About reading

The book I have chosen is called “Night without end”. This book was written by Alistair Maclean and is a thriller novel published in 1959. Specifically, the edition I have read is a retold for students by Margaret Naudi. This novel is “considered one of MacLean´s very best”.

The main characters are three men: Peter Mason, Jackstraw and Joss. They were working in a weather station in the Arctic when suddenly, they heard a huge noise. They left the weather station to know what had happened. They found out that the noise had been an accident of a plane. When they reached the plane, they fortunately found ten survivors, but they also found several dead men but with one of them dead by a bullet not the crash, so it was clear that there were some murderers among all of them.

The rest of the story runs on trying to guess who is or are the murderers. Peter Mason, Jackstraw and Joss are men who are experienced in working in extreme conditions, but they have never managed a situation as described in the book. The leader of the three is Peter Mason, who, with the help of his two fellow workers, will try to find out what is happening and why a plane appears in the middle of the Arctic. At the end, they get to know that there were two murderers who forced the pilots of the plane to land in the ice-cap because in the plane there was a top secret guided-missile mechanism which is valued about a million pounds.

The rest of characters (the survivors) are secondary characters (Corazzini, Marie Legarde, the boxer…), and the writer does not describe them in detail.

In my opinion, the story is really good and has been fast and easy to read because you want to know what is happening and who the murderers are from start to finish, something typical of the thriller genre, but the writer hides it until the end, so you read and read and this is done very fast.

On the other hand, I think that the writer should be slower with the changes between one setting and another, because in some situations the reader is in the plane but suddenly, in the next line, the story continues in the shelter.

In general terms, I liked the book and would recommend it to other students.

I have only read this book of Alistair MacLean, but I have been searching some information on the internet about him and he was (he is dead) a specialist in the thriller genre, so I would read other books by this author because the thrillers are my favorite books and films, but honestly, I see more movies than I read books.

 

 

 

“Night Without End”, written by Alistair MacLean and  retold by Margaret Naudi, is an exciting intrigue book set in Greenland.

The story begins with the suspicious crash-landing of a passenger airliner in the middle of the Greenland ice cap.

The crashed plane is discovered by a group of scientists who rescue the surviving passengers and take them to their station, but soon the scientists discover that among the passengers there are two murderers, so all the passengers are suspicious.

As they don´t have enough food for all of them, they decide to go to a station near the coast but in the middle of the journey the murderers are discovered and they, who have a really expensive and important military object, abandon the rest of the passengers and the scientists and go to the coast where some friends are waiting for them in a boat to escape.

Then, another group of scientist find the abandoned passengers and scientists, and all of them find the murderers before reaching the coast. Then they kill one of them and don´t help the other, who finally dies at the bottom of a crevasse.

Finally, the passengers and the scientists survive.

 

The main characters of this story are the following:

-          Peter Mason: the scientist who tells the story.

-          Jackstraw and Joss: the other two scientists.

-          Hillcrest and his men: the scientists who find the abandoned passengers and scientists

-          Marie LeGarde: a passenger and a famous actress.

-          Zagero and his father: both are passengers, the first is a boxer and the second is his manager.

-          Senator Brewster: he is a passenger.

-          Mrs Dansby Gregg: she is a passenger and a rich woman.

-          Helene: a German girl who serves Mrs. Dansby-Gregg

-          Margaret Ross: the stewardess of the airline.

-          Theodore Mahler: he is a diabetic passenger.

-          The reverend Smallwood and Mr. Corazzini (a businessman): both are passengers and professional killers.

 

This entertaining book shows that, in the end,  good people always beat the bad ones.

 The chapter I enjoyed the most was the tenth chapter where the killers are discovered. It made come to my mind the famous proverb “first falls a liar than a cripple”.

 I recommend this book to all the people who enjoy reading intrigue books because once you start to read, it is difficult to stop because when you finish a chapter, there are a lot of things to resolve and you continue reading to see what happens.

