Athabasca – Alistair MacLean, 1980 ★½

A Thriller on the Rocks

What can you say about a thriller where everything happens at once and an invisible adversary manages to be everywhere and nowhere?

Athabasca is a novel driven by a need to exceed. Not so much in terms of thrills, but in scale. What starts out as a scenic visit by security experts to discuss a possible threat at the mouth of the Alaska Pipeline quickly escalates into a deadly, fiery crisis that draws in a second mammoth oil-extraction operation thousands of miles away.

For this trio of intrepid if overweight investigators led by the smug, loquacious Jim Brady, big explosions, mutilated bodies, and shadowy terrorists are all secondary to how long their booze supply holds up.

At the dawn of the 1980s, the energy crisis dominated news cycles. The cost of oil from the Middle East was rising while relations with their suppliers grew more tense. Among the few sources of alternate energy available to the West were crude oil flowing along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System from Prudhoe Bay, and the surface extraction of oil deposits from tar sands along the Athabasca River in Alberta, Canada.

A tar sands operation in the Athabasca region of Alberta. MacLean makes much of the size and messiness involved: "The latest oil extraction plant, which went into operation only in the summer of 1978, requires 10,000 tons of raw material every hour."
Image from https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/athabasca-oil-sands-making-headlines-then-and-now/article535379/

In Athabasca, both are targets of a vast and mysterious criminal operation. Perhaps OPEC or peeved environmentalists? MacLean toys with these ideas, while making clear whoever they are, the bad guys are several steps ahead of everyone as both facilities are well infiltrated.

Much of the suspense takes the form of clashes with security chiefs and others who refuse to take Brady’s warnings to heart. When one of the Athabasca brass complains that Brady is making his outfit look like a “criminals’ den,” he shoots back: “It’s not a Sunday school.”

Or after a row with one of the more blinkered bosses: “Pity he acts so suspiciously – otherwise he’d have made a splendid suspect.”

Brady’s breezy manner, as well as his need to spew transparent expositions for the reader in a plummy “dear-boy” manner belying his supposed Texas origins, grates quickly. Yet the plotline is immediately immersive and utilizes exotic locales to strong effect. MacLean was an intense cold-weather writer; here he uses deadly subzero conditions to underscore a doomy, suspenseful mood:

The forty-mile-per-hour gale brought the combination of temperature and chill-factor down to minus seventy. Even double-wrapped as a polar bear, without an exposed inch of flesh, the fact remains that one still has to breathe – and breathing in those conditions, until numbness intervenes, is a form of exquisite and refined agony. In the initial stages it is impossible to tell whether one is inhaling glacial air or superheated steam: a searing sensation dominates all else.

In addition to frosty temperatures, the Alaska Pipeline presents another kind of security difficulty - it stretches north to south across the breadth of the state, some 800 miles in all. "Most people don't realize how huge this state is," Brady notes. "It's bigger than half of Western Europe."
Photo by Margaret Kriz Hobson from https://www.eenews.net/articles/big-finds-bitter-clashes-and-nepa-the-tale-of-trans-alaska/

Especially in the early going, Athabasca is quite crafty at keeping you off-guard, introducing a fresh crisis in each chapter and a few mysterious leads to ponder. MacLean takes time in a preface to explain the different ways oil is extracted – from reservoirs deep underground and tar sands at or near the surface – and it is an engaging detour. So are the itemized tours of machines which extract oil from the earth. There is a sense of vital importance in the way it is all laid out.

After not very long, however, the novel settles into a frustrating formula – frustrating not only for the way the villains operate but because Brady and his junior partners, George Dermott and Donald Mackenzie, seem unable to take their situation seriously even as the body count mounts.

After the initial run of sabotage, the trio shuttle from Alaska to Alberta and back again, bantering about their hopeless case. They agree there are too many suspects and too wide an area to cover.

