Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.92 AVERAGE
3.92 AVERAGE
Read on a friend's recommendation... have enjoyed other Clancy novels, but couldn't get past the dehumanization of the Vietnamese while showing Russians sympathetically. Lots of elements reflected norms of an older era.
Exciting, read with twists and turns and a good outcome
Just a good adventure thriller, was in the mood for some more or less mindless entertainment, and this provided it just fine.
Well first, I have great memories of some early Clancy books that captured what seemed to be the unique voice of highly capable and well-equipped American military and espionage warriors. This is not that. It seems like it’s got about 1/3 of a book about a Vietnam era rescue mission and fleshes it out with what feels like a not especially good Lee Childs novel about another loner/avenger. Are we all frustrated by the degree to which law enforcement is unnecessarily hobbled in its work? Sure. Do we want veterans to fill the gap through independent killing sprees? Uh-no. I see problems there. Sad shadow of Tom Clancy’s best work. Not recommended.
adventurous
dark
reflective
tense
medium-paced
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I felt that the novel was perhaps 200 pages too long. However the ending was fast and brutal, maybe by the end even Tom realized that he needed to end it quickly.
Strengths: Plotting (late period Clancy plots are impressive mechanisms). Threading the tightrope between realism and elaborate thriller setpieces. I liked how stupid mistakes drove the plot more than the usual Clancy Signature™ butterfly-effect-coincidence.
Weaknesses: Oh God. Everything else.
The politics are bad, of course. To be expected.
But worse, worse than every other shitty part of this classic of the genre
(worse than the racism; or the schematic violence; or the overlong genre-standard mid novel gore porn sequence; or the stuffy, moralizing narration; or the laughably dated social insights... worse even than the aggressively anti-erotic sex scenes; or obsessive descriptions of barely legal prostitutes with gaps between their front teeth)
is the characterization. Truly bizarre sometimes. I'll give one example:
When we meet our main character his wife has just died in a horrible accident. Before our introduction to him is over he has picked up a runaway teenage sex worker, fucked her on his boat, cried after sex, fallen in love with her, discovered that she has a (minor and currently managed) drug habit, flown into a rage over it, forced her to clean up cold turkey, pampered and groomed her, and gotten her killed – raped to death (the book describes this in detail) – through his stupidity. All this takes about three incident-packed weeks.
The entire time this has been going on the book has been assuring us that A) this is personal growth on his part B) he's the smartest, most capable manly man in every room he's ever been in and C) everything he does is cool and normal. His primary flaw is naivete: despite being an expert hunter-killer cold-blooded assassin operator type he too often sees the best in people and doesn't often enough resort to violence.
By the end of the book – six months later, tops – this will change. Our hero will have tortured a dude to death and then staged his own suicide so he can become a CIA wetworks guy. He'll also have a new wife.
I don't know if I have adequately conveyed how ludicrous this all plays on the page. It's absolutely wild. Every character is like this, too, to one degree or another. I may have made it sound interesting, or entertaining – characters so poorly written they become ironically enjoyable. 80s BBQ dad soap opera camp.
If you have so far come away with this impression, then listen to me. Please. I cannot stress this enough: it absolutely is. This book is both incredibly interesting and also hilariously entertaining. Just not in the way Tom Clancy intended.
It is also gross, and offensive, and awkwardly constructed on every level. The entertainment value is there. You just have to work for it.
Written for and by a specific kind of ultra-nationalist, misogynistic, fragile, middle-aged and church-going – but still horny – white guy, this book reads like a window into the mind of the type of suburban boomer who would eventually grow up to be a MAGA chud.
It is – more than perhaps a regular Jack Ryan political thriller – like a primer for it's genre. The book is fascinating. The roots of Scott Hovarth and Mitch Rapp are here. This is the reason every shitty series character by a TV writer or a retired SEAL goes rogue and then gets hired by some alphabet agency. John Ringo wrote a parody of this thing. Tom Clancy dropped a rip of The Punisher so influential that the Netflix TV Punisher looped back around into a rip of Tom Clancy.
This is the conservative thriller Rosetta Stone and, appropriately, it's barely readable.
Weaknesses: Oh God. Everything else.
The politics are bad, of course. To be expected.
But worse, worse than every other shitty part of this classic of the genre
(worse than the racism; or the schematic violence; or the overlong genre-standard mid novel gore porn sequence; or the stuffy, moralizing narration; or the laughably dated social insights... worse even than the aggressively anti-erotic sex scenes; or obsessive descriptions of barely legal prostitutes with gaps between their front teeth)
is the characterization. Truly bizarre sometimes. I'll give one example:
When we meet our main character his wife has just died in a horrible accident. Before our introduction to him is over he has picked up a runaway teenage sex worker, fucked her on his boat, cried after sex, fallen in love with her, discovered that she has a (minor and currently managed) drug habit, flown into a rage over it, forced her to clean up cold turkey, pampered and groomed her, and gotten her killed – raped to death (the book describes this in detail) – through his stupidity. All this takes about three incident-packed weeks.
The entire time this has been going on the book has been assuring us that A) this is personal growth on his part B) he's the smartest, most capable manly man in every room he's ever been in and C) everything he does is cool and normal. His primary flaw is naivete: despite being an expert hunter-killer cold-blooded assassin operator type he too often sees the best in people and doesn't often enough resort to violence.
By the end of the book – six months later, tops – this will change. Our hero will have tortured a dude to death and then staged his own suicide so he can become a CIA wetworks guy. He'll also have a new wife.
I don't know if I have adequately conveyed how ludicrous this all plays on the page. It's absolutely wild. Every character is like this, too, to one degree or another. I may have made it sound interesting, or entertaining – characters so poorly written they become ironically enjoyable. 80s BBQ dad soap opera camp.
If you have so far come away with this impression, then listen to me. Please. I cannot stress this enough: it absolutely is. This book is both incredibly interesting and also hilariously entertaining. Just not in the way Tom Clancy intended.
It is also gross, and offensive, and awkwardly constructed on every level. The entertainment value is there. You just have to work for it.
Written for and by a specific kind of ultra-nationalist, misogynistic, fragile, middle-aged and church-going – but still horny – white guy, this book reads like a window into the mind of the type of suburban boomer who would eventually grow up to be a MAGA chud.
It is – more than perhaps a regular Jack Ryan political thriller – like a primer for it's genre. The book is fascinating. The roots of Scott Hovarth and Mitch Rapp are here. This is the reason every shitty series character by a TV writer or a retired SEAL goes rogue and then gets hired by some alphabet agency. John Ringo wrote a parody of this thing. Tom Clancy dropped a rip of The Punisher so influential that the Netflix TV Punisher looped back around into a rip of Tom Clancy.
This is the conservative thriller Rosetta Stone and, appropriately, it's barely readable.
adventurous
dark
tense
medium-paced
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
NOOOOPPPPPEEE!!! Hard pass and moving on. I’m DNFing this guy at 8% because those 2 hours of listening time that I’ll never get back were painful. Mr. Clancy I gave you the good old college try, but at least now I know why you’re so popular with the guys.... guns, violence, boats, boobs, military things, drugs.... I mean I could go on and that was on 2 hours out of 27. No rating because I couldn’t give up on it fast enough. I swerved and tried something new, but it’s so far off the mark that I gave myself whiplash getting back into my lane.