The Exalted Heroism of Alistair MacLean's Novels

Less than fifty years ago, Alistair MacLean’s novels were international best-sellers that spawned major motion pictures. Today, his novels are out-of-print in America and MacLean, once considered a “master storyteller,” is virtually unknown to an entire generation of readers. This is tragic, for MacLean was one of the few authors of the last one-hundred years who both displayed a genuine comprehension of man’s potential for heroism and possessed the ability to convincingly portray this potential in literary form.

In her introduction to the reprinting of Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three, Ayn Rand advised a new generation of that book’s readers: “Do not look for ‘the folks next door’—you are about to meet a race of giants, who might have and ought to have been your neighbors.”1 This insight is equally true of MacLean’s best novels, for in them he created a gallery of remarkable heroes who remain undaunted in the face of epic forces seeking their destruction.

MacLean’s best novels, written in the 1950s and 60s, pit British sailors, soldiers, and secret agents against Nazi and Soviet antagonists. His plots generally eschew romance in favor of non-stop, high-voltage action that grips the reader early and keeps him riveted until a final climactic showdown. MacLean’s first book, H.M.S. Ulysses, was published in 1955 and is one of his best. Set during World War II on the notoriously dangerous supply route Murmansk Run, it tells the story of a mutinous crew that—after too many days and nights of bleak and bitter convoy duty—rebels against overbearing authority. The British Admiralty, locked in the Allied struggle against Hitler and grossly undersupplied with men and warships, sends the Ulysses out on one last convoy mission through Arctic waters to supply Soviet efforts against Germany. But this is no ordinary supply run: The Ulysses and the convoy she protects are being offered up as bait to lure out of hiding the sister ship of the legendary Bismarck—the mighty battlewagon Tirpitz. The trip is, in effect, a one-way ticket to a hell in which the convoy will suffer incessant, numbing cold, furious Arctic storms, and unceasing assault by German planes, submarines, and cruisers.

The book’s tag line reads, “The story of men who rose to heroism, and then to something greater.” It is admirably exact. Although they are consistently outfoxed by cunning German commanders and suffer one crushing blow after another, the crew members of the Ulysses demonstrate in battle after interminable battle their unbreachable determination to protect the merchant vessels assigned them. MacLean neither trenchantly examines the nature of this “something greater” than heroism nor explores the characters of the select individuals able to achieve it. Instead, he provides a brutal, gut-wrenching—but uplifting—dramatization of what it looks like in action. The crew members of the Ulysses—sleep-deprived, malnourished, chronically wet, frostbitten, and tubercular—are thrown into an inescapable death conflict with a swarming, ruthless enemy. And yet these horrific conditions, presented in harrowing detail, are not the dominant essence of the novel. Rather, they constitute the ghastly backdrop against which a select few strive heroically to accomplish their mission. At story’s end, a reader may shake his head, uncertain as to whether he has witnessed triumph or tragedy, but certain that he has witnessed rare moments of august grandeur.

H.M.S. Ulysses is not representative of MacLean’s early work. The combination of the British Admiralty’s distrust of the mutiny ship, the crew’s consequent expendability, and the bitter Norse hell to which they are consigned pervades the novel with an inescapable gloom. Further, its final word is that an elite cadre among men can ascend to rarefied heights of valor—and that most men, including those in the upper echelons of command, cannot understand, much less appreciate, their extraordinary deeds. The heroes of the Ulysses die in horrific splendor inconceivable to men of plebeian character.

In The Guns of Navarone (1957), made into a hugely successful 1961 film starring Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn, MacLean’s theme is again World War II heroism, but the details and emotional tone of this tale are quite different from those of H.M.S. Ulysses. Heavy German guns on Navarone, a Greek island off the Turkish coast in the Aegean Sea, command a vital sea lane, prohibiting the naval evacuation of the nearby island of Kheros, where twelve hundred British troops are stationed. With an impending German invasion of the island, the lives of the troops on Kheros depend on the destruction of the German artillery on Navarone. But the guns themselves are guarded by a seemingly impregnable fortress, and all attempts to destroy them by air, land, and sea assaults have resulted in catastrophic failure. The only remaining chance is stealth: A commando team must infiltrate the island and blow up the guns, accomplishing what cannot be accomplished with overt force. The difficulty is that the only surreptitious way onto the island is its south cliff, which overlooks the sea and has been assessed by experienced mountaineers as being impossible to scale.

