42. High Citadel by Desmond Bagley

Now this is what I am talking about.  This is how you write a manly adventure novel.  I was a huge Desmond Bagley fan in my adolescent years after my dad turned me on to him (I think it might have actually been this novel).  The last time I had read a Desmond Bagley novel was High Citadel for the second or third time while hiking through Torres del Paine park in Chile in 1996.  So it's been over 20 years.  Though I was looking forward to re-reading this, I was also nervous that I would find it lacking and be disappointed.

Well either I have not evolved at all as a critical reader (quite likely) or Desmond Bagley is just a kickass writer (or both) as I found myself to have thoroughly enjoyed High Citadel.  It has a few flaws, notably the simplistic conservative politics.  Otherwise, it is arguably a near-Platonic ideal of the late 20th century masculine adventure novel.  Being a little less hyperbolic, I would say that it is a tight, thrilling and imaginative story with a driving structure that really doesn't let up.

The protagonist is Tim O'hara, burnt-out alchoholic pilot flying over the Andes for a shitty airline.  He gets woken up for a late night emergency flight to take a bunch of passengers from a grounded airline to the capital of fictonal Cordillero.  His greasy, lazy co-pilot Grivas is acting weird and gets really weird when over a mountain pass he pulls a gun on O'Hara and forces him to land on a mountain runway.  The plane crashes and O'Hara and the surviving passengers find out that one of them is the ex-president of Cordillera who was secretly returning to trigger a revolution to overthrow the general who staged a coup against him.  Grivas was part of a plot by communist infiltrators to prevent him from returning.

And here is what makes this novel so great.  Oddly, there is nobody at this hidden mountain runway and when the passengers make their beleagured way down the old mining road, they come to a gorge with a single bridge on it. On the other side of the gorge are trucks and a bunch of soldiers. The sole bridge crossing the gorge has been damaged by the first truck that tried to cross it and now they can't get across.  The rest of the book is the survivors, led by O'Hara trying to hold off the soldiers from repairing the bridge.  They are a mixed bag of tourists, businessmen, the ex-president and his beautiful niece and O'Hara.  They have a single pistol among them, taken from the plane, with 12 bullets in it and bits of pieces of leftover equipment from the abandoned mine, as well as supplies the soldiers had left earlier.  I won't go into any detail about the creativity they use to try and survive, but will say that a medieval history professor turns out to be one of their most valuable assets.
The politics do bear mentioning.  The communists are portrayed as cruel and incompetent and it is assumed that the CIA are good guys and the ex-president simply wants liberty and business for his country.  You could very easily read this book as subtle imperialistic propaganda except that the real values here are not political at all but rather the redemption of a man when given the opportunity to fight and find a real woman.

A note on the trade dress.  I really love the design of these Fontana Desmond Bagleys.  There is a whole series and something about the illustration over the cream background and the typeface really works for me.  I would love to have the entire set.