Indiana Jones and the White Witch

So onto the White Witch and if you’ve read my piece on the Sky Pirates, you’ll perhaps appreciate the frame of mind I had, going into this one. Opening the second of Martin Caidin’s two novels in the range, I knew he was, a) capable of writing utter drivel in lieu of something that resembled an Indiana Jones adventure but, b) surely he couldn’t possibly write something as bad as Sky Pirates again… could he?

Well, as soon as the book opened, we were back in another bloody aircraft. For heaven’s sake, after filling his first novel full of incredibly detailed aviation information, we’re back in a cockpit… again.

There’s a carryover idea from the previous novel that Indiana Jones is intensely interested in becoming a pilot. So, Caidin places him in a plane, training over the green fields of England with the Gale Parker character from the previous story acting as his instructor. This idea goes absolutely nowhere, however, as Indy doesn’t do any further training for the rest of the novel, nor does the idea that he has some piloting skill come back – ‘Chekhov’s Gun’ style – later in the story. It’s just there because… aviation!

Then, while you’re still shaking your head at Caidin’s need to shoehorn his personal obsession into these two novels (when I’d reckon the audience doesn’t really want to know any of this stuff – particularly in such detail), things start to get weird. From their place high in the sky, Indy and Gale see a battle taking place. Guns, explosions, the whole nine yards. This feels very odd for a quiet forest in England of the 1930s. As much as it piques your interest – sort of – to know how a battle like this could be happening, and who would be behind such a thing, it seems so unlikely I couldn’t quite engage with it properly.

But that’s only the start of the weirdness. Back on the ground, we learn that the attack has been perpetrated against Gale’s ‘people’ who live in the forest so, along with Indy, she makes for ‘home’. This is where Gale is suddenly dialled up to 11 in terms of being a witch and possessing magical powers.

I don’t recall this aspect of her character in the previous novel at all. If it was there, it must have been very slight and, or maybe I just blocked it out for being silly. Thus it’s very jarring that she’s suddenly ‘Super Witch’ in this novel. She guides Indy to drive down secret roads – which can only be seen through magic – and at one stage even freezes water to ice so he can drive over a river. Yes, you read that correctly. Is this sounding like an Indiana Jones story to you? I was rolling my eyes the whole time.

In these scenes, Gale also vacillates between being giddy at showing Indy that such magical things exist, and being completely traumatised by the attack on her people and needing to get to them. The way her character acts so differently from paragraph to paragraph in these pages is quite bizarre writing.

Over the chapters ahead we learn more about Gale’s people, including that one of them – Caitlin – possesses the sword Caliburn. For those in the know, Caliburn is basically another name for Excalibur. Yes, King Arthur’s sword in myth and legend. Not only does Caitlin wield Excalibur, but she has taken its original scabbard – said to have healing properties – and woven it into her clothing, so that during the attack she received many killing blows but was instantly healed by the scabbard’s magical powers.

This is all before we’ve hit 100 pages of novel, ladies and gentlemen. Caidin presents a world where King Arthur was real, his sword remains in use in the 1930s, a group of witches lives in a forest and can perform real magic, Gale is one of them, and Indy is totally onboard with all of this like it’s just another day at the office. It’s a silly plot, it’s a poorly written Indy character (although poorly written in a different way to the previous novel), and the change in Gale’s character from what I remember of her in the previous novel is just weird. It’s like getting to know a completely new character from scratch.

But on it goes and the inconsistencies continue. The government character, Treadwell, shows up and Indy treats him like some major inconvenience, if not someone he downright dislikes. Yet he was working with him, hand in glove, in the previous novel and seemed really happy about it. Given this novel is following on directly from the previous one, this change in attitude is palpable. Did Caidin just forget how these guys interacted previously? Did something happen ‘off-screen’ that’s not explained?

I talked about language in the previous review and Indy still talks in places – and even thinks – with a distinct British style of speech, which seems very out of place. I still don’t know where this is coming from given Caidin is American. Maybe he’s trying to write how he thinks people spoke in the 1930s and it just comes out ‘British’? I don’t know. But it’s weird, and there’s many lines where I think, “Indiana Jones WOULD NOT say that…” Frankly, there’s no faster way to pull someone out of a story than this.

By about the halfway point I decided that while his dialogue might be all kinds of terrible for our hero, Caidin at least had a better grip on the Indiana Jones character – from a motivation standpoint – than the previous novel. The Indy in this novel is more interested in history and mysteries than being the genius mastermind of a crack team of government operatives – something that was so incredibly out of character in the previous story. That said, it’s an intense interest in the American Civil War that springs out of nowhere, not ancient history or its languages, which motivates him, but you can’t have it all.

And on it goes. The basic premise of the novel becoming that Caitlin wants revenge on the man who attacked her forest home to steal a map that leads to treasure lost during the ACW while Indy (along with Gale and some government assistance), wants to help her find the man – and the treasure.

I mentioned earlier that Indy’s desire to be a pilot stops being a thing in this novel and that’s true, but Caidin still levers in more aviation. To get home to America, where the final section of the story needs to take place on an ACW battlefield, Indy and Gale take the Graf Zeppelin. And here we go again, Caidin’s doing his whole I’m-obsessed-with-aviation-and-dammit-you-should-be-too routine. He has Gale and Indy request a tour of the Zeppelin, which allows a character to tell them fact after fact after fact about the airship. Within a chapter or two they have a second tour, twice as pointless as the first, so Caidin can spew a whole bunch more facts about the zeppelin. You just have to push through and keep reading.

Fortunately, by this stage, the novel’s into its last hundred pages and there’s an action scene that happens in the superstructure of the zeppelin that actually feels quite exciting and my reading pace picked up a little. It highlights that Caidin can write decently – he just doesn’t write what I would call ‘good Indiana Jones’ across his two novels and his overwhelming obsession with aviation doesn’t help.

The action scene on the zeppelin sadly proved to be the high point of story, however, as once Indy, Gale, and Caitlin are in the US – and specifically at the site of the Battle of Olustee (fought in Baker County, Florida), the story goes quite silly again. Gale and Caitlin are back to their magical best and then Indy himself ‘conjures’ up something that seems like he’s discovered time travel long before Dial of Destiny.

While Indy’s stunt does have you guessing – I can’t lie about that – the explanation is so contrived, I wished Indy had used actual magic instead. I’m trying to be spoiler-free here as it’s the denouement of the novel, so I’ll just say that when you consider the logistics of what happens and how the party saw ZERO indication of this ‘situation’ when they arrived in town, or travelled to the battlefield, it’s basically impossible to believe it could just come out of nowhere. It thinks it’s being clever, but it’s really weak.

All told, I’d suggest this novel is slightly easier to read than Caidin’s first effort – but only slightly. Many of the same annoyances are in place as you’ve hopefully taken away from this review and he manages to bog down what’s really an incredibly simple plot into something that’s still a slog to read. It’s perhaps a measure of how bloody awful Sky Pirates is, that this book is still better. But only marginally! 4.5/10