Cussler’s ‘Kahn’ Saturday-afternoon-matinee cool
“Treasure of Khan: A Dirk Pitt Novel”
by Clive Cussler and Dirk Cussler (Putnam, 552 pages, $27.95)
Of all the misleading distinctions on which we routinely insist, the one between high and low culture is among the prissiest.
It’s not that the difference between the two isn’t real. It’s just that making a wall of it denies the plain truth that various appetites can healthily and happily coexist. Dry-aged rib-eye steak is superior to ground beef – unless you’re in the mood for a hamburger.
Clive Cussler’s 31st book, “Treasure of Khan,” is a great big fat juicy cheeseburger of a novel – and, like most thrillers, a bit of a problem for conventional critics.
Books like Cussler’s are intended to gratify not the cultivated, but the uncritical kid still lurking inside so many readers who want a few hours of what they once found so transporting at the Saturday matinees.
How numerous are such readers? Well, “Treasure of Khan” has a first printing of 750,000. Over the years, the 75-year-old Cussler has sold 125 million books in more than 100 countries in 40 different languages.
This novel is the 19th built around marine engineer, adventurer and sometime government agent Dirk Pitt and the second in which Cussler has collaborated with his son, Dirk.
Like the others, this one begins in the historic past – in this case, one of the Mongols’ disastrous attempts to invade Japan.
Once the seeds of future plot twists are leisurely sown, we join our hero in the present, on Siberia’s Lake Baikal, where there’s maritime adventure, a freak wave, a kidnapping and, naturally, a pursuit.
The action proceeds to Mongolia, where the fiendish villain Borjin is plotting to restore Mongol primacy through manipulation of a titanic oil strike.
The oil field is named Temujin – Genghis Khan’s given name – and everything ultimately connects back to the great khan, his grandson Kublai (who twice attempted an amphibious landing on Japan), a treasure, a lost tomb and Xanadu (yes, the one with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “stately pleasure-dome”).
One doesn’t go to a story like this for realistic – or even credible – dialogue. For instance, Dirk and his faithful sidekick, Al Giordino, take refuge in a Buddhist monastery where one of Borjin’s assassins is posing as a monk. When he’s killed and a search of his body turns up a dagger and automatic pistol, there’s this exchange:
” ‘This is not the way of the dharma,’ the lama said with a shock.
” ‘How long has he been at the monastery?’ Pitt asked.
” ‘He arrived just the day before you. He said he hailed from the northern state of Orhon but that he was crossing the Gobi in search of inner tranquility.’
” ‘He’s found it now,’ Giordino said with a smirk.”
Quite a wit, our Al.