During these days of excess reading time, I’ve been trying to catch up on books or authors that I’ve wanted to try (either for the first time or again), or at least some random books that have caught my interest. I’d recently read an early Alistair MacLean novel titled The Black Shrike, and I enjoyed it well enough—at least more than Ian Fleming’s Moonraker, which I read at the same time—so I wanted to try the only other MacLean I had on hand.
If I were to judge Golden Gate by its blurbs, I would have found this book a “startlingly good…tense…ingenious” tale, but frankly it wasn’t any of those things. While I finished the entire novel, I’m not sure why I did. It felt formulaic and stale, with several unbelievable main characters and a plot which had potential but suffered through far too many flaws.
A Plot That Dies Slowly
I’ll tackle the plot first. The first several chapters were exciting, as we watched Branson organize his crew to hijack the Presidential motorcade as it crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. The following sections were interesting as we watched Revson, the undercover FBI agent, collude with reporter April Wednesday and the medic O’Hare to communicate with the officials in San Francisco who helplessly watched the kidnapping unfold on the bridge. But as the story progressed, it became less and less believable until I simply couldn’t wait for it to end.
The Bad Guy is…Really, Really “Bad”
And this brings me to the characters. I’ll simply focus on the worst, the villain Branson, a character filled with so many flaws that it seems he was crafted by a high school student.
Branson’s supposed to be a megalomaniac genius, yet these descriptions do nothing to explain away his utter failure to handle the simplest of security breaches on that bridge. Take for example Van Effen’s disappearance from the bridge. How did he miss the presence of a submarine sitting in the waters below his feet? How could he or any of his watchful henchmen miss Revson’s dropping Van Effen over the side of the bridge by rope to that waiting submarine? Even if there was a blackout, why did Branson accept it as a curious coincidence, rather than placing his men on high alert? He did, after all, already suspect Revson of being a stooge, so why not place him under stronger surveillance?
Take the constant contact between Revson or O’Hare and the good guys not on the bridge. How did he miss the Morse codes, the radio transmissions, the regular visits of the doctor to the city?
Take the innumerable sabotages against both his people and his plan that he ultimately accepts as mere flukes and coincidences. How could this man’s supposed genius not catch on that his helicopters and bombs were being slowly but surely dismantled?
Take his firm refusal to hurt his hostages or anyone else. Remaining gentlemanly to his captive women is one thing, but any bad guy worth his salt has to deliver on this threats of injury or death at least once, just to show he means it. Branson is full of hot air, and his compassion made me slightly angry! If Branson is the bad guy who ultimately gets killed for his dastardly deeds, then MacLean owes it to his readers to make him deserve his coming fate. Otherwise, Revson the hero is nothing more than a murderer.
Finally, take Branson’s overall plan in general. Unless Branson has some higher ideal that caused his kidnapping spree to make sense, then sure. But in the end, he’s only after money, even though he states at one point that he doesn’t need it, since he’s already independently wealthy. So why go to all this trouble? And why develop such an ingenious, fool-proof plan that’s riddled with so many holes?
Conclusion
None of these things made sense to me as I read the book, and now that I review it critically, they make even less sense. I do believe the problems is not with me the reader but with MacLean the author. I was excited to try another novel after finishing the first one, but I’m sad that this was the one I chose. Maybe I’ll try again, but the bad taste of Golden Gate will have to leave my mouth first. [The next MacLean read for me was eventually HMS Ulusses (1955).]
©2020 E.T.
Read More from Alistair MacLean:
- HMS Ulysses (1955)
- The Black Shrike (1961)
- Ice Station Zebra (1963)
- The Golden Gate (1976)
- Goodbye, California (1978)
- Air Force One Is Down (1981)