The Way to Dusty Death, Alistair MacLean (1973)
I can remember trying one of Agatha Christie’s novels and being exhilarated by the simplicity and straightforwardness of her prose. The novel was a rush to read, like skating effortlessly over endless ice. The exhilaration wore off before the end and I became bored instead, but it was an interesting experience.
And I was reminded of it when I read The Way to Dusty Death again after a collection of stories by Sheridan Le Fanu. MacLean is to Le Fanu rather as a desert is to a jungle. One is flat, dry, and arid, the other teems with life and mystery. MacLean’s prose has no depth, nuance or subtlety: it’s as functional and undecorated as a military map. But I still enjoyed The Way to Dusty Death a lot and want to read it again sometime. And maybe my readings are even in double figures by now. MacLean has the ability to write compellingly that a lot of other Scottish writers have and perhaps if English rather than Gaelic had been his mother tongue he might have written more like Robert Louis Stevenson: not just compellingly, but with depth too.
All the same, part of this novel’s appeal is its simplicity. It’s escapist, requiring no special effort, and it pushes the right buttons on the male psyche. Johnny Harlow, the world’s #1 racing driver, is up against a devious and dangerous race-rigging gang, and proves more devious and dangerous than the gang is. There are lots of technical titbits and descriptions of fast driving and hard fighting en route to Harlow’s final and complete triumph. But there’s indirect psychological flattery for the reader with the exciting action. Harlow, like most people in the world, isn’t estimated at his true worth. Or rather, he is until he goes undercover, pretending to become an alcoholic in order to throw both his enemies and his friends off their guard:
MacAlpine, grim-faced and almost incredulous, bent over Harlow, sniffed in disgust and removed the bottle from Harlow’s nerveless hand. He looked at Dunnett, who returned his expressionless glance.
MacAlpine said: “The greatest driver in the world.”
“Please, James. You said it yourself. It happens to all of them. Remember? Sooner or later, it happens to them all.”
“But Johnny Harlow?”
“Even to Johnny Harlow.”
MacAlpine nodded.
Both men turned and left the room, closing the door behind them.
Harlow opened his eyes, rubbed his chin thoughtfully. His hand stopped moving and he sniffed his palm. He wrinkled his nose in disgust. (end of ch. 2)
Disgust is not that something MacLean himself would have shown: Harlow is a wish-fulfilment fantasy for the author as well as the author’s readers. People look on Harlow with disgust, contempt, and pity because of his drinking, but all the time he’s putting on an act and is in perfect control. And later in the book MacLean’s old obsessions with rain, cold, and fatigue return, during Harlow’s adventures in Marseilles. Once again he’s indirectly writing about his service on the Arctic convoys that carried supplies to Russia during the Second World War. Men got little chance for proper rest on the convoys, so MacLean was familiar with the sensation of being asleep on your feet, when dream and reality became intermingled. And in The Way to Dusty Death there’s a dream-like quality to the way the French police, like all other Europeans in the book, speak complex, colloquial English. Or perhaps Harlow is an expert linguist as well as expert driver and they’re really talking in French when Harlow drags his badly injured would-be assassin off to the police station. MacLean doesn’t bother to explain.
Harlow gets bashed in Marseilles too, though it isn’t his fault. Rory, his love-interest’s younger brother, mistakenly switches from hero-worship to hate after Harlow apparently cripples his sister in a driving accident. That’s why Rory starts spying on Harlow for the gang, who have tricked him into thinking they’re the good guys. So MacLean’s old obsession with paranoia and suspicion is present too. Superman Harlow re-converts Rory to hero-worship and deals out dusty death to the gang, as they, in two ways, have been dealing it out to others. The double meaning and Shakespearian provenance of the title are the closest the novel gets to Literature-with-a-capital-L, but I find MacLean more interesting than many writers-with-a-capital-W. He’s careless, he’s clumsy, but he compels.
Papyrocentric Performativity 