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3.9 AVERAGE
3.9 AVERAGE
04/12/2020 Notes:
Rating Raised from 3 Stars to 4.5 Stars on Audio Re-Read
4.5 Stars for Narration by Scott Brick
- I like how Clancy makes the story feel personal. It's not like you're reading about alien cultures and evil villains. He makes the characters come to life on the page. There are realistic layers, personal touches from that area (country/region/etc) and it's a cool look into recent quasi-history.
Rating Raised from 3 Stars to 4.5 Stars on Audio Re-Read
4.5 Stars for Narration by Scott Brick
- I like how Clancy makes the story feel personal. It's not like you're reading about alien cultures and evil villains. He makes the characters come to life on the page. There are realistic layers, personal touches from that area (country/region/etc) and it's a cool look into recent quasi-history.
I'm sure I don't need to recount the plot of this famous novel to you. During the height of the Cold War, a wily Russian submarine captain concocts a brilliant plan to steal the Soviet navy's newest and grandest stealth nuclear missile sub and defect to the USA with it. Shenanigans ensue.
The film version is one of those relatively rare films that's widely hailed as being at least as good as, and maybe better than, the book. So immediately after finishing the book, I sat down and watched the film. I am here to tell you that in most ways, the book is still better.
Book is better: It's simply impossible to tell the whole story of a full-length novel in the space of a 2-hour film, so massive compression and simplification of the plot is inevitable. In the film, everything happens at breakneck speed and there's no time for all the nuances that unfold at a stately pace in the book, particularly things like delving into Ramius's background to get at his ultimate motivations, the slow unfolding of his plan to fool everyone, and why that one guy in the film is suddenly shooting at everyone. The film is also full of corny underwater shots of submarines passing each other seemingly mere meters apart, which I'm fairly certain is baloney. And remember that dramatic scene from the film where Ryan is being lowered from a hovering chopper onto the submarine USS Dallas, and as the chopper captain is trying to call off the drop, Ryan deliberately squirms out of his harness and drops into the frigid North Atlantic so the sub crew will have to rescue him and he'll get on board? Yeah. That whole scene never happened. It was invented purely for added melodrama on screen, which is totally unnecessary in a story with this much drama already in it.
Film is better: There are exactly two things the film does better. It captures and brings to life the atmosphere inside a sub on a mission – the intensely cramped quarters crammed with banks of equipment, and men jostling by each other as they do their jobs. And it avoids the long, drawn-out, Tolkienesque denouement of the book, where the big showdown with the bad guy occurs about the 2/3 mark. It reminded me intensely of sitting in the theater for Return of the King, and there's a triumphant scene where Sauron is defeated, and the armies of Mordor are swallowed up by a great crack in the earth. A little girl sitting in front of me happily shouted, “The end!” And in a lot of other stories, she would have been right. But noooo, there was still an hour of film left in which Sam and Frodo went home to the Shire only to discover it infested with orcs. The final third of THFRO, book version, is pretty much exactly like that.
The sexual politics of military novels. As I read this giant of the genre, published in 1984, I couldn't help comparing it in my mind to a more recent imitator that I read not long ago, Patrick Robinson's [b:Nimitz Class|42622|Nimitz Class (Admiral Arnold Morgan, #1)|Patrick Robinson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1169882269l/42622._SY75_.jpg|42098]. It's not surprising that neither book features any significant female characters, set as they are in the upper echelons of one of the great remaining boys' clubs, so no, of course they don't pass the Bechdel test. And the Bechdel test isn't the end-all be-all of every piece of writing; it's just a metric. But what's notable is that back in 1984, Clancy could imagine a US military where female soldiers, sailors, airmen and even junior officers as well as CIA agents were occasionally seen here and there, although they weren't major characters and mostly didn't have names. Thirteen years later, when women had a more visible presence in all branches of the real-life US military, Robinson chose to pack all the women back to the homefront, where they did nothing but clean the house and fix the meals. Not a female yeoman in sight.
