Sep 19, 2009 03:09 PM
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THE GUNS OF NAVARONE by ALISTER MACLEAN (1957 Novel)
If you are a fiction lover than this must be already in your Library Collection. If not aware then please go and grab it today. Once started reading you will not wink your eyes and make your own record of reading the longest hours.
Yes we have a movie made on this book also which won an Oscar Award and was nominated in more than a dozen of other International Film Competitions. I was in eighth standard when I went carzy about fictions and author Alister MacLean is still my favourite.
STORYLINE:
Two powerful German guns control the seas past the Greek island of Navarone making the evacuation of endangered British troops on a neighboring island impossible. Air attack is useless so a team of six Allied and Greek soldiers is put ashore to meet up with partisans to try and dynamite the guns. The mission is perilous enough anyway but are the Germans on the island getting further help too?
With the battle of Stalingrad turning the war against them, the Germans are attempting to bully neutral Turkey into joining the Axis; to this end they have trapped 2,000 British soldiers on Kiros, an island in the Aegean, with only one sea route for evacuation, a sea route commanded by two gigantic German antiship batteries deployed in a massive cliffside bunker on the island of Navarone.
Immune to air attack and too much for Allied battleships to suppress, the British muster Keith Mallory, a commando officer who has been working on occupied Crete for nearly two years and who is an expert mountaineer, to ferry a team of British commandos to the only area of Navarone that is not monitored by the Germans, a 400-foot cliff.
Greek resistance is to meet the team inland and guide them around German patrols to the area of the German guns. However, the commanding officer of the British team suffers grave injury in the climb and Mallory must take control of the mission, despite clashes with explosives expert John Anthony Miller, who upon the arrival of the night of the raid finds his equipment has been sabotaged, thus exposing a traitor in the team's ranks.
THE MOVIE:
And if you are a big big Gregory Peck fan the action scenes are impressive even by today's standards but in my opinion they are only a secondary pleasure. The main pleasure is watching the divergent and forceful personalities cooperate, conflict, confound and finally triumph. Suspense is maintained throughout. I also liked the way complex moral issues were addressed.
Happy Reading and Keep Smiling. Please do comment if you are thriled.
