- Title:
- Ice
- By:
- James Follett
- Pages:
- 208
- Rating:
- 4
The top brass of Western Intelligence are badly rattled when transatlantic cables are inexplicably and provocatively cut, and Russian and American relations reach freezing-point. Only Glyn Sherwood and Julia Hammond, two scientists working in the Antarctic, can guess the identity of the enemy. It is a gargantuan slice of the glacial continent bearing millions of tons of rock on its grasp, which triggers a series of disasters as it drifts inexorably north.
“He bit on his cigar and summed up with a six-word sentence that made up in conciseness what it lacked in finesse: “Those bastards are up to something.””
This is a very good Follett indeed. Obviously, I can’t say with any degree of certainty what would happen if a gargantuan iceberg decided to start rolling its way through the ocean, but for your average lay person this is quite an interesting premise to read about. It’s at the eighteenth chapter, I think, we start to get a glimpse of our characters spunk and pluckiness; the escape from the doomed cruise liner is thrilling.
Then again, it’s also interesting how my sympathies lay with Oaf, as the doer of the team; until Sherwood, our wining Welsh geologist, actually starts making himself useful and does more than mess things up for everyone else. This story has it all: tension between the characters, humour where appropriate, but a very real threat to many people which is thought-provoking and intelligently written about.