Customer Reviews

Red Rabbit (Tom Clancy)

5 star:		(28)
4 star:		(71)
3 star:		(106)
2 star:		(148)
1 star:		(271)

 

 

When I heard that Clancy wrote a book that was set back in the 80's Cold War era again I was hopeful that he could regain some of his earlier writing success. Not that I was hopeful for his well-being, but more that he would start writing books that were as enjoyable as the ones he wrote early in his career (Red Storm Rising, Patriot Games, Hunt for Red October, etc.). If Red Rabbit was an attempt at reliving the early years then he failed miserably.

Red Rabbit focuses on the spy game that was so prevalent during the Cold War 80's between the Soviets and the British/Americans. Attempting to relieve political pressure from the Pope and remind Poland who's boss, the Soviets decide to assassinate the Pope. Having read previous Clancy books I assumed that this was the catalyst and that the plot would promptly fill in around it. That was my first mistake (and possibly Clancy's too). Instead of moving on with the details of the assassination and the West's attempt to prevent it, the story completely switches gears, now attempting to highlight an unremarkable character in KGB agent Oleg Zaitzev that has an attack of conscience and decides to defect with his family and some very sensitive information. On a sidenote, how can Clancy possibily expect the reader to believe in the shear coincidence of Zaitzev arbitrarily choosing a person on the subway to help with his defection because the guy looked like an American, when in fact he's actually chosen the CIA chief of station in Moscow. Lucky guess, right?

My second mistake was assuming that the story would right itself and get back on track with what seemed to be more interesting, the prevention of the assassination. Instead the pace of the books slows considerably while the focus has shifted to the defector. Plans are made by the CIA and SIS to help him defect and then the plan is executed. What's the problem, you ask? We appear to be missing an antagonist. At one point the defecting family is attending a classical concert in Budapest which had been hyped up earlier in the book as though it was going to be a focal point of the story, perhaps even the setting for the climax. Wrong again. The reader gets the impression that a climax is near when the story starts jumping around frequently from Ryan to Zaitzev to the CIA in Washington, etc. Unfortunately, nothing ever comes of this, namely because the KGB isn't chasing Zaitzev, and it makes you wonder why Clancy just wasted 50 pages on this concert. This story suffered from an extremely feeble plot with little or no climax in the end.

Aside from a weak plot, the book has some other major flaws, one of which is new to Clancy, some of which are not. The new one (of which I don't recall this in his earlier novels) is his remarkable redundancies. From vocabulary to concepts, and character quirks to character titles, Clancy seems to forget that he's already used a particular word (i.e. capacious or ignominy) where even the most common word would have worked in its stead (i.e. spacious or disgrace). Then you have his seemingly unending references to Jack Ryan as a former Marine. Ryan reflects on it often himself, but it became just plain overkill when every time the scene shifted to the boys back at the CIA (they were naturally talking about Jack Ryan every time as though the CIA didn't have any more pressing issues) they'd have to justify his position in the CIA by referring to his stint in the Marine Corps (apparently all Marines are fit for the CIA). Okay, we know he was a Marine, now let's try focusing on a plot. Then you've got "Sir John" and "Lady Ryan". The couple, knighted in the novel "Patriot Games", routinely refer to each other by these titles even though they constantly claim to some sort of aversion to them. While addressing Ed Foley, Clancy will arbitrarily refer to him as "Chief of Station, Moscow," in the middle of a paragraph as though you may have forgotten his position. And how many times does he need to reassure us that Cathy Ryan won't have a glass of wine the night before she's due in surgery or that Jack Ryan doesn't like to fly?

By far the largest fault of this book and the reason it will never measure up to his earlier work, is his nonstop bragging about his characters. Where character or plot development could be taking place, Clancy chooses to continue with lengthy descriptions of his characters personal lives and undying love for their spouses, etc. And when I say character development, I don't mean further developing the same old tired characters that he should have retired 15 years ago, I mean he should be introducing new characters. Clancy boasts about his characters throughout the novel as though they were his own children and he's constantly touting their resume as though someone might question the reputations of these fictionally flawless people. His overuse of Jack Ryan has reached a new high in this novel. Throughout the book, the scene was continually switching between the Foleys in Moscow, the CIA in Washington, and the Ryan family in London. After about 350 pages I started to notice that Jack Ryan served no purpose whatsoever, yet Clancy kept including him and his wife as though their input was relevant to something. Eventually you realize that he is going to be used, even though it feels like it is being completely forced in poor literary fashion, just to keep Jack included in the novel. But if his relevance doesn't begin until page 400, then it makes you wonder why Clancy wasted so much text early on. Parental pride? It gives the story a ham-handed predictability that segregates this book from his earlier, successful novels.