It's also notable that Clancy's now-famous hero Jack Ryan was always a family man and was never designed to be a swashbuckling uber-macho get-the-girl sort of action hero, although Hollywood later did its best to remake him. He's a mild-mannered analyst and naval history buff who has never done field work, is scared of flying, is prone to seasickness, and spends most of the story nervous, anxious, or outright scared. He's there not on his own initiative, but because he got orders straight from the White House that he couldn't refuse. Compare him to Robinson's hero Bill Baldridge, one of the most absurd manifestations of machismo since Superman.
There were a lot of funny archaisms of the type you might find in any book published in 1984, like people tearing reams of computer output off dot matrix printers, or wiring Moscow for instructions instead of emailing, etc. It's curious how we find the archaisms of the 1940s charming and the market for WWII novels has never flagged, but things from the 80s like dot matrix printers and Atari computers just seem vaguely sad unless it involves the pop culture of the 80s. It made me wonder if there's a point in time when a given era becomes old enough to seem exotic. It seems like it's just been in the last 5 years or so leading up to 2020 that the 1970s started to regain some cachet (by which I mean muscle cars, facial hair, and kung fu movies, not macrame pants), so maybe in 10 more years the 1980s qualities of this story will begin to seem exotic and not just dated.
But I was simply depressed at Clancy's rosy description of America to the defecting Russian officers as a place where anyone with a brain and willingness to work can make a comfortable life. It wasn't true in 1984, and it's just an appalling bad joke now, in a land where brains and hard work can just as easily get you nowhere.
The film version is one of those relatively rare films that's widely hailed as being at least as good as, and maybe better than, the book. So immediately after finishing the book, I sat down and watched the film. I am here to tell you that in most ways, the book is still better.
Book is better: It's simply impossible to tell the whole story of a full-length novel in the space of a 2-hour film, so massive compression and simplification of the plot is inevitable. In the film, everything happens at breakneck speed and there's no time for all the nuances that unfold at a stately pace in the book, particularly things like delving into Ramius's background to get at his ultimate motivations, the slow unfolding of his plan to fool everyone, and why that one guy in the film is suddenly shooting at everyone. The film is also full of corny underwater shots of submarines passing each other seemingly mere meters apart, which I'm fairly certain is baloney. And remember that dramatic scene from the film where Ryan is being lowered from a hovering chopper onto the submarine USS Dallas, and as the chopper captain is trying to call off the drop, Ryan deliberately squirms out of his harness and drops into the frigid North Atlantic so the sub crew will have to rescue him and he'll get on board? Yeah. That whole scene never happened. It was invented purely for added melodrama on screen, which is totally unnecessary in a story with this much drama already in it.
Film is better: There are exactly two things the film does better. It captures and brings to life the atmosphere inside a sub on a mission – the intensely cramped quarters crammed with banks of equipment, and men jostling by each other as they do their jobs. And it avoids the long, drawn-out, Tolkienesque denouement of the book, where the big showdown with the bad guy occurs about the 2/3 mark. It reminded me intensely of sitting in the theater for Return of the King, and there's a triumphant scene where Sauron is defeated, and the armies of Mordor are swallowed up by a great crack in the earth. A little girl sitting in front of me happily shouted, “The end!” And in a lot of other stories, she would have been right. But noooo, there was still an hour of film left in which Sam and Frodo went home to the Shire only to discover it infested with orcs. The final third of THFRO, book version, is pretty much exactly like that.
