Title: Stick with Neville Shute
Review: Brinkley labors to fully charecterize even the most peripherial figures in this novel. I was reminded of a creative writing class in which the assignment is to write 1000 words of description without any action. This excessive, often tedious "adjectivitis" has expanded what should have been a short story to over 500 pages. Additionally, the pictures of the crew that Brinkley paints are one dimensional and unbelievable: all the people on the ship seem to have been among the world's elite in every pre-navy activity, whether it was as a gymnast, jesuit, or ballerina. The random, unexplained plot "twist" at the end may have been Brinkley's attempt to capture a kind of hopeless angst; the meaninglessness of the denoument left this reader annoyed, particularly after having slogged through the aforementioned hyper description. I recommened that readers who seek a novel that reflects cold-war cultural anxiety choose Neville Shute's "On the Beach" instead.
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