08/22/2002 Entry: ""
Posted by Maynard @ 02:53 PM MST
Red Rabbit
Tom Clancy has returned to his roots. Red Rabbit is a simple story about Money, Ideology, Conscience, and Ego, set between Patriot Games and The Hunt for Red October. It has a simple, easy to follow plot, and resembles HFRO in more ways than one.
The story revolves around Oleg Zaitzev, a message secretary who works in the bowels of the KGB. When Pope John Paul II sends a letter to the USSR via the desk of the Polish President, threatening to resign the Papacy if Poland doesn't stop its human rights infringements, the KGB begins planning his assassination. The communications for this operation are handled by Zaitzev, who has an attack of his Conscience. He makes contact with the Foleys, who Clancy readers will recognize as the John Clark-trained CIA field agents who love to give The Bear trouble. The Foleys make plans to bring him out, and the fun begins. Jack Ryan plays the part of office-analyst-turned-competent-field-agent well. In the timeline the encounter with Sean Miller and Company happened only a few months before, so the memories of that are fresh in his mind and are mentioned frequently in the story.
The Money and the Ideology are central ideas that Clancy uses to fill blank pages in the book. There are several long expositions on things such as the state of the Soviet lifestyle, especially on why they do what they do and how the U.S. perceives it. Ritter, making an appearance for the first time in a long time, begins planning an economic war against the U.S.S.R. that is set up classically for another book. The Ego is shown clearly in the way Yuri Andropov directs the assassination attempt, assuming blindly that he can keep the operation a secret.
Nitpickers will have a hard time with this book. The actual assassination attempt on John Paul II was done in May 1981, but the book is set towards the end of the year, when the Orioles are playing the Phillies in the World Series. That didn't happen until 1983, but Cal Ripkin is described as a rookie. Oh well, Clancy was always more interested in the plot and characters than with making events in his world match the ones in ours.
This book is only 618 pages in hardback, making it significantly shorter than Clancy's others, by about 400 pages. In some sense, I couldn't shake the impression that this was just a rehash of The Hunt For Red October, since it involved a character who was valuable to the West defecting with a load of secrets, Jack Ryan complaining about not being a field agent, and an apparent death of a Soviet that who turned out not to be dead after all. The good thing though is that the plot of this book is not so far-fetched as some of his others. I say that with a bit of uneasiness, since few people now think that suicidal pilots destroying buildings and biological attacks on America are far-fetched. What I mean is that of all the spy stories I've heard that have come out of the Cold War, Red Rabbit seems to be more like them than any of the other Clancy stories. All the espionage actions are executed in a very professional manner, with no one but the participants noticing.
This book is far from perfect, however. There is a particularly gruesome thread involving three dead people that those with uneasy stomachs should skip over. It struck me as particularly vile, very unlike Clancy's previous work. Why he chose to go with that plot thread rather than another is beyond me. Readers familiar with the British Operation Mincemeat in World War 2 will understand what I'm talking about.
This book is well written, and Clancy fans will snatch it off the shelves. New readers will do well to skip this until they read Patriot Games.
