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3.83 AVERAGE
3.83 AVERAGE
I love the Rainbow Six: Siege game, but its writers are criticized fairly often by the fans of the game. I wanted to read the original novel, that created the whole idea of an international NATO counter-terrorist unit, and I must say, this has been by far the stupidest novel I have ever read.
If you are interested in all its shortcomings, I encourage you to filter for all the 1-star reviews, they explain many issues very well. Unfortunately, Clancy didn't understand what environmentalism or socialism is all about (or what a vegan eats), which made this story a bit difficult to read in some cases. It usually goes like this: begins as a logically sound internal monologue by a character about socialism or environmentalism, going over the top to make it sound ridiculous and end the monologue like "whatever, capitalism much better" / "whatever, people deserve to die but vegans woooo they are crazy"
I gave it 2 stars out of five, because the overarching story was somewhat decent, but it could be summarized in 50 pages or less.
If you are interested in all its shortcomings, I encourage you to filter for all the 1-star reviews, they explain many issues very well. Unfortunately, Clancy didn't understand what environmentalism or socialism is all about (or what a vegan eats), which made this story a bit difficult to read in some cases. It usually goes like this: begins as a logically sound internal monologue by a character about socialism or environmentalism, going over the top to make it sound ridiculous and end the monologue like "whatever, capitalism much better" / "whatever, people deserve to die but vegans woooo they are crazy"
I gave it 2 stars out of five, because the overarching story was somewhat decent, but it could be summarized in 50 pages or less.
I have never in my life read a book more in need of an editor than this one. There are moments of sharp, well-written action, but the sections between them are horrendously bloated. Momentum is constantly halted by inner monologues that span multiple pages, and worst of all is that those same tangents get repeated throughout the book, sometimes by different characters that share viewpoints, but oftentimes by characters you've already seen think the exact same thoughts ~200 pages before.
On top of that, there's got to be at least a 25 page essay you could write about the politics of this book. I'll leave the writing of it to other people, but it's worth asking yourself how a 1,000 page book that largely focuses on terrorism never once mentions American right-wing terrorist attacks on abortion centers.
On top of that, there's got to be at least a 25 page essay you could write about the politics of this book. I'll leave the writing of it to other people, but it's worth asking yourself how a 1,000 page book that largely focuses on terrorism never once mentions American right-wing terrorist attacks on abortion centers.
I read the introduction of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six and was so convinced it was going to be absolute shite that I immediately wrote the following:
Woah. This is garbage. I’ve read Tom Clancy books before, and I’ll admit that the last one was nearly 10 years ago, so my recollections could be false, but The Hunt for Red October, The Sum of All Fears and Executive Orders were complex, technical and dense – The Sum of All Fears had an entire chapter describing what happens inside a nuclear device when it explodes. Some of it might have been factually erroneous (I couldn’t say), but you have to admire an attempt at that kind of depth.
Rainbow Six on the other hand is nothing of the sort. Anyone who’s seen an action movie could have written that first scene in which the hijacking of a two engine passenger jet is foiled. In the Clancy books I mentioned previously, all kinds of military protocol, strategy and know-how is revealed, here there’s nothing an eight year old child couldn’t imagine. In fact, I’m wondering whether Clancy actually wrote this shit. I’m not saying he didn’t, but the only thing that can explain such lame writing is that he had suffered a brain injury prior to beginning the work. Either that or it had been a while since a film had been made of one of his novels, starring Harrison Ford, and he needed to make something accessible and stupid, quick.
It needs to be remembered that Rainbow Six was published in 1998 – that’s three years before the “9-11” attacks changed our world forever – and I would have assumed the worlds of all our various political thriller writers. I like to imagine Clancy putting the finishing touches to his next 900 page opus, only to see planes hitting skyscrapers on CNN before going, “oh, shit. That’s everything I’ve ever written suddenly rendered redundant”. Although, inexplicably, I see Clancy (and two underlings) went on to write twelve further additions to the Jack Ryan Universe (only one of which was a prequel) in the years following those attacks. It’s just that, reading this novel now, everything just seems so irrelevant. But Clancy can’t be blamed for that – not in this pre-9/11 offering at least.
