TARGET ANTARCTICA - Book review

Hammond Innes followed up his novel Isvik (1991) with this sequel, Target Antarctica, in 1993.

As usual, it’s a first person narrative, by Falklands War hero Ed Cruse, having just ignominiously left the RAF. After some shilly-shallying he’s given a job to fly a stranded C-130 Hercules aircraft off an Antarctic iceberg. The reasons are not made clear until near the end of the book. There is a subplot involving one of the interested parties, the tragic if exotic La Belle, which provides a depth of character lacking in a number of the others. Indeed, it is her past that provides the only real fraught conflict.

Ed Cruse is likeable – as are all his first-person protagonists; though I suspect he could be a danger on the roads: he drinks and drives! He had two Bloody Marys and then had a coffee and a couple of large brandies and drove through London in his Jag... (pp138-139)!

I’ve read and enjoyed several books by Innes and found this showed his strengths in putting the reader in the story with believable descriptions. Yet, sadly, it lacked something and I felt the ending was rushed.

If this is your first introduction to Innes and you found it unsatisfactory, do try some of his earlier novels before forsaking his work; you will be rewarded.