| Product: |
The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy |
| Date: |
18/10/02 (515 review reads) |
| Rating: |
 |
Advantages: See review
Disadvantages: See review
My first experience of Tom Clancy, other than knowing that they were the books with dodgy covers that my father read, was the film Patriot Games with Harrison Ford. I thought it was a very good film and, having since read the book, now think it a good and fairly faithful adaptation from literary fiction. Tom Clancy writes two kind of books; those with fighty fighty shooty shooty all the way through, a little like 24 was on television recently, and those which are mainly politically based. Due to the nature of the way I read I tend to prefer the slower paced political books. Last year I was on one of my charity shop book raiding expeditions, you know the ones where you go into town with twenty pounds and return with seventeen books and a pocketful of silver coins. I was sat at the bus stop having opted for not walking home with my newfound library and had nothing with me to read other than my purchases. One of these was 'Executive Orders' Clancy's novel preceding this one.
Most of Clancy's novels follow John (Jack) Ryan who started out in the CIA I think as an intelligence officer, a kind of realistic (well more realistic than) James Bond. By Executive orders he's become POTUS (President of the United States) almost accidentally (but that's another review) and hence that novel and this one are very much the political based thrillers. The Bear and the Dragon picks up where Executive Orders left off, Ryan has just been returned to the presidency by a worshipful electorate (worshipful due to the events of the previous book, a little shooting match won easily by the US and blown out of scale by the American media- sounding familiar to anyone?) and now has to cope with the old enemy Communism, this time in the guise of China (since digs at the USSR are now outmoded and frowned upon generally).
Most of my reading material is fantasy or science fiction, as looking at my list of reviewed items will tell you, simply because it offers
pure escapism and that's the main reason I read. This term at university is different, I have a project to write for my final year assessment and so have a huge stack of mathematical papers and text books to read and cognate upon. Thus my reading habit has been, for pleasure purposes, vastly curtailed. As such I decided to read something that wouldn't matter if I dipped in and out of it frequently, or not. I'd bought The bear and the dragon in a charity shop (noticing a pattern here anyone) a while ago knowing that I'd read it at some point, and it seemed to be the perfect thing. I was right, it was easy to read and dipping in and out with no regularity didn't do the novel any harm.
Firstly it must be said that Tom Clancy has a massive hard on for military technology and jargon. He really loves it and really loves showing off his knowledge of all things jargon and shooty. If you can see past this or ignore it as unimportant and not let it detract from the novel then you can enjoy his books, if on the other hand it really bugs you and you get bogged down with how stubbornly he sticks to TLA's (three letter acronyms) and other daft military affectations then there really isn't much point continuing because he doesn't stop using them and they'll spoil it all for you.
This book is long, it weighs in at nearly twelve hundred pages in it's paperback format and that makes it a pain to lug around with you if nothing else. The problem with this length is that it isn't really necessary. Clancy has been accused of padding his novels, I disagree. Padding suggests that he writes a book and then creates more material (the padding I suppose ;-)) and inserts it unnecessarily in order to make the book longer. My interpretation of the writing process is that it is much more likely that Clancy actually writes books of colossal length because he genuinely enjoys what he's writing about and all the endless detail and di
alogue is there because he wanted to write it. At the editing stage it wasn't necessary to cut down on the word count because Clancy has a large base of fans who will read the book even if it comes in three volumes. Because I read quite fast the length and very slow pace of the novel didn't bother me. Because I was looking for something that allowed me to read a few hundred pages here and there as opposed to sucking me in and dragging me right through it in one night this format suited me very well. Had I begun reading this in the holidays and not had the distraction of work I was supposed to be doing I may well have devoured it very quickly and had a very different impression.
Clancy's writing is very polished, he has written enough now that he has honed his style and he is enjoyable to read just as someone who has mastered their art. Whether you like him or not should not affect the judgement that he is very good at what he does, it's like standing in an art gallery and looking at a painting and thinking 'I hate this, it took an absolute genius to produce but I still hate it'. My position is slightly different I'm more 'This guy has real talent and this work is ok but couldn't he have done something more befitting his intellect?'
The plot begins very slowly, no really slowly, by page 150 you still don't know what the book is going to be about, in fact by page 350 you don't really. He winds the separate threads totally independently hopping between one and another with disarming irregularity, sometimes a section is only a few pages long and sometimes its nearly the whole chapter. This touch makes reading the book very easy, you slide from one location to another, and one set of characters to another gradually understanding the concepts and events that link them together. Unfortunately the characterisation is lacking, severely lacking. Clancy's main characters have appeared in prior novels and he
relies upon you having read those to know the people involved, so that's 1200 pages and not much of it spent on characterisation. In defence of this the very fact that there is so much text devoted to relatively minor happenings does help for you to get a feel for the characters in some sense. Again though the characters are merely fronts or clichés, the Americans are the good guys, the Russians are the vodka swilling failed communist desperately trying to emulate the American good guys and the Chinese are the baby devouring bad guys. Whether Clancy has anything against the Chinese or not I do not know but he has chosen them for the villains in this particular piece and then sticks by his guns.
There are all sorts of odd inserts into this book, Clancy either has a very active imagination or has researched and found out minutiae. Chairman Mao for instance spoke to Henry Kissinger on his death bed, a little known fact but Clancy appears to have read the transcript of the discussion. Also Mao was a eager paedophile (more acceptable in china we are told) and his favourite hobby was deflowering twelve year old virgins. Not because they were twelve but because, according to Clancy, they were virgins. Now this little tid bit, true or not, could have been used to great affect to flesh out the background and make everything that little more seamless (appalling grammar) and believable but instead Clancy, in his excitement at delivering this blow to Chinese communists (or ChiComms as he devotedly calls them) has to repeat it three times in one hundred pages which not only makes it tired but undermines his serious approach to the whole international relations topic.
The best passage in the whole book is a description of a diplomatic function between the US and the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC). Clancy spares no text on the unnecessary description and sets the tone by giving an outsiders perspective of an entirely otherworldly affair. The narrative
is sharp and witty and exposes the human predilection for putting off the inevitable right up to the highest level.
All of these touches do not make this a good book. I enjoyed reading it but cannot recommend it as high literature. There are too many small things missing and too many annoying touches to really allow a decent recommendation. If the Dooyoo rating was out of ten this would get five and here gets three from five as two would be overly harsh. If you enjoyed Executive orders then this is more in the same vein although less expertly executed and not as satisfyingly polished. A friend of mine divides Clancy's political style into to camps- those where he discusses the politics and then has the Americans blow the shit out of everyone at the end and those where he discusses the politics and then has the secret services and/or intelligence agents remove the threat in a super heroic way. This is very much one of the former and I think you'll know that for yourself after the first ten pages.
Summary:
|
|
