Red Rabbit

Rating:
Summary: still up there to compete with top package thrillers !!!!!!!
Review: a little so much of heart won't hurt tommy's intellectual-war saga reputation. Tom, I owe you a lot about reading books, and my little bookshelf is full of your books, 80% of it, 20% is being shared among Ludlums, Clyve Cussler's, and Charles Taylor's, but Tom, a little connection and entimacy between Ryan couple could have pushed the Red rabbit to its full throttle stardom.......

Rating:
Summary: Great little story, too much book
Review: Another unnecessarily long [600+ pages] Clancy novel.
Always interesting, always fascinating, but nearly always long winded and opinionated. The subject matter is very interesting. The pope tries to influence events in his native Poland (Solidarity). Soon to be Soviet Premier decides this is too damaging to the Soviet domination in the Warsaw Pact and comes to the conclusion elimination is the best way to deal with the situation. Meanwhile a Soviet communications officer can't abide by the idea of killing an innocent man and defects. The details are fascinating. The slow, patient "romance" of the Rabbit by the Foleys is good reading.
But overall this book gets only 3 stars because it could have been written in 400 pages or even less. Lots of insight into each character's mind set. Lots of opinions, all in line with one Tom Clancy (and in many cases myself). Constant cuts to a character doing nothing but sitting and thinking (did I say all the good guys' opinions are the same as Clancy's?).
I'm all for cerebral books, and character development. I don't need action to keep me enthralled. Give me ambiance, give me action, give me well developed characters, but leave the knee jerk opinions about the coffee in London, the gray atmosphere of Russia etc... locked in the various players minds. Some is good, too much is bad, and makes a good story a tough read.

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.

Rating:
Summary: No more for me
Review: How the mighty have fallen! I thought Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October" was perhaps the best US/commie cold war high tech thriller I have ever read, or ever will read. Red Rabbit, in contrast, was one of the most boring, repetitive, cliché-ridden unexciting books I've read in a long time, maybe ever. The basic premise was OK, and I liked the fact that the central story line weaves between real historical events (the attempted assassination of the pope in 1981) and fiction. As other reviewers have noted, the book is far too long, perhaps by 50 percent or more. Much of the extra length comes from the fact that minor background comments are repeated over and over, to the point where most readers will want to scream if they hear one more time that "Sir" Jack Ryan went through Marine basic training (U.S. Marines are the protectors of the free world, don't you know!), or that his wife worked for Johns Hopkins hospital (evidently the very best surgeons in the universe work there, and most of those who did not are nincompoops), or that Ryan hates flying but loves good coffee. Clancy's relentless American jingoism is worn prominently on his sleeve throughout, which may appeal to a subset of US readers but is like fingernails on a blackboard for most. Character development is quite spotty. Clancy does spend some time trying to develop the mindset of the central defector, Zaitev, but I wasn't convinced. After all his years in KGB communications knowing full well that murders were occasionally committed during the course of the cold war, why all of a sudden did he develop such a serious crisis of confidence that he would decide to defect, and betray his country, just because one more murder (the Pope) was being planned? The defector's wife's characterization was totally unconvincing - woken in the middle of the night to discover that her husband has decided to move their family unit to the USA, only to meekly go along without so much as a "what the hell???" And Ryan's wife Cathy is equally unconvincing: she becomes so irritated that her husband has to be away from home on business for a few nights, one wonders what century she thinks she's living in. I think we're seeing Tom Clancy in his twilight, struggling to get one more book out to pad his retirement account before too many people notice that he has lost the plot. No more for me.

Rating:
Summary: Anti-british, inaccurate and not up to the normal Clancy.
Review: I think Clancy did not write this book. He may have written part of it and even provided the story line but I am sure he did not write all of it. There are at least two, if not more, writing styles detectable. It is full of repetitions of the same text - as if a number of writers were told "go and write this bit and work this text into your story"

Factual inaccuracies, particularly relating to Britain, abound. Like, for instance, who would choose to live in Chatham and work in Hammersmith? Virginia Water or Sunningdale maybe but Chatham, NO.
Who would take a cab from Victoria to Hammersmith and back "the few minutes" to MI5 HQ? I mean - it would take hours to do not a few minutes first thing in the morning.

Who would land at Manchester airport and just pop down to Exeter in a couple of hours?

