Review: 'Valhalla' vintage Cussler

By L.D. Meagher
Special to CNN

"Valhalla Rising"
By Clive Cussler
The Putnam Publishing Group
Fiction
344 pages

(CNN) -- It would take far more space than is available here to list everything that's wrong with the way Clive Cussler writes. What's right with it, however, can be summarized in two words.

Dirk Pitt.

Cussler's hero remains a swashbuckling seafarer, quick on the draw and handy with his fists. Though he occasionally has a wistful thought about the ravages of time, Pitt doesn't act like a man in the twilight of his years. Is the world's largest ocean liner ablaze in the South Pacific? Call Dirk Pitt. Is the world's first submarine sea liner dead in the water off Florida? Relax. Pitt's on the case.

All that, and a whole lot more, is in "Valhalla Rising," the 16th adventure in the Dirk Pitt series. Cussler sticks close to his formula -- all action, all the time -- as he weaves together threads that stretch across a millennium. Well, "weaves together" may be overstating it a bit. The novel opens in the year 1035 and ends in the year 2003. Let it go at that.

Normally, it's easy to forgive Cussler's lapses as a writer -- the wooden characterizations, stilted dialogue and fixation on hardware both new and ancient -- because his action scenes are such pulse-pounders, the reader overdoses on adrenaline and doesn't notice the missteps. Take the solution to the submarine crisis, for instance. The scene zips by so fast the reader might not notice the similarities to "Raise the Titanic."

Cussler's prose is, at best, workmanlike. The first section of the book, set during a Viking expedition in North America, includes this bit of exposition:

"The Norsemen had a lust for life. They worked hard, lived hard and they died hard. The sea was their element. To them, a man without a boat was a man in chains."

So much for cultural anthropology. The same section includes a reference to a cavern "formed by the cooling of molten rock 200,000 million years earlier." That would mean the cave formed about 185 billion years before the universe existed. So much for cosmology.

Such quibbles will do nothing to deter the legions of Dirk Pitt fans from gobbling up "Valhalla Rising." It's already riding high on the bestseller lists. There's even a major twist in Pitt's personal life at the end (though careful readers will see it coming 20,000 leagues away). For newcomers to the series, this novel is as good an introduction as any. It is, for better and for worse, vintage Cussler.