The sexual politics of military novels. As I read this giant of the genre, published in 1984, I couldn't help comparing it in my mind to a more recent imitator that I read not long ago, Patrick Robinson's [b:Nimitz Class|42622|Nimitz Class (Admiral Arnold Morgan, #1)|Patrick Robinson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1169882269l/42622._SY75_.jpg|42098]. It's not surprising that neither book features any significant female characters, set as they are in the upper echelons of one of the great remaining boys' clubs, so no, of course they don't pass the Bechdel test. And the Bechdel test isn't the end-all be-all of every piece of writing; it's just a metric. But what's notable is that back in 1984, Clancy could imagine a US military where female soldiers, sailors, airmen and even junior officers as well as CIA agents were occasionally seen here and there, although they weren't major characters and mostly didn't have names. Thirteen years later, when women had a more visible presence in all branches of the real-life US military, Robinson chose to pack all the women back to the homefront, where they did nothing but clean the house and fix the meals. Not a female yeoman in sight.
It's also notable that Clancy's now-famous hero Jack Ryan was always a family man and was never designed to be a swashbuckling uber-macho get-the-girl sort of action hero, although Hollywood later did its best to remake him. He's a mild-mannered analyst and naval history buff who has never done field work, is scared of flying, is prone to seasickness, and spends most of the story nervous, anxious, or outright scared. He's there not on his own initiative, but because he got orders straight from the White House that he couldn't refuse. Compare him to Robinson's hero Bill Baldridge, one of the most absurd manifestations of machismo since Superman.
There were a lot of funny archaisms of the type you might find in any book published in 1984, like people tearing reams of computer output off dot matrix printers, or wiring Moscow for instructions instead of emailing, etc. It's curious how we find the archaisms of the 1940s charming and the market for WWII novels has never flagged, but things from the 80s like dot matrix printers and Atari computers just seem vaguely sad unless it involves the pop culture of the 80s. It made me wonder if there's a point in time when a given era becomes old enough to seem exotic. It seems like it's just been in the last 5 years or so leading up to 2020 that the 1970s started to regain some cachet (by which I mean muscle cars, facial hair, and kung fu movies, not macrame pants), so maybe in 10 more years the 1980s qualities of this story will begin to seem exotic and not just dated.
But I was simply depressed at Clancy's rosy description of America to the defecting Russian officers as a place where anyone with a brain and willingness to work can make a comfortable life. It wasn't true in 1984, and it's just an appalling bad joke now, in a land where brains and hard work can just as easily get you nowhere.
3.5 stars
Finally read the hot new book of...1984. The year I was born! It was a lot better than I was expecting for a book entirely about submarines with zero female characters. (But it was still full of a lot of boring technical jargon about submarines and male hero fantasies.)
Finally read the hot new book of...1984. The year I was born! It was a lot better than I was expecting for a book entirely about submarines with zero female characters. (But it was still full of a lot of boring technical jargon about submarines and male hero fantasies.)
This is the book that put Tom Clancy on the map. Not the first one he wrote, but it was the first one that was published...and the narrative that Clancy wrote is so tightly woven that one can feel themselves in the confines of the various ships and submarines described. This is what first demonstrated Clancy's mastery of the political thriller.
At issue is the missing submarine, Red October, and the intentions of the crew. Do they wish to go rogue and attack or provoke an attack? Are they operating on the orders of the Soviet premier? Are they defecting? From the outside, it is unclear what Captain Marko Ramius has planned, but all parties involved start moving naval pieces around in the case of armed conflict.
It is here that Jack Ryan truly proves his mettle as a CIA analyst-cum-field operative--looking at the data on the sub and coming to several conclusions that ultimately prove to be correct. Additionally, the CIA is finally able to smoke out "CASSIUS," a previously unknown KGB agent (first mentioned in Without Remorse and detailed further in Red Rabbit, bringing an intriguing line to a close.
Most people will be able to read this very fast paced thriller in short order and it is certainly worth the time investment.
At issue is the missing submarine, Red October, and the intentions of the crew. Do they wish to go rogue and attack or provoke an attack? Are they operating on the orders of the Soviet premier? Are they defecting? From the outside, it is unclear what Captain Marko Ramius has planned, but all parties involved start moving naval pieces around in the case of armed conflict.
