Book Review — Michael Crichton’s “The Great Train Robbery”
Today I finished reading one of Michael Crichton‘s earlier works, The Great Train Robbery.
The Great Train Robbery takes readers back to the 1855 during the Victoria-era in London, England. As you’ll experience in the novel, from child labor to the treatment of women, times were quite a bit different during that age of steam power and the Second Industrial Revolution.
The Great Train Robbery revolves around a simple concept: a professional burglar wants to pull off a big heist (known as a “pull”).
The motive: Greed.
The target: A shipment of gold being transported on the South Eastern Railway.
Set in 1855, The Great Train Robbery is a fictionalized though mostly true telling of the infamous Great Gold Robbery of 1855. The novel takes place in London, and the majority of the story deals with the planning of the heist, specifically, gaining copies of keys for the safes’ locks. Key characters have to be recruited, though at least one of them ultimately finds himself as being expendable and disposed of in a brutal method.
As a whole, The Great Train Robbery is a clever novel, much of what one would expect from Michael Crichton. The scenarios are plausible, the setting is very detailed, and a few twists and turns keep you guessing as to how exactly the story will end. This is a novel that has you cheering for the anti-hero as he carries out his plan of robbing the government, only unlike Robin Hood, Edward Pierce plans on keeping his desired treasure and not distributing it to the poor.
You do need to pay attention to some of the details in The Great Train Robbery, and some of the English vernacular of that time period (actually, also in modern England for that matter 😉 ) can be difficult for us Americans to understand. English literature was never one of my better classes in school. Despite the minor terminology issues, The Great Train Robbery is still a fun story to read and predict the outcome during each twist in the story.
On a side note, The Great Train Robbery should be required reading for those people interested in reading and writing steampunk literature. The theming and attention to detail of 1850s, Victorian-era London presented here is a valuable resource for steampunk fans and Victorian fans alike.
In the meantime, will Edward Pierce pull off the biggest and most daring gold heist during that time period? Can he elude the police and avoid capture?