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cjelli 's review for:
Red Storm Rising
by Tom Clancy
Closer to a novelized after-action report on a wargame than a novel, occasional moments of character development aside; and if that's what you're looking for: cool! I mean that seriously: for what it is, Red Storm Rising is very good; it's better than a lot of Clancy's more recent fiction, in part because it sets aside politics and diplomacy to focus on what is surely his more focused interest of wars actually being fought. For a seven-hundred-page paperback, it remains surprisingly narrow in scope - to its credit.
Red Storm Rising falls into the zone of books that I have trouble reviewing and recommending, because its reception will depend on what you want to get out of it - if what you want is a tightly-paced and plotted war drama that errs heavily on the abstract side of strategy and tactics (circa the late 1980s), revels in competent men (and all the characters bar two, only one of whom gets point-of-view passages, are men) doing things competently, and stereotypical people doing things stereotypically, then this is unquestionably well worth reading. I read this, originally, in the early '90s, and its concerns seemed more present then; today, it's hyper-focus on technology and war-planning over politics and characters means it hasn't aged as well as it might, as those technological peaks have since been eclipsed, but the political questions it dodges remain rather live -- for example, the decision of several NATO states to ignore their Article 5 commitments gets barely half a paragraph, while we get pages and pages of detailed sonar charts. Where it delves into the personal stress of commanding a submarine, when it takes its time to touch on the PTSD that would surely affect those on the front lines, when it turns its scope more towards the human element it has held up better. But those moments are all too few.
Despite that, it's a page-turner (yes, even the sonar charts), and you can see, particularly in its earlier chapters detailing the slow build-up to war, why Clancy has managed to gain so many readers; and you can also see why his appeal has not broadened outside of his niche.
It's okay. But it's the sort of high-variance 'okay' that some people will find amazing, and others will find unreadable.
Red Storm Rising falls into the zone of books that I have trouble reviewing and recommending, because its reception will depend on what you want to get out of it - if what you want is a tightly-paced and plotted war drama that errs heavily on the abstract side of strategy and tactics (circa the late 1980s), revels in competent men (and all the characters bar two, only one of whom gets point-of-view passages, are men) doing things competently, and stereotypical people doing things stereotypically, then this is unquestionably well worth reading. I read this, originally, in the early '90s, and its concerns seemed more present then; today, it's hyper-focus on technology and war-planning over politics and characters means it hasn't aged as well as it might, as those technological peaks have since been eclipsed, but the political questions it dodges remain rather live -- for example, the decision of several NATO states to ignore their Article 5 commitments gets barely half a paragraph, while we get pages and pages of detailed sonar charts. Where it delves into the personal stress of commanding a submarine, when it takes its time to touch on the PTSD that would surely affect those on the front lines, when it turns its scope more towards the human element it has held up better. But those moments are all too few.
Despite that, it's a page-turner (yes, even the sonar charts), and you can see, particularly in its earlier chapters detailing the slow build-up to war, why Clancy has managed to gain so many readers; and you can also see why his appeal has not broadened outside of his niche.
It's okay. But it's the sort of high-variance 'okay' that some people will find amazing, and others will find unreadable.