Anyway, I hope you’re not offended by me alluding to the 9-11 attacks and being vaguely amused about something at the same time. I’m not downplaying those awful events – after all, they led to the deaths of many people both in the west, the middle east and throughout the rest of the world, and to the systematic erosion of our rights and freedoms by our governments – basically, perpetual war and surveillance to rival anything dreamed of by Philip K Dick. None of these things are to be sniffed at. Nevertheless, Clancy was undaunted and decided his Jack Ryan series was important enough to transcend cataclysmic real world events. Perhaps he preferred to live in a time of infinite fictional possibilities, where everything doesn’t have to be coloured by war with Islam, though I can’t see the point in that.
I have often amused myself by reading reviews of bad books like this on Goodreads, and thought to myself, I wish I could read something that shit, so that I could have fun with the review. Well, this is my shit book. The only problem is that I felt I would be massively wasting my time by reading it. I mean, it’s only just shy of 900 pages long! How much shit can you take? To be fair, the print is much larger than it was in The Sum of All Fears or Executive Orders, so it looked like being pretty easy. Was it worth it though? Well, let’s see how amusing the review can be. I hope I don’t waste this opportunity.
As far as bad writing goes, the introduction alone contains numerous outstanding examples. Mostly it’s the way we’re right inside John Clark’s head, in a really weird way. Kind of like, “Clark looked around the cabin and felt uneasy. It must have been – what? He didn’t know…” That’s not a direct quote, but it gives you the idea. Do you want direct quotes? Cos I’ve got some if you want them. You sure?
Ok then; also in the introduction there was one instance of what I’m going to call a fake aborted sentence. This gives the impression that something has happened that the author, who is inside Clark’s head remember (at this point at least), hadn’t foreseen. This adds urgency or something; “Sometimes you just had to sit and take it and-“… [squirrel!]
Then a new paragraph starts. Ooh, the tension. Later we are treated to perspectives from a whole raft of characters. I’m not sure what the benefit of such omniscience is, but it sure is weird knowing the innermost thoughts of so many people, consecutively at various, almost random-seeming times. It seems contradictory though; you learn a lot of what the bad guys are thinking, but not necessarily everything. Obviously something will be revealed as a big surprise later on, but it seems inconsistent when we already know exactly what our villains are thinking about everything else – why should we not also know what the ultimate aim of this virus thing is all along?
My favourite part – and the part that most suggests to me that a brain injury free Clancy couldn’t possibly have written this tripe – is – well, how can I describe this? With another direct quote (or three) from the introduction.
“The captain sounded cool, and the bad guys weren’t acting crazy – yet. The people in back probably didn’t know anything was wrong – yet…” That’s two consecutive sentences right there, both ending with a pause and a ‘yet’. Then, less than a page later, you have; “even so, Chavez knew what was going down, and had the good sense to do nothing about it… yet”. Are you telling me something’s going to happen, Clancy? Because I thought this was going to be a gentle but overall pointless description of a flight to London where actual interesting things were going to happen. If you’re telling me things are going to happen right away, on this flight in the very first scene of the book, well I’m going to strap myself in…
Shortly after you have this hilarious gem, “The three wolves didn’t know that the sheep herd had three dogs in it. Big ones.”
And then, “Then he said something in Spanish to the woman in 4A. ‘Where is your husband?’ it sounded like.”
What, in Spanish, sounds like “where is your husband”? Does he mean it sounded like the Spanish for “where is your husband”? Come on, Clancy; think about what you’re writing.
Our three big dogs then start to make their move. One terrorist wants to see the passport of the British character, which conveniently is in the overhead bin, where his gun also happens to be. The British character even calls the terrorist, “old man” at this point, because that’s what British people do – even the Scottish ones (see later for a complete “old man/old boy” count). Clark then uses the classic, “hey, I need to take a leak” strategy. Oh, please. Then, while our heroes are subduing the terrorists, no other passenger on the plane is described as reacting in any way – except afterwards when there is a smattering of applause, but strangely no chants of “USA! USA!” It’s like the whole operation was conducted in a vacuum.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
As I continued on to the following chapters, I continued making funny little notes to myself and being amused from time to time, but it quickly became apparent that Rainbow Six wasn’t going to be as shit as I had thought it would be – it was actually going to be quite good. Yes, I was starting to enjoy it. Nevertheless, I allowed myself to write the following:
The next chapter after the introduction is like a “recruiting a crack team” scene from a film, as we’re introduced to the various elite badass soldiers from all over the world (read: USA, UK, Germany, France and Israel), and isn’t that bad. Chapter 2 marks the transition to the organisation’s first official job, and here we are subjected to an amusing nonsensical sentence: “The exercises had been endless, or as much as two weeks could make them.” So, not endless at all. In fact, nowhere near endless. Later there is what might possibly be the longest sentence ever constructed in the English language. It spans fourteen lines. Fourteen! I read it a few times and just couldn’t fathom why it needed to be so long.