In the heavy winter snows of Alberta in the middle of winter, when Athabasca is set, helicopters are the only way to get anywhere. The villains are particularly adept at this, able to appear and disappear at will with no advance warning.
Image from https://www.linkedin.com/company/custom-helicopters-ltd-/?originalSubdomain=ca 

So they relax and have a drink, and another, and another. Throughout the book, Brady, Dermott, and Mackenzie keep making pit stops to load up on spirits and have discussions over who they suspect most in this chapter. A dangerous lot, they agree, yet Brady brings his wife and daughter along on the investigation.

Every Brady dismisses repeated danger warnings, with the daughter protesting she is needed to make Daddy’s daiquiris.

“Jesus, George, somebody, by definition, has to be beyond suspicion,” Brady fumes after leaving the ladies in the hands of some particularly dicey men. This all works out just as you’d expect, setting up one of several stale tropes MacLean deploys, that of damsels in distress.

MacLean novels, once intricate affairs blending adventure and realism, had become gargantuan, noisy spectacles with plots built to complement mindlessly lurid book jackets of ruptured dikes and collapsing bridges. Spy stories, once his bread and butter, had been replaced by disaster tales, with ever-rising stakes and cardboard characterizations.

Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and its oil field would seem more than enough of a target for overreaching supercriminals. But it is just the smaller of two targets. Above, the pipeline network that services the Trans Alaska Pipeline System.
Image from https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudhoe_Bay_Oil_Field

In Athabasca, we get not one but two giant oil operations threatened with simultaneous shutdown. Which begs a question: how would a band of crooks be so organized, especially before mobile phones were a thing? And how were they expecting to get away with it after?

The actual conclusion explains none of that, but by this point it is clear MacLean just wants to wrap it up. He throws in characters we never met to be revealed as key infiltrators, to be captured with no fuss. Which is a shame, because Athabasca as a book would have had more of a chance to stand out if its author were invested in his material. MacLean showcases a playful touch with his dialogue scenes, only to get carried away by sheer silliness:

“As you say yourself, every pipeline operator is as guilty as hell until proved otherwise.”

“I didn’t quite say that.”

“Hair-splitting.”

Alistair MacLean. In interviews, he often declaimed his writing as a mere way to make a living. By the time of Athabasca, the 58-year-old author was still earning well, but his books were off their once-high standard. Still, Athabasca is better than much of his later output.
Image from https://www.instagram.com/p/DIt9J2stbyF/

The investigators’ big break comes when they decide to go on the offensive by checking everyone working security at both facilities against fingerprints on coins extracted from public payphones from which threats were called in. As the saboteurs show they can break in anywhere with ease, it stands to reason they would have inside help; finding a fingerprint match – or a refusal to provide a fingerprint – would help identify these bad actors.

But a meticulous, weeks-long investigation was not what the MacLean formula called for in 1980, so instead of doing this quietly, they broadcast their plans to trigger a violent reaction. Very soon after, Dermott finds himself tied to a steel ring buried in the ground, positioned in front of a gigantic dragline set to crush him into a fine paté.

The dialogue MacLean gives the main villain reads like parody:

“Ah, Mr. Dermott,” said a voice he half-recognized but could not place. “Struggling will not help. You’re anchored to a steel ring let into concrete. The ring is directly in the patch of Dragline One, which, as you can see and hear, is now only a few feet from you. The controls have been preset and locked in position so that the middle of the right shoe will pass over you. Good-bye, Mr. Dermott. You have less than two minutes to live.”

Above, a dragline. Basically a large excavator, it does double duty in Athabasca as a tool of sabotage and of diabolical execution. However, it is also very slow, which gives Dermott and his allies ample time to avoid a cruel fate.
Image from https://www.e-education.psu.edu/mng230/node/845

Passages like this make me wonder how much MacLean was on the level, or if, as it seemed with his earlier adventure story The Golden Gate, he was sending up his genre with some deliberate howlers.

Likely he was just drinking too much. Alcoholism killed MacLean before his time, and in the pages of Athabasca you feel its grip. If it isn’t the constant drinking of the main characters, it is the sluggish pace and the slapdash final resolution. MacLean still knew how to write thrillers, but he didn’t care to give this the same polish or heart. The result is a yarn which starts out well enough but winds up falling apart.