Product Description

Jack Ryan's first days with the CIA may be the Pope's last days alive.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #66464 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-29
• Released on: 2003-07-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 656 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780425191187
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
There's not a shot fired until page 602 in Clancy's lumbering new thriller, and readers up on their history will know the outcome of that shot on page 17. What comes in between is a slow-moving but, given Clancy's astonishing flair for fly-on-the-wall writing, steadily absorbing imagining of the back story behind Mehmet Ali Agca's (real-life) failed attempt on the life of Pope John II in 1981. By going back 21 years, Clancy provides a fresh adventure for a young Jack Ryan, but Ryan fans (and presumably Ben Affleck) may be surprised to learn that Ryan is, until the final scenes, only a supporting player here. The book's main heroes are the husband-and-wife team of Ed Foley, CIA station chief in Moscow, and his agent-wife, Mary Pat, and Oleg Zaitzev (code-named Rabbit), the mid-level employee in the KGB communications department who for conscience's sake decides to defect to America when he's asked to encrypt messages that reveal a plot, under the auspices of then-KGB chief Yuri Andropov, to kill the pope in response to the pontiff's secret letter threatening to resign the papacy and to return to Poland to resist Soviet domination. In real life, the pope wrote such a letter, and analysts have long speculated that the Soviets, via Bulgarian controllers, dispatched Agca to kill him. It's utterly fascinating to read Clancy's playing out of that likely scenario is there a writer in the world who brings so much verisimilitude to scenes both high (Politburo meetings) and low (details of spy craft and everyday Soviet life)? But while Clancy delivers a believable and encyclopedic version of real-life events, the suspense is minimal a disappointment when other writers (Forsyth in Day of the Jackal, for one) have shown that there can be enough tension in a fated-to-fail assassination plot to give a stroke to a yoga master.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Clancy returns to Jack Ryan's first days in the CIA, when the fate of the free world hung in the balance as Ryan discovered a heinous plot to assassinate the Pope. Clancy is so big that this new novel merits a special limited edition (ISBN 0-399-14914-7. $150).
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Inside Flap
4 cassettes, 6 hours

Tom Clancy returns to Jack Ryan's early days, in an extraordinary novel of global political drama.

"Smart and likable, Jack Ryan has become one of the best-known
characters in contemporary American fiction." –The Washington Post

L
ong before he was President or head of the CIA, before he fought terrorist attacks on the Super Bowl or the White House, even before a submarine named Red October made its perilous way across the Atlantic, Jack Ryan was an historian, teacher, and recent ex-Marine temporarily living in England while researching a book. A series of deadly encounters with an IRA splinter group had brought him to the attention of the CIA's Deputy Director, Vice Admiral James Greer–as well as his counterpart with the British SIS, Sir Basil Charleston–and when Greer asked him if he wanted to come aboard as a freelance analyst, Jack was quick to accept. The opportunity was irresistible, and he was sure he could fit it in with the rest of his work.
And then Jack forgot all about the rest of his work, because one of his first assignments was to help debrief a high-level Soviet defector, and the defector told an amazing tale: Top Soviet officials, including Yuri Andropov, were planning to assassinate the Pope, John Paul II.
Could it be true? As the days and weeks go by, Ryan must battle, first to try to confirm the plot, and then to prevent it, but this is a brave new world, and nothing he has done up to now has prepared him for the lethal game of cat-and-mouse that is the Soviet Union versus the United States. In the end, it will be not just the Pope's life but the stability of the Western world that is at stake. . . and it may already be too late for a novice CIA analyst to do anything about it.
"Clancy creates not only compelling characters but frighteningly topical situations and heart-stopping action," wrote The Washington Post about The Bear and the Dragon. "Among the handful of superstars, Clancy still reigns, and he is not likely to be dethroned any time soon." These words were never truer than about the remarkable pages of his breathtaking new novel. This is Clancy at his best–and there is none better.
TOM CLANCY lives in Maryland.

Customer Reviews

Save some time and just read this
Save some time and just read this:

While sleeping the sleep of the just he looked at his wife, the eye cutter, and asked himself, "How many divisions does the Pope have?" which made him realize that little girls give the best hugs. Suddenly he recalled that the KGB had roasted a traitor alive and made a film of it so he decided to buy some Starbucks stock before it was available. Then the Pope didn't get killed.

Now read it again and again and again.

Clancy keeps getting worse
When I heard that Clancy wrote a book that was set back in the 80's Cold War era again I was hopeful that he could regain some of his earlier writing success. Not that I was hopeful for his well-being, but more that he would start writing books that were as enjoyable as the ones he wrote early in his career (Red Storm Rising, Patriot Games, Hunt for Red October, etc.). If Red Rabbit was an attempt at reliving the early years then he failed miserably.

Red Rabbit focuses on the spy game that was so prevalent during the Cold War 80's between the Soviets and the British/Americans. Attempting to relieve political pressure from the Pope and remind Poland who's boss, the Soviets decide to assassinate the Pope. Having read previous Clancy books I assumed that this was the catalyst and that the plot would promptly fill in around it. That was my first mistake (and possibly Clancy's too). Instead of moving on with the details of the assassination and the West's attempt to prevent it, the story completely switches gears, now attempting to highlight an unremarkable character in KGB agent Oleg Zaitzev that has an attack of conscience and decides to defect with his family and some very sensitive information. On a sidenote, how can Clancy possibily expect the reader to believe in the shear coincidence of Zaitzev arbitrarily choosing a person on the subway to help with his defection because the guy looked like an American, when in fact he's actually chosen the CIA chief of station in Moscow. Lucky guess, right?

