"He bit on his cigar and summed up with a six-word sentence that made up in conciseness what it lacked in finesse: “Those bastards are up to something.”"

This is a very good Follett indeed. Obviously, I can't say with any degree of certainty what would happen if a gargantuan iceberg decided to start rolling its way through the ocean, but for your average lay person this is quite an interesting premise to read about. It's at the eighteenth chapter, I think, we start to get a glimpse of our characters spunk and pluckiness; the escape from the doomed cruise liner is thrilling.

Then again, it's also interesting how my sympathies lay with Oaf, as the doer of the team; until Sherwood, our wining Welsh geologist, actually starts making himself useful and does more than mess things up for everyone else. This story has it all: tension between the characters, humour where appropriate, but a very real threat to many people which is thought-provoking and intelligently written about.