buffoonery's Full Review: Tom Clancy - The Hunt for Red October
The first and arguably the best of Tom Clancy's thrillers, "The Hunt for Red October" set a standard for techno-fiction that has seldom been equalled and never (to my knowledge) surpassed.
Clancy allegedly wrote this between making calls as an insurance salesman using unclassified military sources such as Jane's Fighting Ships and Aviation Weekly. The rumor in some military circles is that the book was actually written by some Pentagon wonks who wanted to impress the hell out of the Soviets. That's probably just a story, but it answers in part why this was published by the U.S. Naval Institute Press instead of some mainstream house.
The plot is simple: Soviet sub commander with a grudge wants to defect with the latest edition of Soviet ballistic missile submarines, this one equipped with a propulsion drive that renders it almost undetectable. To spice up matters, he tells his superiors that he is defecting, and the hunt is on--the Soviets to sink him, the U.S. (once it figures out what is going on) to help him out.
Clancy's writing style may charitably be described as workmanlike. Given the nature of the beast, the book is filled with jargon, acronyms, and more about early 1980's weapons and sub detection technology than most people will care to hear. The ex-sub drivers I've talked to say he got a lot right, between making the occasional howler. His politics are quite clear: we're the good guys, they're the bad guys. (Of course, he was right on that score. And how was Clancy to know that the Soviet Union barely had seven years to live when he wrote this?)
But the book is a great read, suspenseful, gripping, and fascinating. The defection scenario solves a difficult question: how do you get a crew to flee a submarine that's in the middle of the Atlantic? The action scenes are terrific; I particularly like the part where some Warthog fliers raise holy hell with a Soviet missile cruiser. The book also introduces Jack Ryan, Clancy's alter ego, who is the leading figure in most of Clancy's later novels (which are of uneven quality).
In any event, this book is mandatory reading for techno-philes. Its success set off a long line of imitators, some successful (Dale Brown, Steven Coonts), others not so.
Five stars for military wannabes like me, three stars for everybody else. If you don't like this sort of thing, you may find yourself seriously bogged down in the techno-babble.
Here is a complete listing of my Jack Ryan reviews:
The runaway bestseller that launched Clancy s phenomenal career. A military thriller so accurate and convincing that the author was rumored to have be...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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