It is here that Jack Ryan truly proves his mettle as a CIA analyst-cum-field operative--looking at the data on the sub and coming to several conclusions that ultimately prove to be correct. Additionally, the CIA is finally able to smoke out "CASSIUS," a previously unknown KGB agent (first mentioned in Without Remorse and detailed further in Red Rabbit, bringing an intriguing line to a close.
Most people will be able to read this very fast paced thriller in short order and it is certainly worth the time investment.
You can read my review at http://tims-reviews.blogspot.com/2017/04/book-review-35-hunt-for-red-october.html.
adventurous
informative
slow-paced
adventurous
tense
medium-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
Not really my thing to be honest, but I appreciate the writing and amount of studying that it took to write this book.
The first time I read a Tom Clancy novel I was in high school, and not particularly impressed. I had liked the book, overall, but I didn't think that the build up was worth slogging through to get to the ending. Well, it had been a long time since that first book, and I decided to give the author another chance. I have grown and matured some since high school (hopefully), and I've also had more experience with harder to read adult books. My parents recommended The Hunt for Red October, and I set about reading it.
I truly, genuinely, absolutely enjoyed this book. It took about 75 pages to really grip me, but as soon as it did I began to have a hard time putting it down. It was an engaging read, though not necessarily a quick one, and the story was only part of that. The characters were incredibly interesting, and I greatly enjoyed how much of the cast got a chance to share their perspective throughout the book. Jack Ryan was very interesting, and for once a action/thriller main character who is not a womanizer/superhero! I liked that Ryan had things he was simply not good at, and that he had to learn from and listen to others. Also, the commander of Red October was an amazing character, who was intricate and interesting, and you could really understand his motivation. That is just a few of the characters, but I assure you that the others were also interesting and fleshed out.
I think one of the reasons I did not originally enjoy Tom Clancy all those years ago is because of how detailed he is when it comes to describing and explaining the things in his story. Each plane, ship, and submarine is explained in far more detail that I originally anticipated, and I can understand why as a young reader I had a hard time with it. Even now, as an adult, I found it at times hard to slog through. But by and large the information was important, and it helped me feel very informed as an admittedly entirely uninformed person when it comes to the military, ships and planes, and how anything works on them. It was fascinating.
The plot was incredibly gripping. There were times I gasped out loud, times I was on the edge of my seat, times I laughed. It was well structured into several acts. As I approached what I thought was the end, I was broadsided by another stunning action scene. This book was wonderful, and I would gladly read it again. Maybe I will have to pick up another Tom Clancy novel.
I truly, genuinely, absolutely enjoyed this book. It took about 75 pages to really grip me, but as soon as it did I began to have a hard time putting it down. It was an engaging read, though not necessarily a quick one, and the story was only part of that. The characters were incredibly interesting, and I greatly enjoyed how much of the cast got a chance to share their perspective throughout the book. Jack Ryan was very interesting, and for once a action/thriller main character who is not a womanizer/superhero! I liked that Ryan had things he was simply not good at, and that he had to learn from and listen to others. Also, the commander of Red October was an amazing character, who was intricate and interesting, and you could really understand his motivation. That is just a few of the characters, but I assure you that the others were also interesting and fleshed out.
I think one of the reasons I did not originally enjoy Tom Clancy all those years ago is because of how detailed he is when it comes to describing and explaining the things in his story. Each plane, ship, and submarine is explained in far more detail that I originally anticipated, and I can understand why as a young reader I had a hard time with it. Even now, as an adult, I found it at times hard to slog through. But by and large the information was important, and it helped me feel very informed as an admittedly entirely uninformed person when it comes to the military, ships and planes, and how anything works on them. It was fascinating.
The plot was incredibly gripping. There were times I gasped out loud, times I was on the edge of my seat, times I laughed. It was well structured into several acts. As I approached what I thought was the end, I was broadsided by another stunning action scene. This book was wonderful, and I would gladly read it again. Maybe I will have to pick up another Tom Clancy novel.