Review: Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat

Tom Swift and His Submarine Boat by Victor Appleton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I didn't expect this to be good, but I probably expected it to be better than it was.

A plot driven largely by accident, luck, coincidence, poor planning, the malicious acts of dastardly rivals, and artificial urgency that somehow vanished when there was actually a reason to hurry. Add Brazilians who speak Spanish (unlike real Brazilians, who speak Portuguese), and it's just a whole mass of nonsense.

Here's how it goes down (there are spoilers, if you care). Tom Swift, boy inventor, is helping his father, the "aged" inventor Barton Swift (everyone who's much older than Tom is "aged"), to build a submarine. They intend to enter it for a Government prize of $50,000, but then Tom reads in a newspaper about the wreck of a ship carrying $150,000 worth of gold off the coast of South America. Nobody else can reach this gold, and it's not going anywhere, but for some non-obvious reason it immediately becomes urgent that they rush the sub's development and go and get the gold, abandoning the idea of trying out for the Government prize. Por que no los dos?

Through a Convenient Eavesdrop, Tom learns that another submarine developer who wants to compete for the prize is a bad lot (he's talking to himself aloud while changing a tyre, and Tom overhears by complete coincidence). Through what I suppose I must call an Inconvenient Eavesdrop - inconvenient for Tom, that is - this character learns of the shipwreck, again by complete coincidence, because Tom is blabbing about it to a friend of his, and of course he will also be able to go after it in his submarine.

There now actually is urgency, and they rush the sub into its first trial without preparing any of the emergency mechanisms that they end up needing when a quite predictable fault occurs in this previously untested machine. Tom ("our hero") does one of the few straightforwardly effectual, protagonistic things he does in the entire book and saves everyone.

They get the sub working properly and all the emergency mechanisms installed at last, and head off for South America. The urgency doesn't stop them from deciding to spend a day relaxing on a tropical island they happen to encounter, where their rival also turns up, having unaccountably followed them (sonar doesn't seem to be a thing, and they were underwater most of the time).

They manage to shake off the pursuers, do an emergency surfacing after another system goes wrong (health and safety is not much of a thing either), and find themselves next to a Brazilian warship. The uncivilized Spanish-speaking Brazilians arrest them as saboteurs and are going to shoot them, but by fortunate coincidence a storm blows up and distracts the slipshod Brazilian navy crew enough that the brave Americans can escape. There's a completely uncalled-for dig at the fact that the Brazilians are brown-skinned.

They cruise to the location of the wreck and, after a bit of searching, find it and carry off the gold without a hitch, exiting just as their rivals come on the scene.

I've left out the subplot about Tom's bully, the spoiled son of a wealthy banker, getting his comeuppance (again) in a rather immature prank-for-prank exchange.

The other notable feature for me was that two of the characters had verbal tics, but Tom wasn't one of them - he didn't say or do things adverbially, which disappointed me, because I love a Tom Swifty. Perhaps this only developed later in the series. One of the tics I found amusing: a character who, in practically every sentence, blesses some part of his body or one of his possessions ("bless my boots!"), often in a way that connects to whatever is going on. The other I found annoying: the captain they recruit to help them with the submarine, again almost every time he says something, tacks on a phrase like "if you'll forgive the observation" or "if my saying so doesn't offend you," even when he has expressed the blandest and most obvious opinion. The tics are at least 50% of the characterization of these two men.

Probably OK if you're 12, not very knowledgeable, and have no problem with American exceptionalism. But for me, disappointing.

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