We salivated with anticipation when we heard about this book........we gobbled it up the day it came out........
What a great idea........a rabid fan, just like us, of the grandly over-the-top 1969 Alistair MacLaean World War 2 adventure movie, riffing on the movie.........(where Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood sneak into a castle and machine gun half the German Army.....)
What a downer. What a disappointment. Nowhere near as much fun as we dreamed it'd be.....
Dyer details the entire 2 and a half hour movie from first to last scene........but he writes like a drunken college professor as much in love with his convoluted, impossible to read prose as he is with his booze.......
Yes, there's some amount of humor and wit hiding in here, but you've got to dig through his impenetrable sentences to find it........
By the time we worked our way through his piles of arcane references and writing that drifted aimlessly around in random directions, we could barely laugh if we came across a laughable moment..........
We did smile as he bounced across all the stuff we love in the movie.........like the German General arriving in a helicopter that wasn't in use until after the war.......("flying in from the future....")
But 98 per cent's of the book's a tiresome slog.......garbled verbiage from an academic having a love affair with his cleverness and degrees in literature.
So sorry to give this only 1 & 1/2 stars (* 1/2) when we ached to love it. Watch the movie instead and do your own commentary......
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