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Red Rabbit (Tom Clancy)
by Authors:
Tom Clancy, Dennis Boutsikaris Features:
Abridged
Audio Cassette
Average Customer Rating:
Better than people are making it out to be
People seem to be dissapointed with this book, but as a longtime Clancy fan, I found it an intersting return to the early days of Jack Ryan (and the early 80's political scene). It's not a fast paced action thriller; it's more a story of political intrigue, with lots of details and background on the competing East-West intelligence agencies that were constantly doing battle. If you're looking for the Hunt for Red October, this isn't it. What is it? A well written, though long and detailed political thriller that manages to entertain, despite the fact that we know what's going to happen (the Pope is shot and survives). Too bad Amazon only gives single stars in their ratings; I'd give this one three and a half stars, if allowed.
What, no 0 star option?
I'm from Britain but I feel that most of my issues with this truly appalling piece of writng have already been covered there. I also found the reviews here more amusing.
First off: single worst book I ever read. Terrible plot, worse characters, and for a thriller, a total lack of thrills. Dialouge was really bad, and much of the lines seemed to repeat themselves throughout the book. The female characters are really badly written, even by his own standards. I won't go into details about the plot, etc, as others have already covered that. There is a couple of things that have bugged me about this book, and I really want to get them off my chest.
Apparantly much of it is set in Britain, though I can't really say it bears much resemblance to how it was in the 1980's. The jokes about British weather, food etc get kind of tiring. Clancy also seems to think we live in a perpetual Noel Coward-esque fantasy world where we all talk like the Queen, address each other as 'chaps' and smoke pipes. And his grasp of geography is awful. Places as 'just down the road' in the book are actually four-hour drives. York is not the 2nd biggest city England, or at least not since the 15th century. These kind of glaring innacuracies are nothing that couldn't have been solved by looking at a map. Tom, have you ever visited Britain? Perhaps the worst slur is on the NHS, which is branded as lazy and incompetent. Mostly this seems to be down to Tom Clancy's view that any socially based health service is vastly inferior to a privately finances one. Which is why 47 million people in America can't get access to good healthcare. The NHS is far from perfect (what system is?), but incompetent and uncaring it is not. And we are not the only country that gets to feel the brunt of Tom's lazy jingoism.
There is some really bad attempts to re-write history. Jack Ryan and members of the Reagan administration amazingly predict that the Soviet Union is going to collapse. This is to demonstrate how 'smart' they all are. Well, I beg to differ. If Reagan and his administration knew the Soviet Union was fit for collapse, then why did they blow trillions of dollars on the Star Wars programme? That just makes them look stupid.
I have enjoyed Tom Clancy books in the past, and own pretty much all of them from Red October right up to the Sum of All Fears. I can safely say I enjoyed almsot all of them. I even bought a couple of the Rainbox Six/Op Centre books. Now they were rubbish, but even they are not as bad as this. At least they were short. This is lazy, lazy work from Tom Clancy. Compared to something as tightly plotted and politically sophisticated as Clear and Present Danger, this almost seems as if it is by another author. If it wasn's so long, it might not have angered me so much as to vent my spleen about it, but Mr Clancy has not only conned me out of £7.99, but precious hours of my life I could have spent doing something more productive and interesting. Life is too short for novels as bad as this.
Contractual obligation?
I've been a fan of Tom Clancy since the 80s, and bought this book to read on vacation. Mistake.
This is comfortably the worst one I've read. There is an almost palpable lack of interest coming through - this feels like a book put together quickly to meet a contractual requirement, and certainly not because the author thought he had a good story to tell.
The plot is thin and (given that it's fairly obviously built around the failed assassination attempt by Mehmet Ali Agca) predictable, and there is no attempt at all to flesh out the characters or any of the subplots. Cathy Ryan's disillusion with Britain's National Health Service is simply left unresolved.
In earlier books Clancy's research always seemed quite thorough, but not anymore. York is quite certainly NOT "the largest city in the north of England", Ryan's Chatham home is about 3 hours drive from 'Greenham Commons (sic) Airbase', not 'just down the road'. On top of that, Clancy's insistence that everything is better in America is frankly insulting.
He must be being paid by some major food manufacturer to keep trotting out brand name after brand name. Try and convince any European that American coffee is vastly superior, and you'll get laughed at. This smacks of the moronic nationalism that thinks re-naming French Fries 'Freedom Fries' is a major statesmanlike act.
If you want to know why the rest of the world sees America as arrogant and small-minded, read this book. Better yet, go visit, and you'll learn more than you'll ever get from this.
Avoid.
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DVD's
Better than people are making it out to be 
What, no 0 star option? 
