Guns of Navarone

I read this book when I was in my early teens and I became an immediate fan of Alstair MacLean. His books waste little time before you get right into the action and then there's action all the way through to the end. I can't remember how many of his books I eventually read; there was "Puppet on a Chain", "Ice Station Zebra", "Force 10 from Navarone", "The Satan Bug", etc. etc. etc.. About the time I was reading "River of Death" I realized that all the excitement in his books didn't always make up for the hasty way in which he seemed to write them. The tough guy with no personality eventually lost my interest. In my opinion, "The Guns of Navarone" was his best work. Maybe it was the World War II setting that gave it added appeal. He didn't have to waste any paragraphs establishing the cause or who were the good guys and who were the bad. Whatever it was, I remember feeling like I needed to take a deep breath when I was finished with it.
It's too bad that literature and spellbinding adventure rarely come together in one book. I remember reading Henry James's "thriller" "The Turn of the Screw" when I was a teenager. That book put me to sleep trying to drag myself through it. Action has no time for character development. Some books make you want to stop and think while others make you want to keep turning the pages. I used to enjoy Alstair MacLean's novels. I would heartily recommend them to any young man who's looking for excitement in a paperback.

From a military viewpoint, this story is not even close to believable. From a liturature viewpoint, this book has simple sentence structure, simple character development, and very basic dialog. This novel seams to have been thought of and written on a weekend holiday. Previous reviews mentioned this book as a freshman level read and that is a good description of the subject content.