About 25 Years Too Late, But Still Good

Well, I read Red Storm Rising (here) about 25 years after it came out and was a best seller, but it still had a lot going for it after all these years. One of the things I really liked about this book is that he wrote it without a primary main character. Sure this is Toland and Sergetov (two major characters) but unlike Hunt for Red October and Patriot Games et al, all the action in this book happens without the presence of Jack Ryan. I liked that. I found it refreshing. It makes me think that Tom Clancy hadn't yet been harangued by his editor/agent that he had to have a central character for readers to glom onto and relate with.

This feature of the book reminds me of the first time I saw Die Hard. I thought, what a great premise for a series of movies in which the main character in each story refuses to give up. I didn't think it should feature Bruce Willis in each movie. I mean how unrealistic that one guy would be put into all those different situations. This is why I dig Dick Francis novels. I think he made two novels with repeat main characters and yet he continued to be a prolific and popular author.

Nevertheless, I really liked Red Storm Rising and it has re-inspired me to go back and read some of the other Tom Clancy's I've missed. In terms of the "techno-thriller" he is unmatched. Some may find it too detailed or boring but I love reading about how the loader works in a battleships guns, or how a submarine uses passive "pinging" verses active sonar and why.

I enjoyed several of his passages. I love this one below that related several of the Russian generals to lions.



Alekseyev leaned forward and swatted himself with his bundle of branches. The action was strangely like a lion’s swishing its tail. At fifty, he was the second-youngest officer there, a respected intellectual soldier and a fit, handsome man with the shoulders of a lumberjack. His intense, dark eyes squinted down through the rising cloud of steam. “Mid-June?”

At one point he writes from a Naval Captain's point of view about the merchant marine fleet that is being used for convoy duty. As much as I liked the analogy above I thought this one was especially cringe inducing.



Of those, a mere 103 were routinely engaged in overseas trade. The supplemental National Defense Reserve Fleet consisted of only 172 cargo ships. To call the situation a disgrace was to describe gang rape as a mild social deviation. They couldn’t allow even one to be lost. Morris wandered over to the bridge radarscope

Then this one caught my eye. In context its not too heavy-handed but it provides a nice glimpse both into the general condition of the battle in Europe but also the weariness of the commander.


A field hospital was in the trees five hundred meters away, and the wind carried the shrieks of the wounded to the command post. Not like that in the movies he’d watched as a child— and still watched. The wounded were supposed to suffer in quiet, determined dignity, puffing on cigarettes proffered by the kindly, hardworking medics, waiting their turn for the courageous, hardworking surgeons and the pretty, dedicated nurses. A fucking lie, all of it a monstrous fucking lie, he told himself. The profession for which he had prepared his life was organized murder. He sent boys with pimples on their faces into a landscape rained on with steel and watered with blood. The burns were the worst. The tank crews who escaped from their brewed-up vehicles with their clothes alight— they never stopped screaming. Those killed by shock or the pistol of a merciful officer were only replaced by more. The lucky ones who reached the casualty-clearing stations found medics too busy to offer cigarettes, and doctors who were dropping from fatigue. 


Finally, this next one grabbed me for its particularly startling last line. I took a second look and thought you should too.


Alekseyev waved for Major Sergetov to follow him. Only he felt the cold lead weight in his belly. Only he knew how weak his knees were as they trod down the marble steps. Alekseyev didn’t believe in God, but he knew that he had just seen the door to hell cracked open. “Major,” he said casually

All in all, a great and terrific book and I can't wait to get a few smaller novels under my belt so I can go back and read another Clancy.