Review: One for teenagers
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 02 10, 2013
This is a crap novel.Not because the plot is bad...it isn't.And not because the characters are thin...they aren't.No, this is a crap novel because it is page after page of grammar error, spelling error, inconsistency and sheer idiocy.And that's a real shame, because as withInto the Black: Odyssey One [Remastered Edition], there is a good story drowned in what is a hack piece of writing.Basically, Currie writes with no apparent care or precision, and "Thermals" will frustrate any reader who cares about such things. Indeed, it is not exaggeration to say that there is a grammar and/or spelling error every couple of pages.For a few examples of the inconsistencies, consider an Interpol Inspector, our leading character Anselm Gunnar. He's European but when we meet him he's thinking in Imperial units, not metric. That's about as likely as Alicia Keys belting out `God Save the Queen' as the National Anthem at the Super Bowl.He switches to metric in short order (in fact the whole novel switches to metric), but that kind of gaff is typical of the errors embedded in "Thermals".Or an emergency call being dialled as `9-1-1' when such a call would be `0-0-0' in Australia.Or a `START' team (some kind of fast response military team) becoming a `STRT' team half way through the novel. I guess the `A' in the acronym was not really needed after all?We also see a police car cruising a desert road at just under 400 km/h (and screaming around town at 200 km/h). I've seen Top Gear's James May doing his Bugatti Veyron Top Speed Test and you don't steer a car going that fast "around a snake in the road". Whether that's actually a slinky, slimy snake or just a description of a corner, the believability factor was zero for me.And the massive structure at the heart of the novel, the Australian `Tower of Power', is introduced as Gunner flies in as "both five thousand feet below them and also loomed another twenty thousand feet above."Exactly what those twenty thousand feet refer to remained a mystery to me as the tower itself is only a kilometre high, or just over 3,000 feet.And from that tower it was possible to see the skyscrapers of distant Sydney. But the Tower of Power is apparently in the midst of the Outback, so the distances just don't make sense. In fact, most of the distances don't make much sense and I doubt Currie has visited the Outback because a road train won't get to Sydney in a `few hours'. Given the vastness of Australia, even a jet has trouble doing that!OK, it's only a novel, but right across the board, Currie takes a reasonable plot and fleshed out characters - even the evil terrorist was well drawn and quite interesting in his motives and actions - and applies a laissez-faire attitude to how he actually writes it.So, I'm recommending this for teenage readers. It's the type of novel I would have devoured as a fifteen year old, not noticing or caring about the inconsistencies...though even then I still would have found the grammar and spelling errors a pain.