Book review: “Ice Station Zebra” by Alistair MacLean

The American nuclear-powered submarine USS Dolphin and her crew have an awful lot of bad luck on a trip under the ice cap to save the survivors of a devastating fire at a British weather station — Drift Ice Station Zebra — near the North Pole.

A broken radio, a broken machine for determining the thickness of the ice, even a broken ankle during a near-suicide mission across the ice floes to find the station are among the misfortunes that must be faced in Alistair MacLean’s taut and compelling 1963 novel Ice Station Zebra.

At one point, two of the three of the doctors on board the sub are knocked out of commission — Benson, the resident medical doctor, falls while climbing up a rope along the icy side of the surfaced sub and is left deep in a coma.  Neil Carpenter, the British expert on frostbite and other artic medical conditions, suffers a badly broken right wrist when a 150-pound hatch swings down on him unexpectedly.

Thank heaven for Doctor Jolly, one of the eighteen survivors who have been brought on board the Dolphin for a trip home.

When even more bad luck occurs in the form of a seemingly catastrophic fire in a hard-to-reach corner of the sub, Jolly rises to the occasion.

Every dark hour brings forth its man, and there was no doubt in the minds of the crew of the Dolphin that that dark night had produced its own hero: Dr. Jolly…

We eventually lost count of the number of trips he made down there [in the thick smoke] that night.  Fifteen at least, perhaps many more…Jolly never failed to answer a call, not even after the time he’d given his own head a pretty nasty crack.

But there’s a problem.

Jolly isn’t only a hero; he’s also one of six survivors who are suspects as well.

 

“Death’s dreadful conception”

Ice Station Zebra starts as a thriller.

It’s about the efforts of many nations to rescue the meteorologists stranded on the ice by the fire at their station.  The opposition is the weather, the ice and the cold, and MacLean is downright eloquent about the strange and threatening places the sub finds itself.

At one point, Carpenter, the narrator of the novel, is standing watch, and, as he looks out over the ice, he thinks:

This ­­— death’s dreadful conception of a dreadful world — must have been what had chilled the hearts and souls of our far-off Nordic ancestors when life’s last tide slowly ebbed and they had tortured their failing minds with fearful imaginings of a bleak and bitter hell of eternal cold…

It was a landscape — if such a bleak, barren, and featureless desolation could be called a landscape — from another and ancient world, weird and strange and oddly frightening….

The ridged and hummocked ice cap had a strange quality of elusiveness, of impermanence, of evanescence: one moment there, definitely hard and harsh and repellent in its coldly contrasting blacks and whites; the next, ghost-like, blurring, coalescing and finally vanishing like a shimmering mirage fading and dying in some icebound desert.

 

Mystery

Then, the novel becomes a murder mystery.

It turns out that the fire wasn’t an accident; it was set.  And four of the victims of the initial incident weren’t killed by smoke or fire; they were shot or stabbed or had their necks broken.

It turns out the weather station wasn’t just a weather station, but also an advance listening post to track moves by the Soviet military, including any preparations for a nuclear attack.  And it turns out that some of the people working at the station were spies, not for a nation, but for a criminal organization gathering information to sell to the highest bidder.

And it turns out that Carpenter isn’t only a doctor; he’s also a high-level British agent who is trying to figure out if secrets have been lost and who is responsible for the fire and the murders.

And there are six men who were at the station who might have been involved.  And Jolly is one of them.

Could the hero be a rat?

 

On many levels

Ice Station Zebra works well on many levels.  Early on, it’s the sort of techno-novel that, later, Tom Clancy would specialize in, as MacLean describes the amazing equipment and technology on the fictional nuclear-powered Dolphin.

It’s an adventure story — first, as the sub tries to find the station and, then, as Carpenter and three American sailors try to walk across the ice in hopes of stumbling on it. MacLean is something of a poet of the ice as the earlier quotation shows.

And it’s a murder mystery that goes one step beyond a closed room — it features a closed-up, sealed-up sub under the ice and under the water with a killer loose and sabotage happening and nowhere to hide.

Written more than half a century ago, Ice Station Zebra still snaps with tension and pulls the reader along until, at a meeting with all the suspects, the mystery is solved.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

11.28.24