Sat 16 Jul 2022
Reviewed by David Vineyard: PAUL STANTON – Village of Stars.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[5] Comments
PAUL STANTON – Village of Stars. M. S. Mill/William MOrrow, hardcover, 1960; Permabooks M4230, paperback, 1962.
Nothing so defined the 1950’s and the early 1960’s as the novel of nuclear terror. Some were science fictional post apocalyptic novels like Philip Wylie’s Triumph and Pat Frank’s Alas Babylon, while others were strictly thrillers like Ian Fleming’s Thunderball and Wylie’s (again) The Smuggled Atom Bomb. There were tense warnings of the dangers of nuclear brinksmanship like Eugene Burdick’s Fail Safe and Peter George’s Red Alert (which became the black humor of Dr. Strangelove) and frightening tales of that brinksmanship gone too far like Nevil Shute’s On The Beach.
Village of Stars was probably the first one of these book I ever read at age twelve. The man behind the pseudonym Paul Stanton was David Beaty, a fine British aviation novelist in the Nevil Shute/Elleston Trevor tradition who was best known for Cone of Silence.
The set up for the novel is fairly simple, and riveting.
There is a crisis in the Middle East, it is getting hotter by the hour. Russian troops are on the move and the West is taking note. Sabers are rattling.
Helen Durrant is the personal assistant to Air Marshal Chatterton when she meets Squadron Leader John Falkner. The chemistry is almost immediate, and like people living on the edge in any place in the world things move pretty quickly. At the same time things are moving quickly in the Middle East.
The gesture was more formal, more possessive than a kiss. And the sense of having moved irrevocably to some unknown destination returned.
Our main characters set and the milieu of impending nuclear war there to ratchet up tension it is inevitable that Falkner will be sent on a mission to the hot spot, that while he is on patrol the tension comes to the boiling point. So much so that Falkner has to take a step he has never taken before.
One of his nukes, F6, is armed. F6 is capable of destroying a 40,000 square mile area. And for a few tense moments the world sits on the edge of the razor. Then the order comes.
The Russians have withdrawn. They are pulling back.
Falkner and crew can breathe a sigh or relief.
The fuse can be disarmed. But you can’t always put the djinn back in the bottle.
K6, the nuke, will not defuse. There is no way for Falkner and his crew to defuse the bomb.
They are near the limit of their flight path, fuel is getting low. There is no place on Earth they can reach and safely dump the nuke, and if the ship drops beneath 5,500 feet the nuke will detonate. If they crash into a mountain above 5,500 feet the nuke will detonate.
There is one chance in the Arctic Sea, but when they reach that spot there are ships from the Russian fleet there. Dropping K6 or even ditching would trigger WWIII.
What now? As they fly over Greenland Falkner wonders what if he just dumped the nuke in the ocean, saved the life of his crew and took the consequences. Who could really blame him?
There is one last chance if they have enough fuel, a landing field at Nairobi at 5,700 feet. Awfully close, but still, a chance, with two hundred feet to spare…
He had an areodrome to land at – that was enough for him.
The hero chooses not to think about it, but Stanton is perfectly happy to let us sweat it out. There is a streak of sadism in good suspense writers that has never been sufficiently explored.
Village of Stars is a heavy breather, a well written two-fists on the wheel read, that builds up, in its relatively short length, considerable suspense. It is tightly written, and would not work half as well as a bloated best seller. Stanton/Beaty keeps the story moving, switching between characters and settings, avoiding the tiresome soap opera of most bigger books to focus on the immediate problem and danger, which in this case is more than enough.
By the time you reach the end, even if it is all a little dated today, you may want a hug and a drink like John Falkner. It’s still a hell of a ride.
July 16th, 2022 at 4:22 pm
The novel of nuclear terror and its effect was similar too but not nearly as all-encompassing as the world of Covid terror. I have been indifferent to both.
July 16th, 2022 at 5:40 pm
Barry,
COVID terror might be more omnipresent at present, but it’s hard to imagine an exciting COVID novel. The thing with nukes is they fit the Armageddon archetype.
July 16th, 2022 at 9:34 pm
I’ve no issue with your take, similar to mine but I was thinking of the long sanctimonious facial expressions and somber voices of low-class morons employed by either the media or various levels of government. Worse than defining or defending their own definitions of gender.
July 16th, 2022 at 10:25 pm
Minus the nuke this was the plot of a made for television movie written by Rod Serling (THE DOOMSDAY FLIGHT 1966) with a bomb on a commercial airliner that will go off if the plane tries to land at a lower altitude, so their only hope is Denver Int..
This one held up well, since the basic story isn’t all that tied up in contemporary politics. With variations you can imagine a similar situation today.
I’m not sure what the first book was to use the nuclear terror theme other than some SF stories well before the bomb that predicted it, in films it was likely SEVEN DAYS TO NOON (1950) about a scientist threatening to set off a suitcase nuke in London, followed by THE 49th MAN (1953) with John Ireland as an American agent trying to stop a Soviet plot, beating Sam Fuller’s HELL AND HIGH WATER by a year and the Japanese film I LIVE IN FEAR by two years. Hitchcock’s NOTORIOUS stumbled onto the nuclear theme but dealt with uranium and not an actual bomb.
For some time after that more thrillers concentrated on the secrets of building the bomb than the bomb itself (Pat Frank’s FORBIDDEN AREA done live on television with Charlton Heston, ATOMIC CITY). Even 1951’s THE WHIP HAND deals with biological warfare and not nukes.
At the height of the Cold War it was ubiquitous and certainly after the Cuban Crisis. I can recall at least one Manning Coles Tommy Hambeldon novel from 1958 with a nuclear weapon in South America that Coles manages to let go off in the jungle, something most writers never figured out how to do without Armageddon following, perhaps why people are still arguing over the ending of Robert Aldrich’s KISS ME DEADLY.
For some reason the trope showed up more often in the slicks than in the remaining pulps, paperback originals, and digests that followed.
After DR. STRANGELOVE it seemed to be used as often for satire as thrills (THE DAY THE FISH CAME OUT).
In one way it worked against some of the rules of suspense since stopping the bomb was anti-climactic while letting it go off was often impossible. That is still an unsolved problem for thriller writers today.
Reality may make it difficult, but thriller writers would like to have it both ways.
September 13th, 2022 at 6:48 pm
Too easy to think these types of “on the edge of a nuclear holocost†novels are passé in this day but along comes a megalomaniac like Putin and “boom†we are reminded the Cold War isn’t gone,just a bit frozen waiting to be thawed out. These types of novels are enjoyable,if that word can be used as they are ironic and good irony is never a miss.Too bad they are not easily rediscovered.Alas Babylon!