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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Shows why Clancy rules,
This review is from: Red Storm Rising (Paperback)
A major superpower, it's economy sent reeling after suffering a catastrophic terrorist attack, goes to war against the rest of the world. Only this is 1987, the terrorists are Azeri nationalists who strike at a major petro-industrial complex, and the superpower is the Soviet Union.Coming soon after "Red October", Clancy delivers a massive follow-up: "World War Three". With the Soviets already reeling from chronic fuel shortages, the attack triggers a collective nervous breakdown among the Soviets' military leadership. Certain that the west will exploit their weakness as soon as it comes to light, the Soviets make a lightning strike in Central-Europe to cripple NATO. Ingeniously coordinated assaults against Iceland and the sea lanes of the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap tip the balance in the Soviets' favor. "Storm" follows the war from the perspectives of those fighting it: a "John Ryan" type analyst; a USAF officer leading a group of marines across occupied Iceland after being driven from their base; commanders of an American ASW frigate; an attack sub skipper; an angry woman fighter pilot who tries to squeeze out as much combat as possible from her non-combat missions; and a skeptical Soviet general who's trying to fight NATO while looking for a way out of the war. Clancy is deft with his touches - he doesn't jump to war but convincingly details the escalation as seen through various characters, and ignores the common technothriller narrative in which the author simply says what's going on. The storytelling is very spare - the political aspects of the war are ignored almost entirely. While the novel offers many exotic weapons (stealth fighters, apparently inspired less by the F-117 - which hadn't even been publicly revealed - than by a stealth-fighter model kit made by Testors the year before) the bulk of the fighting is handled by existing technology (688-class subs rather than Seawolf). The novel excels in the way it limits its story to the perspectives of those populating its several intertwining storylines. The characters aren't that deep, but Clancy wrings the sort of gritty tension that's missing from most technothrillers. As with "Red October", "Storm" shows why Clancy's name was the technothriller benchmark for years - excelling over most lesser authors of the genre. Snarky left-leaning reviewers typified Clancy's work as a neo-con's dream - with do-gooder Yankee types and their noble and effective technology. "Storm" pops that bubble. War here is relentless, gritty and scary. But more than that, "Storm" remains eerily ironic - not simply dated like most technothrillers. For the left, "Storm" is an oddly prescient shocker in which one of the most powerful nations on earth reacts to a devastating blow by going to war with the rest of the world. For right-minded readers, Clancy incorporates the careful optimism of superpower relations in the late 1980's, when anything seemed possible, and when the peace drowned out the specter of nuclear war. Here, war wins out in the end, even as the characters on either side seem dumbfounded by the coming onslaught.
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