Derring-Documentary

THE GUNS OF NAVARONE (320 pp.)--Alistair MacLean--Doubleday ($3.95).

Early in World War II a character called Alistair Digby-Vane-Trumpington (in Evelyn Waugh's Put Out More Flags) asked his wife if she would mind if he joined the Commandos: "They have special knives and Tommy guns and knuckle-dusters; they wear rope-soled shoes."

"Bless you," said Sonia.

"They carry rope ladders round their waists and files sewn in the seams of their coats to escape with. D'you mind very much if I accept?"

"No darling. I couldn't keep you from the rope ladder. Not from the rope ladder I couldn't. I see that."

Like Digby-Vane-Trumpington, many writers cannot be kept from rope ladders; they love to swarm up the icy cliffs of fiction, creep up on reality in their rope-soled shoes and knock it out of commission with those knuckle-dusters. In the van of these shock troops is British Novelist Alistair MacLean, who in H.M.S. Ulysses (TIME, Jan. 23, 1956) showed his ability to zero in with a battery of heavy cliches, fieldstrip and assemble a character in the dark, and tell an exciting story. MacLean displays the same talents in his current operation, dealing with the eastern Mediterranean in mid-World War II.

The Germans are set to wipe out the null British garrison on the Greek isle of Kheros. The Germans control the air by day and the British the sea by night. Unless the British can silence a German battery on the neighboring isle of Navarone, nothing can save the Kheros garrison. Five men are selected to sail a caique under the cliffs by night, scale them, and blow up the German guns. Largely because the five are led by a man so tough and tight-lipped that he would make Bulldog Drummond seem like a pacifist balletomane, they pull off this miraculous stunt. The superman is Captain Keith Mallory, a New Zealand mountaineer, "idol of the cragsmen," hero of legendary exploits in the Cretan resistance.

Before the action ends in a satisfactory bang, there is an uninterrupted spate of sinkings, gunplay, throat-slittings, cliff-hangings, captures and escapes, surrounded by sound technical information. For the young in heart it is great stuff--a first-rate derring-documentary. As in H.M.S. Ulysses, Novelist MacLean sternly eschews sex. A man needs every ounce of strength to punch out novels like this.

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