I used to enjoy Clancy novels and I had high hopes that Red Rabbit might take on the appearance of his previous spy thrillers, but it is merely a 600+ page attempt at conveying a lackluster story that could have been told in 250 pages and even then would have been mediocre.

Save some time and just read this:

While sleeping the sleep of the just he looked at his wife, the eye cutter, and asked himself, "How many divisions does the Pope have?" which made him realize that little girls give the best hugs. Suddenly he recalled that the KGB had roasted a traitor alive and made a film of it so he decided to buy some Starbucks stock before it was available. Then the Pope didn't get killed.

Now read it again and again and again.

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later - after the disappointing _The Bear and the Dragon_, Clancy has sunk even lower with the bizarrely flawed _Red Rabbit_. Clancy's shortcomings (cardboard characters, unconvincing dialogue, trite political preaching) have always been acceptable in the face of his terrific plotting and edge-of-your-seat action sequences. Not this time. The story moves along at a slow pace, there is little to no action, and Clancy barely even provides conflict. Instead, he annoys the reader with repetitive pap.
Longtime Clancy readers will grow tired of being constantly reminded that Mary Pat Foley is a "cowboy", Caroline Ryan is a "doc", and that the thought of his wife slicing into someone's eyeball gives Jack Ryan the heebie-jeebies. Clancy has also decided that if he is to refer to a psychiatrist as a "shrink" (and he does it quite a lot), he must spell it "pshrink", so we'll know what he means.
The book overflows with anachronisms. Ryan apparently bought Starbucks stock a good eight years before the company was formed, mourned the loss of a football team that hadn't relocated yet, "thought outside the box" long before anybody else did, and coined the phrase, "been there, done that, got the t-shirt". All this in 1982.
I found myself annoyed with the Ryan family while reading this - their interaction seems even more shallow than usual in this book. Apparently, the estimable Dr. Caroline Ryan cannot understand that intelligence officers aren't supposed to discuss their work with their families. She comes off as a little bit silly sometimes - certainly not like a woman who can operate on eyeballs like few else in the world, play a dazzling if somewhat mechanical piano, deal seconds like a Las Vegas cardsharp, and charm heads of state while bringin' home the bacon and fryin' it up in the pan.
The plot revolves around a real historical event - the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul. Of course, we all know how that came out, and Clancy doesn't rewrite history here. Unfortunately he doesn't even make the event very exciting. I don't wish to provide a spoiler. Rest assured that Jack Ryan, in an extremely unlikely denouement, saves the Pope and the day.
I did enjoy parts of this book, particularly the Foley sections (a book about Ed and Mary Pat would be very welcome), and the Russian defector's story. The espionage passages were satisfyingly realistic and provided the only tension in the book.
I am a big Clancy fan, and up until now have eagerly purchased his books as soon as they were released (not those "Op Center" things, just the novels). The last two books have been disappointing enough to make me check the reviews before buying future Clancy offerings. _Red Rabbit_ is by no means a terrible book, it's just that one expects more of Clancy, especially now that he's a well-established author - or is the phrase "firmly entrenched"? I hope not.

It seems more likely to me that he outlined the basic plot and then turned it over to someone else to do the grunt work. In particular, the dialogue and characterization of some key players (very notably Ryan's wife -- who is not even remotely recognizable as the woman in the other books) is stilted and crude compared to Clancy's own writing. Clancy uses profanity in dialogue in a way that makes sense and is that is consistent with the character who is speaking. In this book, the use of profanity is stilted and capricious, almost as if the writer was not a native American English speaker. Finally, one of the hallmarks of every one of Clancy's previous book was his careful attention to technical details in a way that added depth to the storytelling. That is not at all evident in Red Rabbit.

I am a major fan of Clancy's past books, and I have no problem with him making a few extra bucks by "phoning this one in", but I think he did his readers a disservice.

