Red Rabbit

Rating:
Summary: A Interesting Tale - Clancy may be a victim of expectations
Review: Tom Clancy is generally regarded as the father of the modern technothriller. Since Red Rabbit is set in 1983, it lacks the gizmos and high tech weapons that readers are used to finding in his books. Some people will be disappointed that the latest in gadgets and toys are missing. However, I found that what is left is actually a fine story.

Red Rabbit stars Jack Ryan as a young intellegence analyst who's begining a post in England. The attack on his family from Patriot Games has already occured but the Red October still lies in the future. Also playing a major role are the Foleys as a young couple begining a tour of duty in Moscow. It comes to the attention of the West that the Russians are planning to carry out an assassination attempt on the Pope, who threatens to undermine the stabitilty of the area.

I found Red Rabbit to be a refreshing departure from the chronological timeline of the Jack Ryan books. Ryan seems to have lost some of his ability to think and act freely as the President, and Clancy has succeeded in restoring some of the more interesting aspects of his character by setting the book at an earlier time. Red Rabbit also gives readers more of a plot than the recent Clancy novels in that the characters and their interactions are not obscured by geopolitical struggles and international battles.

In all, Red Rabbit is a very entertaining story that almost all will enjoy reading. Clancy seems to be writing on his most comfortable subject and it shows. Keep in mind that this book is set in the past - computers and spy technology are all at early '80s levels. If you're looking for a deeply plotted and involving espionage thriller, Red Rabbit will meet that need.

Also recommended - Daniel Silva's Marching Season, Mark of the Assassin, The Kill Artist, and The English Assassin.

Rating:
Summary: Clancy almost back to form
Review: This new title in Clancy's "Jack Ryan" series takes the liberty of going back in time, placing Patriot Games first in the series. This seems to come between Patriot Games and Hunt for Red October. It also sets the stage for Cardinal of the Kremlin and Clear and Present Danger. Clancy brings back Judge Moore and Ryan DDO nemesis Bob Ritter as well as Admiral Greer. Cutter makes no appearances here. CASSIUS from the later books also gets introduced.

This book gets away from the trap that Clancy had fallen into - these long-winded dialogues and descent into puerile humor that characterized Bear and the Dragon. This is not to say that Red Rabbit doesn't drag - it does. but it also gets to the troika that actually defeated Communism: the Gipper and the Iron Lady in the West - and Lech Walesa's Solidarity in the East - a topic that had been lacking previously in Clancy stories.

I'll leave this here with the following compliment. I bought "Red Rabbit" at 2PM yesterday. Couldn't put it down for any more than an hour or two and it is now complete at 3:30 in the following morning. 4 stars!

Rating:
Summary: Clancy keeps getting worse
Review: When I heard that Clancy wrote a book that was set back in the 80's Cold War era again I was more than a little 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 apparently so prevalent during the Cold War 80's between the Soviets and the British and 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.

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, it seems. 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", are routinely referred to by these titles even though they constantly claim to some sort of aversion to them. 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. Well, at the sacrifice of the flow of the book, you start to realize that Ryan is going to be included, 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.

Rating:
Summary: Early Clany writing is apparent
Review: This book takes places as a young Jack Ryan and really explains more on Jack Ryan's wife Cathy. I really liked how clancy put the suspense in this book, but certain parts of this book was a little slow at times, but the ending is great. You will be shocked at the ending of this book.

Rating:
Summary: Slow and boring
Review: I read this book only because I have read all of Clancy's other fiction books. This book was disappointing. It's as if Clancy has realized that in order to keep the franchise going, he has to youthen the character and return to the Cold War. Perhaps Clancy was hoping that this book would be used as the basis for a new Ben Affleck movie. Whatever his intentions, he failed miserably.

The plot is boring and without action. What happened to the military genius that Clancy displayed so many times in his past books? He built a book around a story about a guy who wants to get out of the Soviet Union, and the resolution of that story was anticlimactic.

There were so many things that irritated me about this book. Chiefly the fact that Clancy went out of his way so many times to remind the reader that we were in the 80s. So many references to the events of "Patriot Games". So many references to "I don't like to be called Sir John." So many references to his wife, the eye surgeon, cutting open eyeballs. (If Ryan was 31, Cathy would at most have been a recent graduate of an opthalmology residency/fellowship. Surely not experienced enough to be considered a top notch doctor with all these connections.)

This book was irritating, and I was relieved when I finally finished it.

Rating:
Summary: Worse With Each Page Turned
Review: Half-a-star, but that option doesn't exist.

For anyone who is a fan of the character Jack Ryan, and to a degree Clancy's writing, this book will be an incredible let down. Story is slow and uninteresting, and it doesn't get better. Writing is bad, and unlike Clancy's previous novels. It's as if he didn't write the book. Language is more vulgar and not even necessary for the dialog between characters.