    INTRODUCTION:

    Title: Night without end

    Author: Alistair MacLean (retold by Margaret Naudi)

    Genre: Adventure

PLOT:

A British Airways plane crashed on the Polar ice-cap, and three scientists from the weather station had to save the survivors before they died from starvation or exposure. So they decided to take them into their cabin. When suddenly the radio was smashed, Dr. Mason began to suspect everybody and decided to investigate who their guests were.

Soon he discovered that the plane’s pilot had been cold-bloodedly murdered because he found a bullet in his back, and the plane’s radio operator was killed that night. So he had to investigate the crimes and at the same time he had to travel with the guests through the ice towards the coast, without food and with a killer in the group.

CHARACTERS:

The Scientists:

·         Peter Mason: the main character. He is the person who tells the story. Mason is in charge of the weather station in Greenland. He is a brave, strong and intelligent doctor that must lead a group of people through the Polar ice-cap to keep them saved from starvation and exposure.

·         Jackstraw: he is another scientist. Dr. Mason describes him like this: “If you all live to get home again, it will probably be thanks to Jackstraw. He knows more than any other living man about how to survive on the Greenland ice-cap” It’s a brave and very quiet man with a lot of knowledge of extreme situations.

·         Joss: (Joseph London) he is the radio operator in the scientists’ cabin. Joss is younger than his partners. He stays at the cabin waiting for the expedition group.

The Plane survivors:

·         The Plane’s Radio Operator: this man was seriously injured when the scientists saved him from the wrecked plane. His name was Jimmy Waterman and he was murdered in the cabin the first night.

·         Marie LeGarde: is an old woman that is supposed to be a famous actress. She is very helpful taking care of the injured people on the plane. She is a nice, lovable and cheerful person.

·         Margaret Ross: this is the stewardess. She is a very emotional and sensitive person. Dr. Mason distrusted her because she was supposed to be with the radio operator when he was murdered. She had a pain in her back.

·         Nick Corazzini: he is a business man that goes to Scotland to take over a new tractor company. He helped the scientists to repair the old tractor in order to leave the cabin.

·         The Reverend Smallwood: this is the man who wears a priest’s collar. He is a minister of religion who went to London for an important meeting of the Unitarian and Free Churches. It is a very calm, serious and quiet person.

·         Solly Levin: he introduced himself as Zagero’s manager from New York City. He is a little man that was wearing a large jacket.

·         Johnny Zagero: he is a young boxer that travelled with his manager Solly Levin. He is a strong and dark-haired person.

·         Mrs. Phyllis Dansby-Gregg: she is a young woman wearing fur and rich clothes.  She is quite cold and selfish. She appeared in fashionable society pages from a newspaper as a London society woman. She travelled with her personal maid.

·         Helene Fleming: she is seventeen years old. She is from Germany and is Mrs. Dansby-Gregg’s maid. She was one of the injured people in the crashed plane.

·         Theodore Mahler: he is a very silent person. He is a Jewish. To introduce himself he didn’t say anything except his name.

·         Senator Hoffman Brewster: this is an old man with white hair and a moustache. He is an American politician. He goes to Europe to collect information for political committees.

·         Captain Hillcrest:  he is another scientist that was in charge of the expedition group.

OTHER INFORMATION:

I really enjoyed the book. It was an exciting and entertaining story.  The best part of it, I think, was the beginning of the book when the scientists found the crashed plane and they had to rescue the survivors from freezing and starvation, carrying them on their sledge.

The story makes you suspect of any of the characters as possible murderers. Peter Mason is the one who tells the story so when he suspects one person, you are suspicious of them, too. That is because you are reading his thoughts and that makes you think about the behavior of all the characters in the book.

CONCLUSION:

I recommend the book because, apart from exciting and entertaining, it is a nice story that I read without many difficulties, except some vocabulary. A good thing is that many of the “new” words I learned in this book are repeated during all the chapters, and this is helpful to remember and recognize them much more easily.

I haven’t read other books from this author, Alistair MacLean, but I wouldn’t mind reading another one.