If he did write this himself, it's even more disappointing.

Oh, well.

I quite enjoyed Clancy's previous books and I will no doubt purchase the next one, but I would not recommend Red Rabbit to anyone. First off, Clancy has Jack Ryan talking like a foul mouthed hippie and it is very much out of character for Ryan. Most disappointing, though, is that there is NO suspense. Everything the Americans and Brits plan comes through without a hitch and the Russians are depicted as, if not stupid, then certainly quite naive. Rabbit's wife hardly questions his defection! A very poor effort from Clancy. Seems almost as though this book was written to meet a publisher's deadline rather than to entertain readers.

First of all, I have to say that I am a huge Tom Clancy fan but "Red Rabbit" REALLY put that to the test. I normally love seeing continuing characters inserted into "real" history. C. S. Forrester's Hornblower is a perfect example of how this can be done with hardly a ripple and Tom could learn a lot from him. A better plot would have been to have dropped Mr. Clark into Sophia to try and uncover the plot and then barely fail in an attempt to stop the assassination. But, then, that wouldn't have generated another script treatment for Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan. In fact, I almost could hear the AFLAC spokesduck quacking out "Affleck!" throughout the book. Maybe I'm wrong but...

Anyway, to the book. It's been a long time since I had to force myself to finish a book by an author that I liked but this read was work. Hard work. I, for one, always have found the relationship of Jack and Cathy Ryan to be wooden and stilted but there were always other exciting sub-plots running in the background that eventually drew us mercifully away. Not here. They are like Luci and Desi on Prozac. Several times I caught myself fantasizing about Cathy hitching a ride on the Popemobile and taking one or two for the Pontif. But I digress. I have long ago accepted Clancy's difficulty in showing a believable man-woman relationship just like I have given up on ever seeing John Grisham end a book well. Heavy sigh!

I've run on way too long but here's the book in a nutshell. No real drama or suspense as to the outcome. Too much of Jack and Cathy. No entertaining side issues or sub-plots. Not even any good jingoistic rhetoric. Too big to be so dull. C'mon, Tom!

Clancy has many, many Jack Ryan fans, fans who keep demanding more and more about their favorite character. But Clancy has run into a problem: he has already written Jack into the highest post in the land in previous books, and it is difficult to see how he can continue along his fictional future history and keep expanding Jack's role, much like the problem the writers of Superman comics had when Superman became effectively all powerful. So for this book at least, Clancy has sidestepped the problem by returning us to the days when Jack was just a freshly hired analyst for the CIA. Of course, in this role Jack can't be the prime mover of events, which may disappoint his fans, but at least they get to see a little more of Jack, along with another story of adventure and spy-craft.

This story revolves around a Soviet plot to assassinate the Pope, a story crafted around the real events of 1981 (though Clancy takes some liberties with actual dates and concurrent events). Here again this is something of a departure, as Clancy is effectively updating and changing his future history to match the events of the real world, making this book somewhat inconsistent with earlier books in the series. Whether the shooting of Pope was actually plotted by the Soviets is still a matter of conjecture, but it is certainly plausible as the basis for this story. The action revolves around trying to get Oleg Zaitzev, a KGB communications specialist who has critical information about this plot, and his family out of Russia.

With these basic elements, it should have been easy to craft a taught, exciting thriller. Especially as Clancy has finally dropped his penchant for having page after page of extreme technical detail interrupting the story flow. But this story does not achieve very much in the way of excitement or suspense at all. I found that all the actions by the various people involved were accomplished way too easily, just about everything goes according to plan. Even the ruse to make it appear that Zaitzev has died rather than defected comes off as just another day at the office, even if it is rather gruesome. This may be closer to the real world of the CIA and KGB, but it doesn't provide for a great reading experience.

I also found Zaitzev's attack of conscience, his reason for defecting, just a little too rapid and convenient to be thoroughly convincing. Andropov's portrayed character (at that time head of the KGB) was a little more believable as a pragmatic and coldly calculating man. Jack is still Jack, and Clancy did a good job of returning to the Jack of the eighties, a little unsure of his value to the CIA and his importance in the world, a little more impetuous than he would later become.