And the references to "Starbucks" feels out of place chronologically. During the setting of the story, Starbucks would have existed of just a few stores in the Northwest. Hard to swallow that Jack Ryan would've have been that addicted to their coffee for so many mentions.

I'll just stick to re-reading Clancy's past greats. Either Red Rabbit was ghost written, or he's lost his gift to pen a worthwhile read.

Rating:
Summary: Worst Tom Clancy novel I ever read
Review: _Red Rabbit_ is the next Tom Clancy novel (after _The Bear and The Dragon_) set in the "Ryanverse," the series of stories centering around Jack Ryan. Next that is in terms of order published; the book is set in 1981 and occurs after the events in _The Hunt for Red October_ and _Patriot Games_ but before _The Cardinal of the Kremlin_. Occurring something like twenty years in the past of the history of Jack Ryan, in this novel Ryan and his family have moved to the United Kingdom in his work for the CIA. During the course of events in the book Ryan becomes involved in a complex plot involving a KGB defector and Pope John Paul II.

Clancy took the real world failed attempt on the Pope's life in 1981 and constructed a story around it. In the book (and in actual history), the Pope wrote and sent a letter to the Soviet Union, threatening to resign his position as Pope and return to his home nation of Poland to fight Soviet oppression there. Soviet leaders - chiefly KGB chief Yuri Andropov - designed an operation to kill the pontiff, dispatching a trusted Bulgarian operative to arrange for another man to kill the Pope (one that could not be traced back to the either the Bulgarians or more importantly the Soviet Union), an operative that would in turn be eliminated himself by the Bulgarians soon after assassinating the Pope so as to further safeguard the originators of the operation (here on out the book is entirely fictional). A communications specialist and cryptographer working for the KGB (by the name of Oleg Zaitzev) is assigned to the task of handling communications between Moscow and the Bulgarians. Horrified by what he learns he is encrypting and sending back and forth between the two parties, Zaitzev decides (without telling his wife and his young daughter) that he has a huge problem with this operation and seeks (rather clumsily) to make contact with the Americans working in Moscow. The man he makes contact with is Ed Foley, the rather recently arrived CIA station chief in Moscow (who along with his fellow agent and wife Mary Pat are main stays of the "Ryanverse," instrumental in many other stories), who helps to arrange under Zaitzev's (now code-named Rabbit) insistence that he be aided in defecting to the West as a "conscience defector" (as opposed to say a defector leaving just for money or some other reward or avoiding some other fate). A long (very long) description of his being smuggled out of the Soviet Union and Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe follows, after which he is brought to the United Kingdom, debriefed, and a mission is launched to act on the information about the planned Papal assassination. As you might guess, the assassination attempt is not exactly foiled - the Pope is shot (and recovers) in this universe as he is in ours - but they do manage to defeat the Bulgarian operative.

Somewhat interestingly, the Americans and British decide they value the Rabbit's knowledge of KGB operations more than the actual information about the planned Papal assassination plot, and go to some pains to fake his death so that the KGB doesn't know he defected, thereby making him even more useful (so that the KGB doesn't know that their communications and operations are being compromised). Ryan, who was involved in getting the Rabbit and his family out of Eastern Europe, has to convince the powers that be that they must undertake some sort of operation to try and save the Pope, even if they aren't allowed to tell the Vatican what they know for fear of losing the advantage of the KGB not knowing that the Rabbit is in fact alive.

There, I just told you the whole plot, saving you the effort of wading through it. This massive volume, over 600 pages long, is very long, very slow moving, not brisk reading by any stretch of the imagination. It seemed like it took forever to get anywhere in the book with the plot; you could see where things were going well before they actually got there, which is fine I suppose if there were twists, surprises, or something you didn't expect. They weren't any twists or surprises. The good guys make plans, the good guys execute plans, the good guy"s plans work. There is no real tension - and I don't mean just from the fact that we all know the Pope does get shot and does survive - as the book just doesn't go anywhere. It just plows ahead, so very slowly. I read this book during my lunch break at work, about twenty to thirty minutes three or four times a week, but the book was so slow, so dull, I would not read it for weeks at a time; it probably took me six months to read this dull tome. Easily the worst Clancy book I have ever read. If this were made into a movie I would not go see it.

I guess I didn't hate the book, it wasn't horribly written, just not terribly exciting. It was just too slow for my tastes. It could have been a lot more concise, thrown in a few twists maybe, I don't know. I thought it might be interesting to learn more about the supporting characters in the Ryan universe - Ed Foley, Mary Pat, Greer, Ritter, Moore - but you don't really learn terribly much about them either (well a little about the Foleys). Some Cold War spy intrigue might have been interesting (as it was in _The Cardinal and The Kremlin_) but the intrigue here wasn't, well, intriguing.