Chapter 3 details the actual first mission – a hostage situation in a bank. Within the space of around 20 pages the team gets the go-ahead, boards a flight to Switzerland, tools up, kills all four terrorists, rescues all the hostages and returns home for beers. There’s even space for a future villain to get in a few paragraphs and do a killing. So far, I think that makes six dead; four terrorists, one hostage (killed prior to the arrival of our heroes) and one terrorist’s friend.
It still wasn’t anywhere near as good as the novels I’ve mentioned previously, but it was streets ahead of thrillers I’ve read by James Paterson (Big Bad Wolf) and John Grisham (The Client). There were still some things that are worth noting. There was one chapter, for instance, where I got really bored. Up to this point, chapters were regularly around 20 pages long, which seemed a lot when I was younger, but recently I’ve been finding it a breeze. But then I came to a chapter that just seemed to go on forever (around 50 pages). It detailed Rainbow’s second mission, and all the events leading up to it. Once things started kicking off it got interesting again, but all the scene setting and preparation was monotonous in the extreme. By comparison, the third mission – a terrorist plot centring on a Spanish theme park (where they accept GBP and DM as currency, but no mention is made of pesetas), is dealt with quite differently. This time you have two preliminary chapters instead of an attempt to shoo everything into one big one. At first I thought that Clancy must be doing a kind of chapter-per-day thing, but that can’t be right either, as the second of the preliminary chapters encapsulates both the night before the terrorist assault, and the morning of it, before taking a break. Then it all culminates in a mammoth chapter detailing the rest of the mission.
One thing you’ve got to say for Clancy though; you really get a sense that he is absolutely loving writing this stuff. It’s like when you see a professional sportsman who seems to genuinely enjoy playing – you can’t help but warm to them.
Ok, some other issues.
• ‘“Danke”, Hans Furchtner observed’. How do you observe “thank you”?
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“No, sorry, it was just an observation.”
“… of what?”
“What?”
“How can ‘thank you’ ever be an observation?” – is how such a conversation might go.
• “Johnston was the best rifle in Rainbow, even better than Houston by about half a cunt hair on a good day”. Bit blue, but Clancy does this kind of thing a lot; describing things in the kind of terms his characters might use.
• “Clever bastards, but not clever enough… maybe”. Huh?
• “And to what purpose? Which was even a better question…” - I think he means “an even better question”, but again, this could be representative of a character’s lack of grammatical understanding. It is weird though.
• “Neither man owned a fur coat”. This is an observation of how two scientists don’t mind testing on animals, but actually they quite like animals. Notwithstanding, I have never met a man who did own a fur coat – even if fur coats were socially acceptable, I wouldn’t expect any men to own one.
One section concerning ex-KGB agent Popov was very strange indeed. It consisted of three very long paragraphs; one of a whole page plus five lines, the next of a full page plus seven lines and the final one of a full page plus ten lines. This was in complete contrast to the rest of the book, and even with every other time Popov had appeared so far. Is this Clancy playing with styles, or did he write this section loosely into the notebook app on his phone and send it to his editor, who neglected to add any formatting? Either way, it was something interesting to observe.
As we approach halfway the disparate plot elements start to come together, and we find out that nearly every character who isn’t in Rainbow is connected to the big conspiracy in some way – even one who’s in the US government. Of course, we knew that all along, because otherwise there wouldn’t have been any point in including all these things in the text. Nevertheless, we can sense now that we are getting somewhere. We even get to see why “old man/old boy” has been used so much. It is meant to represent a British way of speaking, such that when our ex-KGB agent wants to show that he can do an English accent, he can just insert “old boy” (or “old man”, I forget which) into a sentence, and we can feel confident that he has just executed a perfect English accent. What region he’s affecting isn’t specified, but obviously that isn’t important – nor is the fact that Australians are also credited with using this term a few times later on.
