Caravan to Vacarres

the ultimate guilty pleasure!

First about the book, then some fun trivia about Alistair Maclean!!

This supple, muscular, hilarious and heart-stopping thriller is my favorite Alistair Maclean.  Considering  that Maclean's oeuvre consists of the likes of Where Eagles Dare,  Guns of Navarone,  HMS Ulysses et al,  it's saying a lot. And what a riot I had re-reading it after, I think, twenty years. And I was again in thrall of the writer's  consummate mastery over language and plot.

I grew up with Alistair Maclean's books and those of Desmond Bagley, Arthur Hailey, Irving Wallace, Harold Robbins - till I discovered the Hardy's, Fitzgerald's, Cronin's, Proust's,  Mausappant's and the like. But Alistair Maclean has always been a bridge for me - the guilty pleasure, which still enabled pencil markings under consummate writing.

And Caravan to Vacarres is ultra-special - the way Kill Bill will be, however great a film Tarantino might have or might  make or Mad Max: Fury Road would be, however incredible all road thrillers might be. 

First and foremost the atmospherics of the book. Set in the starkly beautiful and menacing Provence area of France, it evokes the romance and fascination and foreboding related to gypsies. The plot follows them as they travel deep into the region - and all kinds of utterly fascinating encounters take place. Violence is embedded in the story but it is the characterisation of the protagonists and the conversations, which take it to another level.  The mordant humor of Neil Bowman, the hero, who calls himself an idle layabout, as he goes about poking his nose into the affairs of the gypsies with some pretty dire consequences, or the ducal snobbery of the regal and rotund Le Grand Duc,  whose wealth is only matched by his appetite, will have you chuckling away the night as you simply have to finish this utterly enthralling book in one hungry bite!

The set pieces - the chase into the craggy heights of the Alpilles; the fight inside a caravan as it ends being clinically wrecked into smithereens; the absolutely heart-thudding encounter in the callajon, the bull ring, with an Andalusian monster from Spain, whose horns have been sharpened to make it a killing machine, where our hero has to become a toreador to survive. Oh the riches abound.

The heroes are tough, the girls are pretty and pretty tough themselves, you learn about gypsies and things you shouldn't do with them, and an intimate guide into the  must-visit and never-visit areas in Provencal France. What else can a simple pleasure-seeking, lotus-eating reader ever want?

Alistair Maclean 's books always resonate with one dialogue in this book, when Duc is about to walk into a situation he has nothing to do with, in front of his perplexed girlfriend -

"But you can't just barge in -"

"Nonsense. I am the Duc de Croytor.  Besides, I never barge. I always make an entrance."

You could say that for all the books of the redoubtable Alistair Maclean.

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Did you know? (I didn’t, till today!)

• MacLean wrote very fast (35 days for a novel) because he disliked writing and the "sooner he finished, the better."

• He never reread a book after it was finished.

• His novels were notable for their lack of sex. "I like girls", he said. "I just don't write them well. Everyone knows that men and women make love, laddie – there is no need to show it."

• Where Eagles Dare was first written as a screenplay, and then only converted into a novel! And both the film and the book were massive hits!

• Maclean once said, "I'm a storyteller, that's all. There's no art in it, no mystique. It's a job like any other. The secret, if there is one, is speed. That's why there's so little sex in my books – it holds up the action." He said he enjoyed the plotting "but the rest is a pain."

• MacLean died of heart failure at the age of 64 in Munich on 2 February 1987; his last years were affected by alcoholism. According to one obituary, "A master of nail-chewing suspense, MacLean met an appropriately mysterious death; when he died in the Bavarian capital after a brief illness, no one, including the British Embassy, knew what he was doing there."

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Here are other books I have talked about!! Dive in, because these are gems too!

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I take out The Uncuts for the sheer delight of creation - and the hope that it gives you both pleasure and pause. It’s free, but not cheap. And all I ask of you is - do share it with someone who you feel would enjoy it!