Read: Raise the Titanic!; Clive Cussler

For reasons I have yet to question, I’ve started rereading Cussler’s novels, which I last read back in the 1980s and 1990s. And even then I thought they were bad. Raise the Titanic! is probably his most famous novel - it’s certainly the one that made him a bestselling author. It was his third novel, the first two had sold poorly, and this one was expected to do the same. But an editor visiting from the UK saw the manuscript at Cussler’s US publisher, and took a copy back home with him. This kicked off a bidding war on both sides of the Atlantic, resulting in Cussler pulling in a huge advance. The novel then went on to become a bestseller. (Soon after, Cussler bought back the rights to his earlier novels, and resold them to his then-current publisher for considerably more than he’d sold them originally.) The plot of Raise the Titanic! sees Dirk Pitt, special operations director the US National Underwater and Marine Agency, and all-round hard man, lady killer and Competent Man, is tapped to head a US project to raise the RMS Titanic from its seabed grave, 3800 metres below the surface (where the pressure is around 400 atmospheres). Because there’s a presidential black project to build an anti-missile screen around the US and it needs a supply of “byzanium” in order to work. The only known quantity of byzanium was secretly mined under the noses of the Soviets on Novaya Zemlya by US miners in 1912, but was shipped home on the RMS Titanic. Oops. The USSR learns of this plan and decides to hijack the Titanic once she is on the surface. Perhaps because of the amount spent to buy the novel, Raise the Titanic! seems to have been closely edited, and the prose is far better than in the earlier novels (although still not, well, good). The plot and setting is also much more science-fictional. The book was written before the wreck was found, and most people believed the ship had come to rest in one piece (she actually split in two). So Pitt’s plan is to plug the many holes in the Titanic’s hull with “wetsteel” and then pump the ship full of air… The novel was adapted for the screen in 1980 by UK TV production company ITC, but was a massive flop. ITC’s owner, Lew Grade, later said “it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic”, but he did like the film. Cussler didn’t. He refused to allow anyone to adapt his other books, and later sued the makers of Sahara, adapted from his 1992 Dirk Pitt novel of the same name. That film was huge flop too. Cussler died in 2020, but some time around the millennium he’d created an atelier, which has since produced a huge quantity of Dirk Pitt and NUMA novels by diverse hands (with Cussler’s name the most prominent on the cover, of course). His son, called Dirk, natch, now writes the Pitt novels. ( )

fiction - Cold War spy adventure novel (c. 1976, 1988, 2004), standalone book in a series featuring action hero Dirk Pitt, taking place in northern remote stretches of USSR (secret Byzantium mining site) and the north Atlantic wreck of the Titanic.

mass market paperback reprint; a popular author though characters/plot definitely subscribe to a very dated 1960/70s sexism. Don't expect to find any positive female roles (apart from objects to be either appreciated or ignored) -- the lead archaeologist doesn't even get to provide a response to her husband's selfishly asking her to have a child to "save" their marriage because "you can't deny a son or daughter their chance at life" though he would not of course make any concessions to decrease his workload to help out. Supposedly she didn't have a great childhood and this is the crux of her unwillingness but it's a very one-sided argument framed by the male perspective of why-won't-she-give-up-her-career-and-rearrange-her-life-to-provide-me-with-an-heir when there's nothing wrong with some people just not wanting kids, period (later on, she even happily sheds her clothes and climbs into bed with Dirk Pitt). To be fair, the multitude of male characters (who are more or less interchangeable, except for the supposedly incomparable Dirk Pitt) aren't all that likeable either, but they do get to voice their opinions (and many, many bad jokes) throughout the majority of the story.

other than that, various moments of suspense and political intrigue for readers who enjoy that type of book -- I thought it dragged quite a bit in several parts and the plot was needlessly complicated for no discernible reason other than to make the book longer. However, I have had one library patron explain that he likes Clive Cussler because he feels like he is "learning something" while also reading something fun, and yes, there is that little bit of technical language being explained to make a reader feel smarter or accomplished afterwards, though some of it is pseudo-science/science fiction that is based on a fragment of actual science.

picked up from a Little Free Library, part of my trying various popular authors I've never read before-- ( )

"Even if it were technically possible, and it isn't…" (pg. 124)

A really fun and well-put-together adventure potboiler, made more lasting by its successful Titanic novelty. Published about a decade before the real wreck's discovery by Robert Ballard, Clive Cussler's Raise the Titanic! is, of course, completely implausible. Most notably, we now know that the wreck was torn in half during its sinking and therefore not in one piece to raise. Titanic buffs will enjoy themselves picking holes elsewhere too (the boilers, for one thing, did not break loose).

