Clancyverse Update

 

I just passed the halfway point in my “return to the Clancyverse” – five books and 2,790 words down. If there’s one thing that hasn’t changed with me regarding Tom Clancy’s books, it’s that they’re all still page-turners. I started re-reading his works in their internal chronologic order in the middle of March, and at this rate (about 35 pages a day or 45 minutes of daily reading) I should finish up the project around the middle of August.

 

The books I’ve completed so far are, in order of reading, Without Remorse, Patriot Games, Red Rabbit, The Hunt for Red October, and The Cardinal of the Kremlin. I’ll rank them all when I’m finished, but so far I enjoyed Cardinal the most, and remember having enjoyed it when I first read it sometime in the mid-90s.

 

The Cardinal of the Kremlin has, arguably, the most intricate plot of the first four books. There’s the high-level diplomacy of nuclear arms reduction talks. There’s the backdrop of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There’s CIA and KGB spycraft. “CARDINAL” is the code-name for a high-level asset with deep ties to the Politburo, a World War II hero who’s seen through the faults and flaws of the corrupt Soviet government. A valued American scientist is kidnapped on our own soil. There are Bondian plot elements, too – a Russian space laser facility atop a mountain with the capability of shooting down satellites, led by a Colonel Bondarenko who has shades of “henchman” written all about him, though I always found him quite honorable and admirable. There’s a submarine subplot and our old friend, CIA agent John Clark, has a cameo.

 

I read that Cardinal was considered as a sequel to Harrison Ford’s last Jack Ryan movie, Clear and Present Danger (itself a movie sequel to Patriot Games), but the novel was found too complex to adapt. Not to mention that by this time, the late-90s, the Cold War era of 10 years prior when the novel was written, and the SDI “Star Wars” weaponry central to the plot, were somewhat dated. Ford was signed on to threepeat the role, and William Shatner – William Shatner! – was also a member of the cast, though I couldn’t discover what part. Was Captain Kirk to be the CARDINAL of the Kremlin? I dunno. This is around the time when Shatner was rebranding himself, as Leslie Nielson did fifteen years prior, as a comedian. So I’m not sure if it would’ve worked, but I have to admit the possibility intrigues and haunts me.

 

How are the novels holding up on a second read thirty years later? Well, as I feared, not as good as the first go-round, but still worthy enough to re-read. This is due, I suppose, to the 900 or so books I’ve put away since my last adventure with Jack Ryan. A lot of those books truly expanded my mind – Les Miserables, The Count of Monte Cristo, War and Peace, Moby Dick, Finnegan’s Wake, not to mention works by Dickens, Robert Silverberg, George R. R. Martin, Jorge Luis Borges. A mind, once opened and expanded, never returns to its original dimension, that quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson or Oliver Wendell Holmes, applies here. Also, there’s a unique benefit that comes when first reading a work, similar to that of reading a poem or hearing a sublime work of music, that one loses upon a second reading, and that too applies. But the bottom line is that I am enjoying the experience, and that beats spending 45 minutes a day watching 99.99 percent of anything that streaming on the tube.

 

A more detailed analysis of my thoughts on this second go-round with Clancy’s works will follow once I complete the project. I have four more “bricks” or “door-stops” to journey through: Clear and Present Danger, The Sum of All Fears, Debt of Honor, and Executive Orders. Sum is one that I’m especially looking forward to as it was my introduction to Tom Clancy, read in the crisp autumn of 1994. And I made my own executive order to remove Rainbow Six from the list, as I read it way later than the others, 1999 I think, and it doesn’t really involve Jack Ryan (it’s centered on aging John Clark), it borrows a similar plot line from Executive Orders, and, well, I have a small growing pile of other fiction on deck.

 

Happy reading, all you amateur CIA analysts!