The one and only Tom Clancy book I ever read was Without Remorse, and it was enjoyable enough for me to get through. Mainly because I was spending hours waiting around in a hospital during the days I plowed through it and I needed something to put into my head.
Anyway, how does that book stack up against the cream of the crap y’all are denigrating here? If I were to pick up a recent book by Clancy, how badly would I be disappointed? (Well, disappointed relative to the book of his I’ve read, not disappointed relative to the books I usually read.)
Derleth I think you’d be quite dissapointed. I used to quite enjoy Tom Clancy books until I recently tried Teeth of the Tiger. At first I thought that the Iraq invasion and subsequent demonstration of the US intelligence agencies fallibility had made the premise of that book utterly un realistic, I could not suspend my disbelief. But I eventually realised that it’s just really badly written. Particularly the parts where the two guys are deciding whether to take on their new job or not:
“Gee I don’t much like the idea of killing people without knowing what they’ve done”
“Yeah but the government knows that they need to be dead and they are never wrong”
“Good point, ok lets do it.”
I would never bad-mouth Richard and Warren. I’m talking about some of the tripe put out by the hack writers Tin Pigeon has hired in recent years, such as Bamboo Dragon.
Yep, that’s it. I knew it was one of those made into a movie, but all I could come up with was “Clear and Present Danger”–and I knew that wasn’t it.
I have a couple more of his books sitting on a shelf around my house (Goodwill: interested in a book but don’t want to pay full price? Get it for 50 cents in paperback!), but after that first book, there was no way I felt I could get away with picking through another of his novels.
I never used to read military/espionage thrillers, but I stumbled across Ludlum’s Bourne trilogy at a Goodwill store ten or so years ago, and I enjoyed them so much more than I expected that I picked up some Clancy books, too. It wasn’t the same experience.
The books have gotten WAY too big. The only saving grace of Teeth of the Tiger is that it is no longer than Red October. Red Rabbit would have been OK at half the length.
It seemed to me that Executive Orders and Rainbow Six should have been three books (of reasonable length), one dealing with Ryan becoming President, one dealing with the anti-terrorism team, and one dealing with biological warfare. Split up like that, it would have made much more sense.
My biggest gripe with Bear and the Dragon was that there was no need for Nomuri to seduce Ming. In fact, doing so puts them both at unnecessary risk.
Nomuri’s cover was as the salesman/technical rep for Ming’s computer. Instead of taking her into his confidence and asking her to put the spyware on her computer, he could have given it to her as a routine patch, leaving her completely ignorant.
This would have been just as effective and much safer. Of course, it would have eliminated the sex scenes – but his previous novels didn’t need them, so why start now?
Are you forgetting about Debt of Honor and the super-uber Japanese AWACS planes?
I’m also pretty sick of hearing how Ding Chavez is just a poor [insert slang for Hispanic] from the barrio but he’s such a fucking genius! He can talk about complex issues in street slang! Holy fuck! noone else alive can do that!
You mean “Executive Orders”, actually. But yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I have a pet theory that once an author actually publishes a book that’s more than 1000 pages long, without breaking it into volumes like Tolkein did, it’s time to never read that author again. “Executive Orders” is exhibit A.
I too looked at Rainbow Six as the point at which Clancy had jumped the shark. However, even in the latter few books that I did like, I found myself being distracted by the tech specs Clancy fills the books with, and in particular the (seems like several) paragraphs he spent in one book describing the specs of a coffee mug used by some ship’s commanding officer.
I haven’t read anything of his since then, IIRC. In retrospect, if his characters were ever anything other than two dimensional and robotic, I can’t recall it.
Man I’m always late to the party. I’d forgotten I read Tiger until the spoilers, not that I forgot the story, but that I’d forgotten the name, which was unusual for me in a Tom Clancy book. Anyway it’s not just Clancy, all the right wing authors are doing it, I just started reading a Stephen Coonts story, within the first 30 pages you’ve got the obligatory slight at the Left, Technobabble and a huge blow job to our intelligence services. I think the election of Bush has caused all these guys to start mastubating on their keyboards.
[QUOTE=CynicalGabe]
Are you forgetting about Debt of Honor and the super-uber Japanese AWACS planes?/QUOTE]No, while bloated, Debt of Honor was a reasonably self-contained story. Yes, the ending was a cliffhanger, setting up the next book, but the novel overall was concerned with one thing, the war with Japan. Cool concept, but, Jeeze, Clancy really needs an editor with cojones enough to tell him to cut it by a third or more!
Executive Orders and Rainbox Six on the other hand, muddled several plots together, including the ascention to the Presidency of Clancy’s alter ego, biological warfare, and the anti-terrorism team. It seems to me that each theme could and should have had its own (shorter) book.
Mind you, I have no objection to subplots, but these three plots are large enough, and were developed enough, to exceed the “sub”. Speaking of subs, does it occur to anyone else that Clancy always manages to squeeze in a submarine somewhere in each book, even if there is no real reason for it?
Here’s what I think happened to Tom Clancy: From the get-go he was a bad writer blessed with the good fortune to land a very good editor.
Then a bunch of his books sell like hotcakes, and the next thing you know he’s thinking he’s a flippin writing god and fires said editor.
The books quickly go to crap.
I would say Rainbow Six was where it became totally apparent, but I think there were signs that it was happening earlier. I thought that Without Remorse got a bit redundant, with all the female characters winding up getting raped then murdered over and over again. It would’ve been good to have someone to say “Ya know, Tom, I think one rape/murder would be enough to drive a man through the whole book, you don’t need to kill off an entire whorehouse worth of hookers-with-hearts-of-gold to get your point across.”
Anne Rice also has the problem of thinking she’s so good she doesn’t need an editor.
Cool - just yesterday I was trying to pry this word from the recesses of my brain (probably a thought train related to the customer service at Walmart, or something) and just couldn’t come up with.
Also - has it occurred to anyone else that entire US Government operation seems to be run by less than 20 middle-aged guys (and Chavez) whose lives seem to be remarkably intertwined?
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, CLANCY! PEOPLE ARE INTELLIGENT ENOUGH TO GET TO KNOW SOME NEW CHARACTERS!
I found that the quality of Clancy’s writing dropped off markedly after Executive Orders. Possibly a coincidence, but isn’t that near when his divorce started?
Well, that may be why there’s more sex in his most recent books… either he’s not gettin’ any, and taking it out in his books, or he’s finally getting some, and it’s showing up in the books. Either is possible.
I skipped pages and pages of Executive Orders. Whenever he started explaining the obvious ways to fix the problems of government, I turned the pages pretty fast. More than once in Rainbow Six somewhere would say “Mind if I light up?”, and the answer would be “Sure, go ahead. I’m no health nazi.” Bleah. The action scenes were still rather exciting but the rest of it was crap. The Bear and the Dragon was a really long set up for the short battle scenes at the end where the techno-wizards pulled out the cool weapons. Poor silly Chinese. I’ve almost picked up Red Rabbit, but I just can’t.
The right wing politics he put in everyone’s mouth as obvious truths I find annoying. And his complete distaste for enlisted personnel and “uneducated” people I find tiresome. Chavez gets ahead and gets a master’s degree. All the great people have advanced degrees or are officers. Also bleah.