So the Russian deploys to the UK and Clancy is forced to reveal a little more detail about British behaviour and custom than he has to this point. With one or two things he’s absolutely on the money – like where he points out that Brits are polite, but in London people move really quickly. Any tourist who’s been at a London rail or tube station during rush hour can attest to that. Oddly though, some of the other things he mentions make me question whether Clancy has been to the UK at all [I’m assuming he must have, as a well-paid, best-selling writer]. Three specific examples:
- Popov stays at a motel in Hereford – we don’t have motels in the UK. Even my phone called bullshit on that one, insisting on autocorrecting to “model” when I typed a note about it.
- In reference to a football match that is being watched in the pub next to the hotel, two locals lament the match ending in a “tie”. British people would never refer to a football match ending in a tie. We would say it was a “draw”.
- ‘Popov drained his glass and paid the bill’. In a pub. That’s not how we do things in our pubs.
There’s also another hilarious example of being in a central character’s head (I think this one is Popov also, actually); ‘Again, it was the not-knowing that worried him. Worried? Yes, he was worried now.’ I think that sentence is intended for reading in a Russian accent, as it strikes me as an attempt to render the character’s nationality through the grammar he uses to think. There’s even a “how you say…” in there somewhere.
So there’s lots of stuff to highlight as bad writing, bad research, or just plain humorous. It would be remiss however, not to mention how good this book is overall. Yes it’s about a bunch of elite military heroes, swaggering in and out of various countries, kicking ass and taking no prisoners. Yes, the missions are all a bit simplistic if you’re familiar with some of the more technical of Clancy’s thrillers, and here, politics is very much kept to a minimum – basically so that Clancy can have as much fun as possible with the various rescue missions that gradually get [slightly] harder like levels in a Playstation game without having to wade through pages and pages of diplomacy and maneuvering.
When you get halfway through the book though, all the disparate strands start coming together and The Big Idea is revealed. And it’s a corker. Then you can just sit back and watch how Clancy handles it – which is expertly. It’s tense and fun, there’s action and intrigue, and it all adds up to you staying up late to read the last 60 pages in an hour and a half long session. I don’t normally do that, but I was excited about finishing this one. I have to say I was a bit disappointed with the ending in one way, though there is another element about it that is quite good. I’d like to tell you what that was, but it would ruin it for you.
Ultimately then, it isn’t garbage, it’s a barnstorming action romp and I won’t be afraid of picking up another Clancy novel in future – I’ll just be hoping that the next one is a bit more political, a bit more detailed… a bit less action movie.
Finally the ‘old man/old boy’ count: pages 34, 61, 64, 209 (x3 – making up for the big gap, and being representative of two English characters talking to each other), 414, 441, 694, 757, 810. That’s one every 81.5 pages – more than any other book I’ve ever read. What I didn’t count was the instances of characters saying, “Quite.” The reason for that was that another reviewer already highlighted this particular idiosyncrasy, so a desire to be original meant I steered clear of that one.
Woah. This is garbage. I’ve read Tom Clancy books before, and I’ll admit that the last one was nearly 10 years ago, so my recollections could be false, but The Hunt for Red October, The Sum of All Fears and Executive Orders were complex, technical and dense – The Sum of All Fears had an entire chapter describing what happens inside a nuclear device when it explodes. Some of it might have been factually erroneous (I couldn’t say), but you have to admire an attempt at that kind of depth.
Rainbow Six on the other hand is nothing of the sort. Anyone who’s seen an action movie could have written that first scene in which the hijacking of a two engine passenger jet is foiled. In the Clancy books I mentioned previously, all kinds of military protocol, strategy and know-how is revealed, here there’s nothing an eight year old child couldn’t imagine. In fact, I’m wondering whether Clancy actually wrote this shit. I’m not saying he didn’t, but the only thing that can explain such lame writing is that he had suffered a brain injury prior to beginning the work. Either that or it had been a while since a film had been made of one of his novels, starring Harrison Ford, and he needed to make something accessible and stupid, quick.