Skip this book. Don't waste your time. Maybe if you were a diehard fan of Jack Ryan and wanted to be able to say you read all of the novels about him, I guess it might be worth your time. I recommend instead one either try his earlier works or try the excellent novels of James W. Huston.


Rating:
Summary: A different kind of Clancy, but still a good read.
Review: The people flaming the book make some good points and some bad ones. The idea from many that they just can't believe Jack Ryan's luck or that the book is unrealistic is laughable! If "realism" is the gold standard, then I would be hard pressed to name a SINGLE book in the Jack Ryan series that comes close to that standard. The truth is that CIA operatives and analysts don't encounter one tenth of the excitement and intrigue in their entire careers that you will find in any TWO Ryanverse novels.

Tom Clancy did a couple of interesting things in this book. First, only one person is killed in the entire book - an anomaly for a Clancy novel - and he isn't killed until the last page of the book. That must have been tough to do, and it had to be a conscious effort on Clancy's part. I couldn't even count the number of people who died in "Executive Orders," so that is refreshing.

Second, how can people complain that everything in the book was too easy? They are trying to stop the asassination of the Pope and ended up having nothing to do with the outcome of the asassination! They failed to stop the shooting, but the Pope lived anyway. Sounds pretty realistic to me!

I could argue all day about whether this was a good book or not, but won't. If you want realism, don't read ANY Jack Ryan novel. Read Clancy's non-fiction books like "Shadow Warriors" - also an interesting book.

The Ryanverse novels are referred to as "fiction" for a reason. They're complete fantasy, sprinkled with realistic touches.

By the way, someone did predict the collapse of the Japanese economy quite publicly in the 1980's. His name was Harry S. Dent, and I remember him predicting that the balloon would burst in the mid to late 80's. He was spot on, except that Japan didn't burst overnight, but rather deflated rapidly over a period of a couple years.

Rating:
Summary: Red Roost
Review: Wow, the intensity, the techo thriller and the interesting plot are gone. I found this a bit to boring and predictable. Although interesting, it could have been told in 50 pages or less. I do not think I can handle another Clancy book, and I used to be a big fan. The creative juices from Clancy are gone like a burnt out rock star. Time for him to retire and read other's great novels.

Rating:
Summary: Contrived - At Best
Review: Clancy took us through the career of Jack Ryan - for unwitting hero in Patriot Games to the accidental President and beyond. Red Rabbit offers us a look at the early career of Jack Ryan as a CIA intelligence offer in light of history - and a look at some of the major players in the Clancy novels.

The plot centers around an attempt to kill a polish priest - actually, the Pope - who threatens to resign and rejoin his people in the wake of solidarity. Jack Ryan, who only 5 months earlier jointed the CIA is put into a British post. Ed and Mary Pat Foley, new station chiefs in Moscow have their first coup - a "rabbit" = in thie case a KGB cypher clerk who knows about the plot against the Pope and is willing to trade what he knows for the West for himself and his wife and child.

Where the novel falls down is in realism. Jack Ryan, despite being an honorary knight (Patriot Games) would not have been assigned to the UK after only 5 months of service. Ed Foley probably would have dismissed his rabbit's first attempt as a clumsy KGB operation. Plus, the good guy's don't really win in the end.

The novel makes it harder to reconcile real history with Clancy history. Clancy history deals with right wing presidents (Clear and Present Danger), left wing presidents (Sum of All Fears; Debt of Honor), and Ryan's own unwilling Presidency (Executive Orders and The Bear and The Dragon).

Still, Jack Ryan remains what he always was - a man of honor fighting a war he believed in. He was a rookie in this book, but proved himself a master of intelligence in later books (stealing Red October; then compromising the KGB head with it to get him to defect). Even as the President he swore before God he would do his best.

Yes, after Red Rabbit it was time for Clancy to give Jack Ryan his decent retirement - a lifetime of service. From a simple act to prevent murder (saving the Prince and Princess of Wales - and their child) to the highest office in the United States, Jack Ryan served as best he could. He also let his wife pursue her own career as a doctor.

Clancy gave us some great spy thrillers, from his breakthrough book (The Hunt for Red October) to Red Rabbit (the last of the Jack Ryan series). Some backstory (Patriot Games) to his term in office as President (Executive Orders and The Bear and the Dragon), Clancy gave us a hero. Even more, his side heros John Clark and Domingo (Ding) Chavez have provided heros on the CIA operations wing. John Clark earned it through service and his own serial killings of drug lords (Without Remorse); Ding earned it throught faithful service (Clear and Present Danger) and a hard apprenticeship.