Nevertheless, Cussler makes a pretty respectable go of it in his novel considering he lacked the facts we now have, and he makes some astute choices that seem uncanny in retrospect. His fictional Titanic wreck is discovered by a U.S. military expedition operating under the guise of an oceanographical scientific expedition, which is not too dissimilar from Ballard's real expedition (a military-funded expedition searching for a lost nuclear submarine that, once completed, started looking for the Titanic). Like Ballard, the first sight Cussler's expedition has of the wreck is its distinctive boilers. It even gets the date of discovery pretty close (1987 compared to Ballard's 1985). And, in 2023, the set-piece where one of the expedition's deep-sea submersibles is trapped at the bottom of the ocean among the wreckage recalls much of the speculation that initially surrounded the fate of OceanGate's doomed Titan a few months ago: "If the unthinkable happened, an accident at twelve thousand feet, there would be no hope of rescue. A quick death would be the only prayer against the appalling suffering of slow asphyxiation" (pg. 162). Suffice to say, there's plenty for those fascinated by the Titanic to get their teeth into.

Elsewhere, the book is that oddball mix of narm and genuine thrill that one gets from the best of Seventies pulp fiction, including some clumsy sexism that now seems almost endearingly quaint as you shake your head at it. The super-weapon MacGuffin never convinces – the Titanic's sunken cargo apparently contains an elusive element (the fictional 'byzanium') which can be used to create an all-powerful missile defence system – and nor does the corresponding Cold War espionage plot in which the dastardly Soviets seek to sabotage the salvage mission. (And, in one of the dumbest plot developments, why would the US government leak the information? If byzanium is such a game-changer, why start to play silly beggars with the Russians?) The hurricane also seemed a bit much at first, though it eventually worked in well enough, and the claim that the Titanic wreck had been kept free of rust and corrosion by unique ocean conditions was brazen hand-waving from the author to distract from the mighty plothole. And speaking of plotholes, I never understood why Dirk Pitt, our protagonist, was sent to interview a random Titanic survivor who provides crucial information – there just never seemed a realistic way for the two threads to link.

But the truth is that none of the above flaws matter a jot. Cussler's Titanic novelty is robust enough to ride over any flaw, and in truth it is – by thriller standards – a well-written story. Pitt is a decent protagonist and the pages turn easily. There is a globe-trotting adventure and enough research to give a thin veneer of plausibility to the Boy's Own nonsense. They raise the Titanic by blowing it off the bottom of the sea with explosives, which is so inappropriate it's staggering, but it's also so much fun to read as Cussler paints us the picture of how the dormant wreck, slowly but surely, begins to move. "We raise the Titanic!" a character proposes on page 108, and you can almost hear the triumphant music playing as it is said. The risen Titanic being towed into New York harbour, its original destination in April 1912 before fate intervened, is physically impossible and the most romantic of pipe dreams, but it's also a damn fine thing to read as Cussler makes it happen in this fairytale. For all its flaws, the book is a feast to read, and with such an alluring topic at hand it was always going to be so.

"'Strange thing about the Titanic,' Sandecker said softly. 'Once her spell strikes, you can think of nothing else.'" (pg. 161) ( )

[b:Raise the Titanic!|41706|Raise the Titanic! (Dirk Pitt, #4)|Clive Cussler|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1439783780s/41706.jpg|81973] by [a:Clive Cussler|18411|Clive Cussler|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1225620641p2/18411.jpg]

Genres; Action/Adventure, Crime, Mystery, Suspense

4 Stars

Mass Market Paperback, 384 pages
Published October 1st 1984 by Bantam
Oh this trip down memory lane.
Amazing how the one constant in my life is books. Almost all the books I have read throughout my life have been adventure, suspense and mystery.
Does anyone remember the Nick Carter books? Yep, I read every one of them back in the 1970's.
Back to this book.
I remember enjoying it. Loved the action and suspense. I also remember thinking Dirk Pit was a bit like Nick Carter. For me, a young adult, they were both HOT!
I loved the adventures Dirk Pitt took me on. I actually learned a lot about the world and some history from these books. ( )

Dirk and his trusty sidekick have to stop enemies from getting to something in the Titanic and prevent it from being gotten at forever. Deep sea excitement with a James Bond type of suspense. Don't read it because it is plausible, just enjoy the ride. Good action adventure. ( )