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FIGHT AGAINST ALBATROSS TWO by Colin Thiele

FIGHT AGAINST ALBATROSS TWO

By

Pub Date: April 1st, 1976
Publisher: Harper & Row

From the day the mammoth semi-submersible drilling rig Explorer King arrives at Ripple Bay, South Australia, this novel's final line ""nothing can ever be the same again"" is foreordained. What's really remarkable here is Thiele's translation of an apparently clear-cut ecological moral into the subtleties of family conflict as Tina, just discovering a passion for ornithology in the process of easing her pet fairy penguin, Piglet, back to the wild, finds herself aligned against her fourteen-year-old brother Link, who has signed on the rig for a two week stint as cook's helper. Polarization is inevitable when the drilling runs into trouble and Link is caught up in the oil company's expensive and tricky attempts to contain the leaking gas and seal off the now dangerous well while Tina is occupied with cleaning up birds killed by the accompanying oil spill. Thiele's knowledge of operations on the rig itself gives weight to those sequences and the physical action he narrates so well doesn't impose any facile answers on the problem which looms over the likably undemonstrative residents of Ripple Bay.