It needs to be remembered that Rainbow Six was published in 1998 – that’s three years before the “9-11” attacks changed our world forever – and I would have assumed the worlds of all our various political thriller writers. I like to imagine Clancy putting the finishing touches to his next 900 page opus, only to see planes hitting skyscrapers on CNN before going, “oh, shit. That’s everything I’ve ever written suddenly rendered redundant”. Although, inexplicably, I see Clancy (and two underlings) went on to write twelve further additions to the Jack Ryan Universe (only one of which was a prequel) in the years following those attacks. It’s just that, reading this novel now, everything just seems so irrelevant. But Clancy can’t be blamed for that – not in this pre-9/11 offering at least.
Anyway, I hope you’re not offended by me alluding to the 9-11 attacks and being vaguely amused about something at the same time. I’m not downplaying those awful events – after all, they led to the deaths of many people both in the west, the middle east and throughout the rest of the world, and to the systematic erosion of our rights and freedoms by our governments – basically, perpetual war and surveillance to rival anything dreamed of by Philip K Dick. None of these things are to be sniffed at. Nevertheless, Clancy was undaunted and decided his Jack Ryan series was important enough to transcend cataclysmic real world events. Perhaps he preferred to live in a time of infinite fictional possibilities, where everything doesn’t have to be coloured by war with Islam, though I can’t see the point in that.
I have often amused myself by reading reviews of bad books like this on Goodreads, and thought to myself, I wish I could read something that shit, so that I could have fun with the review. Well, this is my shit book. The only problem is that I felt I would be massively wasting my time by reading it. I mean, it’s only just shy of 900 pages long! How much shit can you take? To be fair, the print is much larger than it was in The Sum of All Fears or Executive Orders, so it looked like being pretty easy. Was it worth it though? Well, let’s see how amusing the review can be. I hope I don’t waste this opportunity.
As far as bad writing goes, the introduction alone contains numerous outstanding examples. Mostly it’s the way we’re right inside John Clark’s head, in a really weird way. Kind of like, “Clark looked around the cabin and felt uneasy. It must have been – what? He didn’t know…” That’s not a direct quote, but it gives you the idea. Do you want direct quotes? Cos I’ve got some if you want them. You sure?
Ok then; also in the introduction there was one instance of what I’m going to call a fake aborted sentence. This gives the impression that something has happened that the author, who is inside Clark’s head remember (at this point at least), hadn’t foreseen. This adds urgency or something; “Sometimes you just had to sit and take it and-“… [squirrel!]
Then a new paragraph starts. Ooh, the tension. Later we are treated to perspectives from a whole raft of characters. I’m not sure what the benefit of such omniscience is, but it sure is weird knowing the innermost thoughts of so many people, consecutively at various, almost random-seeming times. It seems contradictory though; you learn a lot of what the bad guys are thinking, but not necessarily everything. Obviously something will be revealed as a big surprise later on, but it seems inconsistent when we already know exactly what our villains are thinking about everything else – why should we not also know what the ultimate aim of this virus thing is all along?
My favourite part – and the part that most suggests to me that a brain injury free Clancy couldn’t possibly have written this tripe – is – well, how can I describe this? With another direct quote (or three) from the introduction.
“The captain sounded cool, and the bad guys weren’t acting crazy – yet. The people in back probably didn’t know anything was wrong – yet…” That’s two consecutive sentences right there, both ending with a pause and a ‘yet’. Then, less than a page later, you have; “even so, Chavez knew what was going down, and had the good sense to do nothing about it… yet”. Are you telling me something’s going to happen, Clancy? Because I thought this was going to be a gentle but overall pointless description of a flight to London where actual interesting things were going to happen. If you’re telling me things are going to happen right away, on this flight in the very first scene of the book, well I’m going to strap myself in…
Shortly after you have this hilarious gem, “The three wolves didn’t know that the sheep herd had three dogs in it. Big ones.”
And then, “Then he said something in Spanish to the woman in 4A. ‘Where is your husband?’ it sounded like.”
What, in Spanish, sounds like “where is your husband”? Does he mean it sounded like the Spanish for “where is your husband”? Come on, Clancy; think about what you’re writing.