And the bit about the surgeons nipping out for a swift pint in the middle of an operation beggars belief.

The trouble is if you know those parts are not believable how can you belive the other "facts" are accurate?

No - definitely not Clancy standard but if you ignore the bad bits it is a reasonable read and the pace is fast enough not to fall asleep reading it in the bath.

Rating:
Summary: Justin's Review for Red Rabbit
Review: I thought that Red Rabbit was a pretty enjoyable book. The plot was great and the points of views were good too. However, the beginning of the book was very slow and the climax went by very fast. One of my favorite aspects of the book was how they had the Americans, British, and Russians included in the books expressing their thoughts and ideas. Overall this book was good but I didn't like how it had a slow beginning and a very fast climax. The climax itself left many questions which is why I am giving this book three out of five stars.

Rating:
Summary: Passé
Review: In the multi-volume series featuring author Tom Clancy's Super Hero, John Patrick ("Jack") Ryan, RED RABBIT is inserted into the saga shortly after Jack saved the Prince and Princess of Wales from Irish terrorists, but some considerable period before he becomes President of the United States. Ryan is a busy boy. And it doesn't hurt the legend that his film roles have mostly been played by Indiana Jones, a.k.a. Harrison Ford.

In the book, it's mid-1981, and Clancy builds his plot around the real-life assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II by Mehmet Ali Agca. The author capitalizes on the conspiracy theory that the whole thing was stage managed by the Bulgarian secret police at the behest of Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB.

At this point in his career, Jack is a CIA analyst on loan to Britain's SIS London HQ, Century House. Over in the KGB's Moscow Center, communications officer Major Zaitsev suffers a crisis of conscience after transmitting secret messages setting up the plot to kill the Pope. So, Zaitsev, replete with the knowledge of Soviet spies in the British and American governments, decides to defect to the West, and Ryan becomes involved in the Anglo-American operation to get him out.

Clancy is apparently an unabashed patriot, and his Ryan creation is a Red, White and Blue amalgam of a Boy Scout and Miss Goody Two-Shoes. That's fine, except that Clancy, through Jack, gets too preachy. Thus, we have Ryan expounding to anyone who'll listen such pearls of wisdom as:

"The problem is that (the Soviet) economic system doesn't reward people for doing good work. There's a saying in economics: 'Bad money drives out good.' That means poor performance will take over if good performance isn't recognized. Well, over there, mainly it isn't, and for their economy it's like cancer. What happens in one place gradually carries over to the whole system."

And, regarding Jack's personal motivation:

"But those doctrines (of the Catholic Church) were seen as a threat by the Soviet Union. What better proof of who the Bad Guys were in the world? Ryan had sworn as a Marine to fight his country's enemies. But here and now he swore to himself to fight against God's own enemies." Oh, puhleeze!

Mind you, RED RABBIT was first published in 2002, a decade after the collapse of the Evil Empire and it's disposal onto the ash heap of history. Isn't it time for Clancy to snap out of it?

Now, I've read other Jack Ryan thrillers in the distant past and found them pretty good. By former standards, I might even have liked this one more than I did because it does have a reasonably clever core plot, albeit badly in need of severe editing. But, I've grown jaded, or my tastes in literary trash have matured with age. Now, I much prefer - and highly recommend - the lean and mean thrillers by British author Gerald Seymour. In Seymour's fictional world, his protagonists are ordinary blokes with everyday problems caught up in conflicts at the world's grotty margins. Seymour doesn't preach, his morale landscapes are filled with gray areas, and his heroes' victories are Pyrrhic more often than not. To me, this is a better reflection of real life.

RED RABBIT is my last Clancy novel. He and Ryan can save the Free World without my help.


Rating:
Summary: Ugh -- why did I finish it?
Review: This book reminds me of some particularly gruesome c-rations I remember choking down. When I complained about how vile they were, the Gunny asked me why I ate them if they were so bad. "Well, they're chow" I replied.
Well, this was a Clancy book and it wasn't supposed to be this bad. I believe that Tom had a lot of spare text -- philosophizing about the roots of the USSR's dowbfall -- that his editors had begged him to take out of other novels; and he likely cobbled it all together for this offering. Needing a plot to tie it all together, I think he borrowed heavily on Claire Sterling's _The Pope Must Die_ as the skeleton to hang this offal on. And it is offal -- or something that sounds like it.
Will I read another Clancy novel? Probably. I have long flights coming up and -- well -- its chow.

