Another dispatch from the newspaper inside my head:

It’s impressive that anybody at all has exercised their critical attention on an instance of Clive Cussler’s apparent moral inattention. It’s not something one sees very often: Cussler has a critical aura of protection about him, but one cannot read one of the novelist’s works without unease. We may begin with Cussler’s more famous – and more famously ambiguous – relationship with Tom Clancy, the lapsed-NeoCon. We hold him to account for his actions – that almost goes without saying in critical circles – so what about Cussler?

Well, if the attention is for sound reasons, the only useful and meaningful way to hold an adventure writer to account would be to hold him to account according to the mores of airport novels, just as the only meaningful way to hold Clancy to account would be according to dross (as many have done – the Daily Express book pages for instance).

We can approach this by asserting that one novel (Sahara), despite being a straightforward adventure novel is surely, in essence, a call for the recolonisation of Africa, one that under its stereotyped characterisations and turgid prose is on the side of Fascism, of imperialism and racial persecution.

We can add weight to this argument by extracting from the Dirk Pitt saga the more shadowy backstory of Pitt’s sidekick, Al Giordino (while leaving aside for a moment the doubly-denied homoeroticism of their relationship). Giordino’s Italian extraction points to the regressive context of Cussler’s work: the continuation of Mussolini’s grand plan for Africa which approached as far as the Sahara desert in the 1940s before its defeat by the Allied forces, represented in Sahara by French industrialist Yves Massarde. We may also gesture wildy in the direction of the Nazi obsessions of Cussler’s first novel The Mediterranean Caper.

What we shall not address, and which perhaps might offer more interest than this critique, is why someone else – Julian Barnes, for example, or Ian McEwan – someone with apparently impeccable ethical credentials, is not in any way as enjoyable as a good Clive Cussler novel; often quite the opposite?

[Sources: 1 and 2]