Enter a team of elite British commandos led by “the human fly” Captain Keith Mallory. The toast of pre-war Europe, Mallory is an accomplished New Zealand mountaineer and is universally acknowledged to be the world’s greatest climber. And he lives up to his stature: Under the worst possible conditions—on a dark night, in a driving storm, as his boat is battered to pieces by wind, wave, and reef—Mallory achieves the seeming impossible by scaling the south cliff of Navarone, thereby enabling the other commandos to climb by rope.

But the team’s troubles have only begun. The Germans know, by the treachery of a Greek spy in their midst, of their arrival, and hunt them down by means of trained mountain troops and Stuka dive bombers. Betrayed and heavily outnumbered, Mallory and his small team must somehow penetrate the fortress of Navarone and destroy the giant guns that prevent the evacuation of the British troops on Kheros. Then, hounded from every imaginable quarter, they discover that their explosives have been sabotaged . . .

One of the most satisfying elements of MacLean’s best plots is the never-ending cat-and-mouse game, the life-and-death battle of wits between the heroes and their cunning adversaries. One such episode plays out in The Guns of Navarone when Mallory’s team is captured by the Germans and one the heroes—a lethal warrior who has killed innumerable Nazis—feigns the role of a simple islander who faints at the sight of blood. Such subterfuge, frequently employed by MacLean’s protagonists, show them to be individuals of far more than superlative physical prowess—they are also men of almost preternatural brilliance.

This is especially true of John Smith, the English secret agent who is the main character of Where Eagles Dare (1967). Although burdened with a woefully banal name, Smith is a man of spectacular resourcefulness, a man who gradually reveals himself to be one of fiction’s great masters of espionage. In the novel, Smith is given the mission of infiltrating the Gestapo headquarters in Bavaria to rescue a captured American general who knows the secrets of the impending D-Day invasion of France. Making his mission next to impossible is the fact that the headquarters are in the Schloss Adler, a castle located on a lofty mountain peak, protected by elite Alpenkorps troops and guards with trained Doberman pinschers, and accessible only by a cable car suspended one thousand feet over a yawning chasm.

Where Eagles Dare remains one of the most suspenseful thrillers ever set during the grim days of World War II, for nothing is ever what it seems—not the mission, not the members of Smith’s team, and, especially, not Smith himself. Bits and pieces of the truth bubble slowly to the story’s surface in the midst of the heroes’ breakneck attempt to breach the fortress’s defenses. The reader becomes aware of large portions of the truth only when, in one of the most intense scenes in espionage fiction, Smith reveals his actual identity. But not all is revealed. MacLean saves one last twist for the finale, when everyone but Smith believes the hair-raising saga to be mercifully concluded. A large measure of the enjoyment provided by this tale is found in the manner in which Smith towers—both intellectually and physically—over the action, pulling the strings of both friend and foe as though he were the master puppeteer of a vast, high stakes marionette show.

But even Smith pales in comparison to the heroes of MacLean’s finest work. The Secret Ways (1959, known in Britain as The Last Frontier) is the one 20th-century thriller that is Hugo-esque in its grandeur.

The story is set in Hungary, a few years after the Soviet’s brutal suppression of the 1956 uprising. Britain’s top secret agent, Michael Reynolds, must rescue a leading English scientist, Dr. Harold Jennings, from the Communists. Reynolds is a hero of James-Bondian proportions, a battle-scarred British commando who fought in World War II and whose rapier-sharp training since has prepared him for even more dangerous missions as a secret agent deep inside a Communist police state. But even Reynolds’ heroism is dwarfed by that of two members of the Hungarian Resistance from whom he receives aid: Jansci and The Count. In their roles as freedom fighters against both the Nazis and Communists, these two men have endured hardships and suffered staggering personal losses that would crush lesser men.

Jansci’s father, a dedicated Ukrainian Communist, was murdered by Stalin in the purges of 1938, tortured to death by the GPU in Kiev. Seeking justice, Jansci proceeded to kill his father’s murderers, but was captured and shipped to Siberia where, for six months, he was kept in solitary confinement in sub-zero temperatures, without daylight, a bed, or a blanket, and with mere scraps of food and drops of water for sustenance. “For the last month they stopped all supplies of water also, but Jansci survived by licking the hoarfrost off the iron door of his cell.”2 The Communists then shipped him to the slave labor camps at Kolyma, where millions died under Stalin. At Kolyma he lost fingers while being dragged inches behind propeller-driven sleds, was thrown unarmed into a pit with starving wolves, and was nailed naked to two trees and left to die in the frigid Siberian temperatures. “Nobody ever came back from . . . Kolyma . . . but Jansci came back.”3 No one knows how he escaped, but within four months, alone and on foot, Jansci reached the Trans-Siberian Railway and made his way back to Ukraine, where he joined the army and awaited his chance to fight the Soviets.