Our three big dogs then start to make their move. One terrorist wants to see the passport of the British character, which conveniently is in the overhead bin, where his gun also happens to be. The British character even calls the terrorist, “old man” at this point, because that’s what British people do – even the Scottish ones (see later for a complete “old man/old boy” count). Clark then uses the classic, “hey, I need to take a leak” strategy. Oh, please. Then, while our heroes are subduing the terrorists, no other passenger on the plane is described as reacting in any way – except afterwards when there is a smattering of applause, but strangely no chants of “USA! USA!” It’s like the whole operation was conducted in a vacuum.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
As I continued on to the following chapters, I continued making funny little notes to myself and being amused from time to time, but it quickly became apparent that Rainbow Six wasn’t going to be as shit as I had thought it would be – it was actually going to be quite good. Yes, I was starting to enjoy it. Nevertheless, I allowed myself to write the following:
The next chapter after the introduction is like a “recruiting a crack team” scene from a film, as we’re introduced to the various elite badass soldiers from all over the world (read: USA, UK, Germany, France and Israel), and isn’t that bad. Chapter 2 marks the transition to the organisation’s first official job, and here we are subjected to an amusing nonsensical sentence: “The exercises had been endless, or as much as two weeks could make them.” So, not endless at all. In fact, nowhere near endless. Later there is what might possibly be the longest sentence ever constructed in the English language. It spans fourteen lines. Fourteen! I read it a few times and just couldn’t fathom why it needed to be so long.
Chapter 3 details the actual first mission – a hostage situation in a bank. Within the space of around 20 pages the team gets the go-ahead, boards a flight to Switzerland, tools up, kills all four terrorists, rescues all the hostages and returns home for beers. There’s even space for a future villain to get in a few paragraphs and do a killing. So far, I think that makes six dead; four terrorists, one hostage (killed prior to the arrival of our heroes) and one terrorist’s friend.
It still wasn’t anywhere near as good as the novels I’ve mentioned previously, but it was streets ahead of thrillers I’ve read by James Paterson (Big Bad Wolf) and John Grisham (The Client). There were still some things that are worth noting. There was one chapter, for instance, where I got really bored. Up to this point, chapters were regularly around 20 pages long, which seemed a lot when I was younger, but recently I’ve been finding it a breeze. But then I came to a chapter that just seemed to go on forever (around 50 pages). It detailed Rainbow’s second mission, and all the events leading up to it. Once things started kicking off it got interesting again, but all the scene setting and preparation was monotonous in the extreme. By comparison, the third mission – a terrorist plot centring on a Spanish theme park (where they accept GBP and DM as currency, but no mention is made of pesetas), is dealt with quite differently. This time you have two preliminary chapters instead of an attempt to shoo everything into one big one. At first I thought that Clancy must be doing a kind of chapter-per-day thing, but that can’t be right either, as the second of the preliminary chapters encapsulates both the night before the terrorist assault, and the morning of it, before taking a break. Then it all culminates in a mammoth chapter detailing the rest of the mission.
One thing you’ve got to say for Clancy though; you really get a sense that he is absolutely loving writing this stuff. It’s like when you see a professional sportsman who seems to genuinely enjoy playing – you can’t help but warm to them.
Ok, some other issues.
• ‘“Danke”, Hans Furchtner observed’. How do you observe “thank you”?
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“No, sorry, it was just an observation.”
“… of what?”
“What?”
“How can ‘thank you’ ever be an observation?” – is how such a conversation might go.
• “Johnston was the best rifle in Rainbow, even better than Houston by about half a cunt hair on a good day”. Bit blue, but Clancy does this kind of thing a lot; describing things in the kind of terms his characters might use.
• “Clever bastards, but not clever enough… maybe”. Huh?
• “And to what purpose? Which was even a better question…” - I think he means “an even better question”, but again, this could be representative of a character’s lack of grammatical understanding. It is weird though.
• “Neither man owned a fur coat”. This is an observation of how two scientists don’t mind testing on animals, but actually they quite like animals. Notwithstanding, I have never met a man who did own a fur coat – even if fur coats were socially acceptable, I wouldn’t expect any men to own one.
One section concerning ex-KGB agent Popov was very strange indeed. It consisted of three very long paragraphs; one of a whole page plus five lines, the next of a full page plus seven lines and the final one of a full page plus ten lines. This was in complete contrast to the rest of the book, and even with every other time Popov had appeared so far. Is this Clancy playing with styles, or did he write this section loosely into the notebook app on his phone and send it to his editor, who neglected to add any formatting? Either way, it was something interesting to observe.
