buffoonery's Full Review: Tom Clancy - Rainbow Six
This is the last (until "The Bear and the Dragon" is released this summer) of my series of Tom Clancy reviews. (Real novels only, please-no non-fiction and certainly none of that wretched OpCenter/NetForce bilge.) In "Rainbow Six", Clancy finally gives us a rest from the Olympian Jack Ryan saga, whose rise from CIA policy wonk to President of the United States and All-American boy left us all a bit breathless.
Now, I've been a Clancy fan ever since "Hunt for Red October" was released. The first four or five books were terrific. Since then, with the exception of "Without Remorse", he's been indulging in his Jack Ryan fantasy, letting Ryan do all the cool and heroic stuff that Tom wanted to do but couldn't because he was selling insurance. So I was waiting for Ryan to shake to dust off his shoes and give his loyal readers some action. I hoped that "Rainbow Six" would be that book.
Wrong.
In "Rainbow Six", the good news is that we don't have the Ryan fantasy to deal with. The bad news is… that we don't have the Ryan fantasy to deal with. That's because this novel is really, really dreadful, when it isn't being frightfully silly.
The novel centers on the operations of an elite international force of counterterrorist agents in which the well known dance team of Mr. Clark and Ding Chavez play a central role. After frustrating an attempted airliner hijacking, they go to and fro across Europe, shooting up assorted bad guys. Some of these events are almost exciting. If they had been more skillfully handled, we might even have gotten a novel here.
However, one's hopes are cruelly dashed. It seems that these terrorist events are being orchestrated by some real bad guys who make the mass murderers in the Kremlin and the Forbidden City look like a bunch of pikers. Yep, we're talking about environmentalists here. Now, truth-in-packaging alert: I hold no brief for the green movement and, without going into detail and for fear of offending some of my left-leaning readers, suffice it to say that the most polite adjectives I can use to describe it are "alarmist" and "coercive" (although I will without fear of retribution state that I condemn its prescribed methods of population control, most specifically abortion). But even I don't think that the Sierra Club is ready to exterminate the human race. PETA, maybe, but not the Sierra Club. Not yet, anyway.
Alas, that is the purpose of the greeners in this novel: in order to save the planet, the human race must die, using the quick-and-easy method pioneered in "Twelve Monkeys". Clancy gets to have a lot of fun caricaturing (or maybe not so caricaturing) the evil greeners. Clancy's fun is the reader's boredom. Like I said, I hold no brief for these people, but I also demand some credibility in my novels. I would have preferred to see less politicizing and more believability.
Inside this umpteen page tome is maybe a tight 350-page anti-terrorist shoot-up-the-bad-guys thriller. As noted, the terrorist incidents in the first half of the book aren't bad. The rest of the book, as our yeomen spy hounds track down their Luddite opponents, is a yawner. The conclusion is an absurd fantasy.
A couple of years ago, Clancy was quoted as saying that he thought the techno-thriller genre was played out. He may be right. The few books I've read over the past couple of years have tedious, incompetently written bores and I have pretty much given up on the lot. But I'll give Clancy one more chance. This summer's book appears to be the Russian/Chinese conflict that has been brewing over the past couple of Jack Ryan novels. I'll review that upon publication.
You've got one more chance, Tom.
One star. I don't even recommend that fans read this one.
Here is a complete listing of my Jack Ryan reviews:
Ex-Navy SEAL John Clark--the man who conducts the secret operational missions that Jack Ryan can t be a part of--faces his greatest fear with Rainbow ...More at Buy.com
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