When the Germans invaded in 1941 he joined them, as did hundreds of thousands of other Ukrainians, in order to fight the Communists. After two years, he was recaptured by the Russians and forced to fight against the Germans from a suicide position but, again, he escaped and, after the war, became an anti-Communist freedom fighter based primarily in Hungary, helping hundreds escape to the free world via Austria. In his exploits, he has made the gruesome discovery that his mother has been killed and his two children buried alive by the Soviets. Everyone but him believes that his wife is also dead; in search of her he has broken into—and out of—five of Hungary’s nine concentration camps.

Jansci’s partner, known only as “The Count,” possesses an equally astonishing capacity to continue fighting for his ideals while enduring hardship and nightmarish personal suffering. At the novel’s outset, The Count, like Jansci, has suffered the loss of his entire family to murder or disappearance, but at the hands of the Nazis. An actual Polish aristocrat, The Count fought the German invasion of his country in 1939, then joined the Underground Resistance to secretly fight the Nazi occupation that followed. Captured and condemned to grisly slave labor. The Count killed his Nazi jailers and escaped, joining the Polish Resistance Army. Captured again, and sent this time to Auschwitz, The Count nevertheless survived, and after World War II joined forces with Jansci to form an elusive, irrepressible cadre of freedom fighters to battle the conquering Communists.

The Count, a swashbuckling, devil-may-care, Errol Flynn-style hero, has used his mastery of disguise and language to infiltrate the AVO, Hungary’s cunning and murderous secret police, and to rise brilliantly to the rank of Major. The Count, in his nerve-straining double existence, risks his life daily—and to great effect. The knowledge he gains in his position as a trusted confederate of the AVO leadership is invaluable to Jansci, enabling him to carry a steady stream of freedom-seeking Hungarians to the West.

Without Jansci and The Count, Reynolds would have no hope of rescuing Dr. Jennings from the Communists. But even with the aid of these two great men, Reynolds’s chances of success are slim; they are deep within a suppressive totalitarian state, where the secret police are ubiquitous. The result is an epic duel between, on the one hand, Reynolds and Jansci’s freedom fighters and, on the other hand, the secret police, who are represented superlatively by the relentless and deviously brilliant Colonel Hidas. Plot twists abound and the suspense continues to the story’s death-struggle climax.

One highlight of the rescue attempt is Reynold’s adrenaline-pumping, death-inviting journey across the icy roof of a train hurtling through a howling blizzard, a feat brilliantly rendered to leave the reader wide-eyed and sweaty-palmed for the duration of the scene. Generally, MacLean’s plots are limited to violent external conflict in which the hero is single-mindedly determined to prevail, suffering no internal value struggle regarding the desired outcome. But in The Secret Ways, the heroes are burdened by an agonizing internal struggle that causally engenders the story’s roaring climax, for the freedom fighters discover that, through the vicious cunning of the secret police, the lives of some of their loved ones will be violently cut short if they carry their mission to fruition. The on-all-fronts nature of the conflict engaged by MacLean’s heroes is what accounts for the Hugo-esque quality of this book. The grandeur achieved by men so principled that they dauntlessly face any form of antagonist—internal and external, intellectual-emotional and physical—to successfully conclude their chosen value quest is what makes The Secret Ways MacLean’s finest work.

A minor annoyance in this novel is the pacifistic philosophy endlessly spouted by Jansci and his converts. But while such drivel undermines the consistency of the characters, it also serves to enhance their heroism. Because they can incapacitate, but never kill, their murderous secret police adversaries Jansci and his freedom fighters are driven to even more brilliant heights of ingenuity to overcome both their enemies and their self-imposed limitations.

Alistair MacLean’s best books, superbly plotted and populated by heroes of immense stature, offer readers a timeless value. Do they brim with insights into human nature as do the works of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy? They do not. MacLean’s generally eschews characterization in favor of hard-driving, unrelenting action, and, insofar as his novels express any explicit philosophy, it is inadequate to explain the meaning of his stories, much less the meaning of life.