My second mistake was assuming that the story would right itself and get back on track with what seemed to be more interesting, the prevention of the assassination. Instead the pace of the books slows considerably while the focus has shifted to the defector. Plans are made by the CIA and SIS to help him defect and then the plan is executed. What's the problem, you ask? We appear to be missing an antagonist. At one point the defecting family is attending a classical concert in Budapest which had been hyped up earlier in the book as though it was going to be a focal point of the story, perhaps even the setting for the climax. Wrong again. The reader gets the impression that a climax is near when the story starts jumping around frequently from Ryan to Zaitzev to the CIA in Washington, etc. Unfortunately, nothing ever comes of this, namely because the KGB isn't chasing Zaitzev, and it makes you wonder why Clancy just wasted 50 pages on this concert. This story suffered from an extremely feeble plot with little or no climax in the end.

Aside from a weak plot, the book has some other major flaws, one of which is new to Clancy, some of which are not. The new one (of which I don't recall this in his earlier novels) is his remarkable redundancies. From vocabulary to concepts, and character quirks to character titles, Clancy seems to forget that he's already used a particular word (i.e. capacious or ignominy) where even the most common word would have worked in its stead (i.e. spacious or disgrace). Then you have his seemingly unending references to Jack Ryan as a former Marine. Ryan reflects on it often himself, but it became just plain overkill when every time the scene shifted to the boys back at the CIA (they were naturally talking about Jack Ryan every time as though the CIA didn't have any more pressing issues) they'd have to justify his position in the CIA by referring to his stint in the Marine Corps (apparently all Marines are fit for the CIA). Okay, we know he was a Marine, now let's try focusing on a plot. Then you've got "Sir John" and "Lady Ryan". The couple, knighted in the novel "Patriot Games", routinely refer to each other by these titles even though they constantly claim to some sort of aversion to them. While addressing Ed Foley, Clancy will arbitrarily refer to him as "Chief of Station, Moscow," in the middle of a paragraph as though you may have forgotten his position. And how many times does he need to reassure us that Cathy Ryan won't have a glass of wine the night before she's due in surgery or that Jack Ryan doesn't like to fly?

By far the largest fault of this book and the reason it will never measure up to his earlier work, is his nonstop bragging about his characters. Where character or plot development could be taking place, Clancy chooses to continue with lengthy descriptions of his characters personal lives and undying love for their spouses, etc. And when I say character development, I don't mean further developing the same old tired characters that he should have retired 15 years ago, I mean he should be introducing new characters. Clancy boasts about his characters throughout the novel as though they were his own children and he's constantly touting their resume as though someone might question the reputations of these fictionally flawless people. His overuse of Jack Ryan has reached a new high in this novel. Throughout the book, the scene was continually switching between the Foleys in Moscow, the CIA in Washington, and the Ryan family in London. After about 350 pages I started to notice that Jack Ryan served no purpose whatsoever, yet Clancy kept including him and his wife as though their input was relevant to something. Eventually you realize that he is going to be used, even though it feels like it is being completely forced in poor literary fashion, just to keep Jack included in the novel. But if his relevance doesn't begin until page 400, then it makes you wonder why Clancy wasted so much text early on. Parental pride? It gives the story a ham-handed predictability that segregates this book from his earlier, successful novels.

I used to enjoy Clancy novels and I had high hopes that Red Rabbit might take on the appearance of his previous spy thrillers, but it is merely a 600+ page attempt at conveying a lackluster story that could have been told in 250 pages and even then would have been mediocre.

Jack Without a Hammer
Clancy has many, many Jack Ryan fans, fans who keep demanding more and more about their favorite character. But Clancy has run into a problem: he has already written Jack into the highest post in the land in previous books, and it is difficult to see how he can continue along his fictional future history and keep expanding Jack's role, much like the problem the writers of Superman comics had when Superman became effectively all powerful. So for this book at least, Clancy has sidestepped the problem by returning us to the days when Jack was just a freshly hired analyst for the CIA. Of course, in this role Jack can't be the prime mover of events, which may disappoint his fans, but at least they get to see a little more of Jack, along with another story of adventure and spy-craft.

This story revolves around a Soviet plot to assassinate the Pope, a story crafted around the real events of 1981 (though Clancy takes some liberties with actual dates and concurrent events). Here again this is something of a departure, as Clancy is effectively updating and changing his future history to match the events of the real world, making this book somewhat inconsistent with earlier books in the series. Whether the shooting of Pope was actually plotted by the Soviets is still a matter of conjecture, but it is certainly plausible as the basis for this story. The action revolves around trying to get Oleg Zaitzev, a KGB communications specialist who has critical information about this plot, and his family out of Russia.

With these basic elements, it should have been easy to craft a taught, exciting thriller. Especially as Clancy has finally dropped his penchant for having page after page of extreme technical detail interrupting the story flow. But this story does not achieve very much in the way of excitement or suspense at all. I found that all the actions by the various people involved were accomplished way too easily, just about everything goes according to plan. Even the ruse to make it appear that Zaitzev has died rather than defected comes off as just another day at the office, even if it is rather gruesome. This may be closer to the real world of the CIA and KGB, but it doesn't provide for a great reading experience.

I also found Zaitzev's attack of conscience, his reason for defecting, just a little too rapid and convenient to be thoroughly convincing. Andropov's portrayed character (at that time head of the KGB) was a little more believable as a pragmatic and coldly calculating man. Jack is still Jack, and Clancy did a good job of returning to the Jack of the eighties, a little unsure of his value to the CIA and his importance in the world, a little more impetuous than he would later become.

At best, this is an average spy novel, with too little suspense to be really absorbing, even if well written. A must for Ryan fans, others can skip this one.