Inspirational Technology

Review: Tom Clancy Red Rabbit

I've always enjoyed Tom Clancy's books, enough that I've read almost all of them, many twice. The last couple books have seemed to be pretty slow going in the beginning, like the first 200-300 pages. However, it's usually worth slogging through the drawn out character development in the first few hundred pages to get to the excitement at the end.

Red Rabbit starts out in the same manner, it's very slow and not particularly interesting. But then something happens, well OK, not really. In fact, through out the entire book nothing happens. No plot twists, no intrigue, no unexpected events, nothing, nada, zilch. The book is filled with banal conversation between characters about the most mundane topics: drinking coffee, watching television, shopping. Everything goes exactly as planned and nobody gets hurt. Either Tom Clancy has completely run out of ideas, or this book was written by somebody else. It's flat out horrible and a complete waste of time to read through the 1,000+ pages. In fact it's so boring that after about 600 pages I just started skimming, literally reading 2 or 3 words per page and had no trouble following what was going on. Yes, it's really that uninteresting. You get pages and pages of discussion between characters about, well ... nothing. You'll hear more interesting conversations on the street.

Oh yeah, the plot. Hmm OK, Russian's plot to kill the Pope, Russian KGB comm officer decides to defect because of his conscience after learning of the plan, contacts CIA and defects, Pope still gets shot. Yep that's about it, use the 1000 pages of the book for fire kindling or something. Thankfully I checked this one out of the library.

For a good read try The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games or Rainbow Six. Also just noticed there's a new Tom Clancy book coming next month, The Teeth of the Tiger. Boy I hope that one is better, but I'm not even sure I'll bother.