The timeless value provided by MacLean’s best novels is their depiction of heroism, of men achieving great things in the face of extreme danger, of men thus worthy of our admiration. After encountering giants such as Keith Mallory, John Smith, Jansci, and The Count, after suffering with them through grave challenges and basking with them in their moments of glory, after witnessing the dauntless character of men triumphing over seemingly insuperable obstacles and succeeding, the reader is reminded of how much is possible to those who strive to achieve—and that the difficulties of his life are merely surmountable hindrances. This is the superlative gift offered mankind by MacLean’s best novels.

Why have such books slipped into obscurity?

A superficial explanation might be that his best books are World War II or Cold War thrillers, that modern readers are no longer interested in what to them are tales of a dim past. But such an explanation would be false. Were it true, the entire realm of historical fiction would be similarly neglected, including the works of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Dumas, Hugo, Shakespeare, Virgil, and Homer. But such works are not neglected because it is not primarily historical setting that determines the value of fiction to readers. A great writer captures some universal essence of human nature or experience and conveys it in a gripping story. Dostoyevsky’s best works, for example, are set in a Russia of almost 150 years ago. Yet his depictions of human evil, of religious fervor, and of a profound (and irrational) yearning of some men for a transcendent world are timeless—as are the singular plots by means of which he conveys his characterological insights.

The reason for MacLean’s neglect is not the historical settings in which his novels take place. The reason for the neglect of these great works is the state of our literary culture.

It has often been pointed out that ours is the era of “the anti-hero,” in which “serious” novels, dramas, and short stories depict man as a pitiful, ineffectual creature perennially beset with loathsome desires. In the post-World War I era, the avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein famously observed of her intellectual peers: “You are all a lost generation.” The evidence for this, and, indeed, for a virtual “lost century,” is overwhelming.

One of the 20th century’s most widely respected novels, for example, depicts a neurotic young southerner at Harvard, who commits suicide over the chronic guilt he suffers as the result of an incestuous affair with his sister. Another, a scabrous, mocking parody of The Odyssey, depicts the “struggle” of a philandering husband to journey home to his adulterous wife through a virtual “Who’s Who” of drunks, prostitutes, and other low-lifes.

One influential 20th-century playwright, sneering at The Orestia, dramatizes the self-destruction of a prominent, incestuous, and murderously conniving American family. Another stage play presents a modern-day savage who brutally drives his captious, neurotic sister-in-law into insanity.

One of the past century’s leading short story writers depicts a woman who seeks out the terminally ill for the ghastly satisfaction she derives from their cadaverous condition and final death agonies. Another dramatizes the manipulative, domineering grandmother of a petty, sniping family who finds God instants before a homicidal maniac (mercifully) obliterates the whole bickering brood of them. A third presents the story of an alienated man who goes to sleep and awakes a gigantic beetle—that is subsequently starved to death by his family.

In such an intellectual atmosphere, writers who depict great men are not wanted; their works attract not a following but dust. MacLean is ignored because his novels—with relentlessly goal-directed characters who assume control of their own destinies, with vivid external conflicts against which his characters triumphantly wage, and, above all, with the towering, swaggering heroism displayed by his protagonists—run counter to modern literary trends. In other words, the characteristics of MacLean’s work that explain his current neglect are the very characteristics of his work that those weary of the modern literary status quo will find immensely refreshing.

Is MacLean, even at his best, a great novelist in the sense that Hugo is? He is not, although, as mentioned earlier, The Secret Ways manifests distinctively Hugo-esque elements. Rather, MacLean can be favorably compared to the lesser, but still great, Romantic authors of swashbuckling adventure fiction—of whom the best are Alexandre Dumas, Rafael Sabatini, Baroness Orczy, and Anthony Hope. MacLean, at his best, is the Dumas or Sabatini of late-20th-century literature—and this is exalted praise, indeed. May the literary tides change and MacLean prove to be not the last of such great writers of heroic adventure fiction—but the first of their return.

About Andrew Bernstein

Andrew Bernstein holds a PhD in philosophy from the Graduate School of the City University of New York and taught philosophy for many years at SUNY Purchase. He is the author of Capitalism Unbound: The Incontestable Moral Case for Individual Rights (2010), Capitalist Solutions (2011), and, most recently, Heroes, Legends, Champions: Why Heroism Matters (2020).

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