Indiana Jones and the Aussie Crusade! (Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly)

Member Name: marandina

Product:	Seven Ancient Wonders - Matthew Reilly
Date:	03/10/06 (208 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Rapid fire style, all very Boy's Own

Disadvantages: Not the best writing style

Boy's Own adventures of varying description are very much in vogue at the moment. With the global phenomenon that is "The Da Vinci Code", it's hard not to be swallowed up by the insatiable desire for labyrinthine subterfuge and world-wide intrigue. Not that I've read the aforementioned book by Dan Brown but "Seven Ancient Wonders" by Matthew Reilly did catch me eye recently. I'm not sure whether it was the exotic book cover featuring an artistic pyramid with an all-seeing eye within or whether it was the synopsis that proclaimed about ancient secrets being unlocked and adventures beginning. Whatever it was, I decided to delve into the world of the Australian writer to see why he had managed to break into the top 20 bestsellers.

"Seven Ancient Wonders" is the story of the fictional pursuit of the Golden Capstone of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Broken into seven separate pieces and hidden amongst the Seven Ancient Wonders of the world many centuries ago by Alexander the Great, three teams from the United States, Europe and a smaller conglomerate of nations including Ireland, New Zealand, Canada, Australia and three other smaller countries are head to head in a deadly race to find the pieces and bring them together once more. Riding on this challenge is the prospect of performing an ancient ceremony at the top of the Giza pyramid at the time of the Tartarus Rotation on March 20th 2006. The Tartarus or sunspot will invoke a great power upon the nation performing the ritualistic ceremony at precisely the right time, granting them absolute power for a thousand years and more.

The story revolves around Max West, an Australian ex-SAS soldier who leads a team of hardened, modern-day militia from the smaller nations. Together with Lily, one of two twins born as Oracles, they must either obtain the missing pieces and/or decipher the ancient Callimachus Text - a compendium of writings spanning over 1,500 years that tracked the course of the capstones - to locate the seven wonders and unravel the words required for the ancient ceremony. Reilly turns the tough guy world of hardened call signs for the team members upside by allowing them to be renamed by the innocent Lily with names like Pooh Bear and Wizard and it's a mix of Indiana Jones and semtex that defines the story as the team lurch from one mission to another in a race against time.

When I first started to read this book I did wonder what I'd let myself in for. Short, sharp sentences punctuated by exclamatory description left me reeling from the brevity of it all. It was as though the writer had decided to eschew fuller, correct sentences in favour of a broken skip full of short statements made for effect. With a tendency to avoid anything approaching elaborate, it was the intellectual equivalent of reading a tabloid newspaper rather than anything more discerning. However, having got over the initial impact of Reilly's style, I did get into the story and the characters at the heart of it. The book is written in real time with events starting just six days before Tartarus and the chapters are headed up chronologically to herald an almost "24" like countdown to the finale. There's a brief diversion to show how a mission to Uganda in 1996 resulted in the rescue of Lily the Oracle and other, further departures to explain to the reader about the meeting of the smaller nations in Ireland in 1996 that established the strategy of the smaller nations as well as a reverie of Lily's upbringing in Kenya. The bulk of the book is unequivocally action based igniting the explosive nature of trying to find the elusive capstones.

What Reilly does well is to bring to life the real time nature of the missions. With a penchant for staccato-like description, at times the story reads more like a comic book than a paperback work of fiction. Complete with diagrams and labels, the author takes the opportunity to bring the action to life in the reader's imagination utilising his own vivid yet technically detailed imagining of what the Seven Wonders would probably look like today. So it is that the reader gets to see the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes and the other great wonders, at least in their mind's eye as a mix of historical treasure hunt and conspiracy theory reeling in the Catholic Church with a more ancient religion brings the story to a boil. Reilly also manages to create an affinity between the reader and the main characters, more through the childlike charms of Lily than anything else. There's a tension that's tangible between the leader of the US Marines in Colonel Judah and West who have worked together before and the probability of a mole in the team simply adds to the degree of difficulty in overcoming the Americans as well as bringing the determined Europeans to heel. Funnily enough, I actually enjoyed the acknowledgements at the end more than the actual story. With an insight into the thought processes behind the writing of the book as well as the influencing factors, the ten or so pages made interesting reading as well as speculating over the future of some of the book's heroes.

Where the book doesn't work so well is the basic nature of the writing at times as well as the superficial quality of the characters in the story. Despite the background given, there's never really any depth to the protagonists and the whole escapade is more of a harem scarem nature than anything more meaningful. Whether this is in anyway connected with the author's background of writing his first two novels at the University of South Wales is anybody's guess (why is it that so many potential lawyers end up as writers at university?) although the action-centred nature of his literary material has led to work writing television series, screenplays and other books that have been published. Maybe more of a first-person approach using Max West as the story-teller instead may have given the story a different dimension but the plot is told in the third person and maybe it's this along with the insubstantial writing style that leaves the book wanting.

Still, if you like your books filled with adventure operating at break neck speed with spectacular violence and military tough guys then this will be for you. There is a big nod to both Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" and the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" movies by the author and it's somewhere in the midst of that adventure yarn genre that this book operates. If you like more elaborate, classical writing with depth then steer well clear!

Thanks for reading

Mara

ISBN 0-330-41657-5
Published by Pan MacMillan [www.panmacmillan.com]
I paid £3.79 from Tesco for the paperback. The book is available at Amazon for £3.99
PP: 523

Summary: Overview of Seven Ancient Wonders