save the

survivors of a burnt-out weather station, But just as the British Ice Station Zebra turns out to be more than a weather station, Dr. Carpenter, who tells the story and who is taken along unwillingly by the US atomic sub Dolphin on its errand of mercy, is more than a doctor. In fact he keeps peeling off his identity throughout the story like the successive skins of an onion. Not even the reader can be completely sure when he has reached the last of them Thi ; Maclean at the t of his form and few thriller addicts will

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V y P (ICE STATIO n zebra. Published by Collins. 22/6.)