As strong of a storyteller as Hammond Innes was, he nevertheless had his weaknesses. They're on display in this novel. One of the particular strengths of past Innes' stories has been their flawed protagonists, who may or may not come out the better for their engagement with the elements of nature and humanity. Alec Falls certainly qualifies as a flawed protagonist. Alas, he is more than that. He undertakes one stupid act after another. It's like watching a horror movie. You know there is something evil at the dark at the top of the stairs. But that doesn't stop the hero or heroine from willfully blundering into terror. And they wouldn't listen to you, even if you could tell them. So, too, with Alec, who fails to see he is being made a patsy; who incredibly, at the end, allows himself to be followed into the desert towards the great copper strike; who constantly sleeps as life and death decisions pass him by; who doesn't have the sense to understand the intense rivalries for money that surround him; and who is always letting opportunities get away from him, because he is more interested in swilling beer, gulping tea, and filling his gut with food rather than do without and carry through on a plan. Instead, Alec is someone who trusts to luck. Several times, he is saved from his own death simply by luck, as Innes describes it. A morally flawed hero is interesting. An idiot is not.

Finally, the setting for this book is not as appealing as in other Innes novels, where the exotic seems always at hand. Other books of his have explored the Moroccan desert and given it a sense of magic. Australia is not magical. It is dreary and monotonous, despite the fact that Alec keeps trying to convince us of its desolate beauty. It all comes across as a poor man's version of the American Old West but without the epic scale and grandeur that diverse geography gives the American frontier. For that is what Innes has tried to do, here, write an epic adventure tale. He failed. He was always better at intimate stories among a small group of people, and he simply can't get past that formula in the Golden Soak. About the time he was writing, of course, Michener and Clavell were succeeding in that genre. Perhaps Innes saw an opportunity there. But it was not to be. He was always an adventure writer rooted in the Fifties and Sixties, when he did his best work. ( )