Rating:
Summary: "More amusing than his cabbage soup, certainly..."
Review: What an awful piece of crap!! Some of the dialogue was just atrocious. I mean, really, have you ever heard anyone actually talk like the character's in this novel? When disussing Cathy's profession with his English colleague, Simon, (Chap. 8), Jack gives a description of a procedure Cathy does. Simon supposedly shudders at the description, and responds, "I suppose it's better than being blind." To this Jack responds, "Yeah, I know what you mean. Like when Sally was in shock-trauma. The idea of somebody carving up my little girl didn't exactly thrill me." Whaaaaaaaa??? Okay, beyond the absolute shallowness of the dialogue, how does Clancy expect us to believe that two guys who evidently cannot stomach the thought of routine medical procedures are going to save the free world from the threat of global communism with their brilliant and objective analytical skills? And the absolute idiocy of the sterotypical English conversation. Do these people really go around saying "quite" and "bloody good" all the time? Quite the sterotypical view of the English, wouldn't you say old boy??

And when his characters engage in self-reflection. C'mon, a cypher clerk, who according to the storyline, had never given much thought to the messages he encrypted suddenly develops an instant conscience, and decides that the assassination plot on the pope is just too much. And the number given to the message sent to the Rezident in Bulgaria, 666? I mean puleeeeze. And in chapter 3, when Zaitzev is having dinner with his family and reflecting on his place within the hierarchy of the KGB, he thinks to himself that it is rather amusing that a lowly fuctionary like himself is entrusted with such great secrets. Here is the actual line from the novel. Are you ready for this??? Okay, here it is:

"More amusing than his cabbage soup, certainly, nutritious though it might be."

Once you stop laughing, you have got to ask yourself this question...is that the worst line ever written in a novel?? What the hell does that mean?? More amusing than his cabbage soup??? Anyhow you get my point. Bottom line, this is a really bad book!


Rating:
Summary: Good premise, weak book
Review: With "Red rabbit", Tom Clancy goes back to his most succesfull character, the young Jack Ryan. Set back in early 1982, this book is an attempt by the author to make ammends to his readers. Nobody wants to know about endless reunions in the Oval Office, or Jack complaining all the time about a job he didn't even want in the first place, or how he has to trust his secretary to smoke covertly. No, now Jack is back in his thirties, a promising analyst for CIA involved in a russian plot to murder the Pope, and the defection of a KGB agent.

The premise of the book is good. Although we know what happens to the Pope in the end, Clancy usually knows how to describe intrigue, and this time the political part plays an important role in the story. The problem is, "Red rabbit" is 300 pages too long. The good political plot and the defection part should be really interesting, but the endless dialogue, the repeated and sometimes amusingly idiotic opinions of the characters (stereothypes, most of them, like the "bloody" thing with the british), and the fact that NOTHING happens during most of the chapters made this book become a tiresome reading. It just dragged on. Take, for example, Forsyth's "The day of the Jackal". We also know what will happen at the end of the book, but Forsyth took the time to develop a great plot and two unforgettable characters, and constructed his excellent book around them. "Red rabbit" is nothing of the sort, although it has its moments (few of them). I only imagine what this book could have been if handed to a writer more concerned about his readers than about sales.

But, looking back, "Red rabbit" is not as disastrous as people say. It is certainly better than "The bear and the dragon" - and this is not praise, just a fact. This book should have deserved a 3-star rating, but there's one thing that bothered me during the reading, and left me scratching my head in amazement: at the beginning of one chapter, one of the characters is in Budapest, Hungary, and wakes up at dawn, thinking that in Moscow, his native city, he would still be asleep, because due to time-zone differences it would still be dark at the russian capital. I read the paragraph at least a dozen times, trying to see if I had understood it right. Something clearly was amiss. I looked in the maps, just to be sure, just to see if I was not crazy, and there it was: Moscow is WAY east of Budapest; the sun in fact rises first in Moscow than in the hungarian capital. I mean, if a mistake like that can pass edition, what further wrong information is given in the story? I know this is a work of fiction, but this kind of basic errors are simply unforgivable. That lack of respect to the reader is unforgivable.

Clancy's future books, only if I find them in used-books stores.

Grade 4.5/10