As we approach halfway the disparate plot elements start to come together, and we find out that nearly every character who isn’t in Rainbow is connected to the big conspiracy in some way – even one who’s in the US government. Of course, we knew that all along, because otherwise there wouldn’t have been any point in including all these things in the text. Nevertheless, we can sense now that we are getting somewhere. We even get to see why “old man/old boy” has been used so much. It is meant to represent a British way of speaking, such that when our ex-KGB agent wants to show that he can do an English accent, he can just insert “old boy” (or “old man”, I forget which) into a sentence, and we can feel confident that he has just executed a perfect English accent. What region he’s affecting isn’t specified, but obviously that isn’t important – nor is the fact that Australians are also credited with using this term a few times later on.
So the Russian deploys to the UK and Clancy is forced to reveal a little more detail about British behaviour and custom than he has to this point. With one or two things he’s absolutely on the money – like where he points out that Brits are polite, but in London people move really quickly. Any tourist who’s been at a London rail or tube station during rush hour can attest to that. Oddly though, some of the other things he mentions make me question whether Clancy has been to the UK at all [I’m assuming he must have, as a well-paid, best-selling writer]. Three specific examples:
- Popov stays at a motel in Hereford – we don’t have motels in the UK. Even my phone called bullshit on that one, insisting on autocorrecting to “model” when I typed a note about it.
- In reference to a football match that is being watched in the pub next to the hotel, two locals lament the match ending in a “tie”. British people would never refer to a football match ending in a tie. We would say it was a “draw”.
- ‘Popov drained his glass and paid the bill’. In a pub. That’s not how we do things in our pubs.
There’s also another hilarious example of being in a central character’s head (I think this one is Popov also, actually); ‘Again, it was the not-knowing that worried him. Worried? Yes, he was worried now.’ I think that sentence is intended for reading in a Russian accent, as it strikes me as an attempt to render the character’s nationality through the grammar he uses to think. There’s even a “how you say…” in there somewhere.
So there’s lots of stuff to highlight as bad writing, bad research, or just plain humorous. It would be remiss however, not to mention how good this book is overall. Yes it’s about a bunch of elite military heroes, swaggering in and out of various countries, kicking ass and taking no prisoners. Yes, the missions are all a bit simplistic if you’re familiar with some of the more technical of Clancy’s thrillers, and here, politics is very much kept to a minimum – basically so that Clancy can have as much fun as possible with the various rescue missions that gradually get [slightly] harder like levels in a Playstation game without having to wade through pages and pages of diplomacy and maneuvering.
When you get halfway through the book though, all the disparate strands start coming together and The Big Idea is revealed. And it’s a corker. Then you can just sit back and watch how Clancy handles it – which is expertly. It’s tense and fun, there’s action and intrigue, and it all adds up to you staying up late to read the last 60 pages in an hour and a half long session. I don’t normally do that, but I was excited about finishing this one. I have to say I was a bit disappointed with the ending in one way, though there is another element about it that is quite good. I’d like to tell you what that was, but it would ruin it for you.
Ultimately then, it isn’t garbage, it’s a barnstorming action romp and I won’t be afraid of picking up another Clancy novel in future – I’ll just be hoping that the next one is a bit more political, a bit more detailed… a bit less action movie.
Finally the ‘old man/old boy’ count: pages 34, 61, 64, 209 (x3 – making up for the big gap, and being representative of two English characters talking to each other), 414, 441, 694, 757, 810. That’s one every 81.5 pages – more than any other book I’ve ever read. What I didn’t count was the instances of characters saying, “Quite.” The reason for that was that another reviewer already highlighted this particular idiosyncrasy, so a desire to be original meant I steered clear of that one.
The plot is totally far-fetched and there are more than a few off-handed potshots at environmentalists, but the very idea of a NATO counterterrorism unit is enough to keep me going.
After seeing 9 million copies of Tom Clancy on both my veteran grandfathers’ shelves over the years, I was convinced these books were not for me. I begrudgingly admit the storytelling was compelling, and the details were well researched. Sparing the cringy microaggressions every few chapters, I didn’t hate it.
challenging
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
mysterious
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
i thoroughly enjoyed this book. probably the longest i’ve ever read. the only reason i didn’t give it 5 stars was because of the amount of technical military terms, which while incredibly fascinating to me, i don’t understand it all. but i really love books about super competent people getting the job done, along with the mystery and chess-playing.
I enjoyed the story but would’ve enjoyed it more if it wasn’t so long. The story could’ve been told in half the amount of words.