At best, this is an average spy novel, with too little suspense to be really absorbing, even if well written. A must for Ryan fans, others can skip this one.

This is the most disappointing work of any author I've read in years. Red Rabbit is an almost complete dedication to the shameless jingoistic bashing of everything Soviet, right down to the physical makeup of the Slavic man and woman. Not only is this work poorly researched (assassination attempt is incorrectly set in plot timing, assuming there's allusion to real-life incidents), it's thoroughly shallow in its depiction of character. Even Ryan, perhaps the least caustic character in the novel has uncharacteristically ugly words. The sign-language Idiots, Inc. spy team of Ed/Mary is completely ridiculous, but that's not wholly surprising as I've never been impressed with the covert worlds in Clancy's literature. There's really only one fiction spymaster - John le Carre.

What happened, Mr. Clancy? Where's the wit, the drama and the maturity we saw in your other works, such as the Red October and Rainbow Six? I'm disappointed. And disgusted. What a waste of time, pen and paper.

I have always been a big Tom Clancy fan and wait with tremendous anticipation the publication of each of his novels. Lately, however, I have grown disenfranchised with Mr. Clancy and have found it harder and harder to get through his books. This book was no exception and I struggled to get through this book, though for different reasons than his last couple of Jack Ryan novels.

Mr. Clancy is a talented action writer and his mastery of the techno-thriller novel has been widely and justly praised. Unfortunately, Mr. Clancy is also a talented researcher and political thinker, and he tends to assume that his audience is equally interested in the minutiae of these subjects. Ever since Red Storm Rising (co-authored with the under appreciated Larry Bond) Mr. Clancy's books have been growing thicker and thicker to the point that one often despairs of the number of trees necessary for just one print run of his books. Regretfully this increase in girth has not always been to the benefit of the story.

Fortunately for his readers, Mr. Clancy is an excellent action writer and his novels are generally filled with enough action or blistering political tension that you are able to digest the odd 50 pages here and there of political or military analysis. Two fine examples of this are The Sum of All Fears and his last offering, the Bear and the Dragon. The Sum Of All Fears offers one of the most suspenseful and thrilling stories he has ever drawn up which covers about 500 of the 798 pages of the book. The rest is filled with the sometimes mind numbing detail of the process of assembling a terrorist nuclear weapon. Similarly, the Bear and the Dragon offers up a fine political suspense drama for about 600 of the 1028 pages of the book. The remainder are filled with long political dissertations on the morals of the political process, party politics and just about anything else President John P. Ryan might care to muse about for 100 pages or so while pondering his next decision.

Ironically, this book is one of Clancy's shortest efforts in many years coming in at just 618 pages (not the 896 pages erroneously reported in the Amazon info section) and does much less delving into the thinking of the President or the minutiae of the technology involved. Unfortunately, the trimming process seems to also have cut deep into the action in the book resulting in lots of interesting information on how a CIA station works and what a defection is like but very little suspense. Indeed, since you know the outcome of the primary plot point before you start reading the book it is difficult to stir up any feelings of excitement even when the action does get going in the last 50 pages or so. This book is very similar to The Cardinal of the Kremlin in that it is almost entirely about the process of espionage and defection, which in the real world frequently have very little action indeed.

I cannot recommend this book as his best, but I will continue to read Mr. Clancy's books because even his bad books are interesting and his good books are wonderful. I would recommend a reread of Without Remorse or Rainbow Six, two of his best more recent works, before investing any time in this one.

I have been a big Tom Clancy fan. Since I first read "Hunt for Red October", I have loved the multiple strong characters and story lines that he blends together to make thrilling, compelling reading.

That said, this book was BORING! The action in this book didn't start until around pg. 500 and wasn't in high gear until pg. 580. By that time, I just wanted to finish. Since I normally read paperbacks, I was even more disappointed by a book that I'd paid so much for.

This book was a lot like "Star Wars 2". You already knew the start (of the "Jack and his friends" saga) and had seen the journey to its conclusion at the White House. Now Mr. Clancy has tried to fill in the blanks about his CIA characters that I really didn't care about. Trying to fit a story around details that have been told many times before doesn't make for easy writing. Mr. Clancy wasn't any more successful that George Lucas.

The only thing positive I can say about this novel is that in carrying it around, I improved my muscle tone.