The Teeth of the Tiger (Spoilers)

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Picked up the latest Clancy today. Was surprised when I learned about it last month, because Red Rabbit was released last year, and Clancy normally takes 2 years between each of his novels. But I can see why, this is probably the slimmest Clancy novel in years, with decent-sized type. (I remember when I bought Executive Orders when it came out… over 1,000 pages with really tiny type. That was a brick of a book.)

Frankly, I think Clancy’s been a bit downhill since Executive Orders. Rainbow Six was kinda cool, but the premise was almost 007-ish. Bear and the Dragon was kinda eeeeeh. Red Rabbit was just wretched in my opinion. The Jack Ryan worship went on to extremes in Red Rabbit… I mean, not only does he save the Pope from assination, but he’s like the first guy to recognize and invest in a small coffee company from Seattle called Starbucks? Isn’t it enough that Jack is POTUS? But did we really have to rewrite history in a book that just felt like it had zilch for action?

SPOILERS BELOW

So far, I’m about 50 pages into Teeth of the Tiger, and it’s promising. Reminds me a lot of the early pages of Executive Orders. In fact, the bad guys are a combination of Columbian Drug Lords (Clear and Present Danger) and Muslim Fundamentalism (Executive Orders).

The Jack Ryan superworship kinda goes on… Jack (who is only referred to in the book) has retired from the White House. Robby Jackson became America’s first black president, but then was assisnated by a KKK redneck (which brought a, “Oh, shit, he killed off Robby? And he only mentions this in passing?”) John Clark is only referred to in the book, but it sounds like he got a Medal of Honor finally awarded to him.

There are 3 protagonists, and, well, I’m afraid the Jack Ryan–family of supermen thing kicks in again, cause one of our heroes is Jack Ryan, Jr., now all grown up and graduated from Georgetown. Then there are the two Caruso brothers, one a Marine, the other an FBI agent, who also happen to be the nephews of former President John Patrick Ryan. (In Patriot Games, there’s a passing line that Jack’s only surviving family after his parents were killed in a plane crash is a sister out in Seattle. Well, the Caruso boys are hers.)

But hey, I’m enjoying it so far, though I’m trying to wrap my head around how a drug cartel would find it in its interests to cooperate with Muslim terrorists in launching an attack on America. After all, they wonder what America could do to them. Well, didn’t they pay attention to how America got all pissed off an annihilated the Taliban in a place where everyone else said America would get bogged down like the Soviets and British empires did?

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I don’t mean to troll, but I’m curious if Clancy has learned how to write fiction yet.

Well, OK, that was a bit provocative…

I mean to say that I’ve read some of Clancy’s nonfiction and it was well written, composed intelligently, used conventional English, and so on. Yet in flipping through some of his novels, I realized he wasn’t actually using conventional English at all. I don’t object to his dialogue. Though it’s a bit silly at times, his characters naturally speak in acronyms and use the clipped obtuse slang of military people and spies. I’m referring to extremely bad narration, not dialogue. Clancy’s narration just doesn’t seem to have complete sentences. I remember in one of his books (the one in which the Vikings lose to a dud nuke) I flipped at random to over a dozen pages and stabbed a finger at a random narrative paragraph. In no one of these tests did I hit a complete sentence, which had subject, verb, and object, nor did I see a complete sentence anywhere in the selected paragrah – it was really qute remarkable…

What I mean is. Entire paragraphs devoid of strucure. Lacking subjects. Even implied objects missing. Discombobulated anaphora. Not to mention missing verbs at times. Like stream of consciousness from someone very short of breath. Like no editing. Like no galleys. Like no rewrites. Just bad writing.

Of course any good writer can break the rules sometimes. I daresay that almost any novel will use sentence fragments or even deliberately bad grammar for some of its narration. But Clancy’s fiction seems to be totally fragmented and even completely broken, and I found it extremely unpleasant to read.

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Does it have anything comparable to the “that jewish temptress, with her cow-like teats and cow-like udders” passage from The Cardinal of the Kremlin?

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Clancy is virtually editor-proof. As one of the most popular and highly paid authors in the world, he can and does call his own shots, unfettered by such minutiae as proof-reading and fact-checking. In the past, he’s taken pride in finishing the last hundred or so pages of a novel on the day before he was contractually obligated to submit the manuscript to his publisher, leaving no time for any rewrites before the book was rushed to the printers.

I haven’t really enjoyed any of Clancy’s novels since Debt of Honor, although Executive Orders had a few good bits. He’s been on autopilot for much of the last decade, and I doubt he’ll ever regain the form that produced The Hunt for Red October and Red Storm Rising.

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A new Clancy interview:

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Clancy, however, remains adamant that he is just trying to tell a story—not making any political points.

I’m sure of this! Why, when the first thing Jack Ryan advocated on the death of the entire government was a flat tax - surely an uncontroversial thing!

Q: But they technically don’t exist. They don’t even have a charter.
A: Well, it’s not written down, but they have one.

Q: With no set of checks or balances to —
A: That’s how you strangle. That’s how you prevent people from doing real things. The whole premise of the book is if the government wants to do something effectively it has to be outside the budget process. That’s why the original title for this novel was “Off the Books.”

Q: But an agency like this could easily fall under the wrong leadership without those checks and balances.
A: That’s why you have to be very careful setting it up. But at some point you have to trust professionals to be professionals just like you trust doctors to be doctors. That’s what they do.

Ugh.

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Woolen Horde, have you finished the novel yet? How about a quick review?

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Jeez… I read the book in one friggin’ day.

And it’s something of a letdown. Like Clancy was talking to the Wachoski’s a bit too much. The reason he got this out in a year rather than the typical 2 years is becuse it’s half a book.

SPOILERS.

THis is mainly all setup. There is a BIG secret terrorist organization out there (like Al Queada), and all this book does is set up things for the next book.

  1. We get this new privately-funded intelligence agency whose mission is to assissinate terrorists. Since it is completely 100-percent privately funded (the cover is that it is a big banking firm which does make lots of money thanks to the intelligence feeds it gets from NSA and CIA), damn near no one in the Federal Government or the Congress even knows about it, that way, secrecy is kept because you can’t follow any tax dollars to it.

Jack Ryan (Sr.) set it up while he was still President in a very quiet way.

  1. This new agency is just getting off the ground. It has the intel analysts (all of whom double as banking anaylsts during the day), but it needs the assassins. So it just happens that two brothers by the name of Caruso happen to make their marks on the world. One of the brothers is a Marine captain who did some ass kicking against the Taliban on their home turf, the other is an FBI agent who blew away a murdering pedophile. Seeing that these boys have little problems with taking down bad guys, they’re recruited into the agency.

  2. Jack Ryan, Jr., fresh out of Georgetown, wants to make his own mark in the world. He doesn’t join the CIA, because he remembers how much his father bitched about the CIA’s bureacracy when he was King Spook. But he pieces things together and figures out about the secret agency, and they decide to let him on board.

(Oh yes, it should be noted that the Caruso brothers are first cousins of Jack Ryan. Jr. Their mother being Jack Ryan Sr.'s sister. So you know these boys are smarter and better than everyone else, because in Clancy’s worldview, America may not have royalty, but it has the Ryans, the CIA’s version of the Kennedy’s or something.)

  1. The Terrorist Organization makes an alliance with Columbian Cartels… in exchange for giving the drug lords a free distribution network in Europe (300 million potential customers!), the drug lords will smuggle terrorists into the United States through their smuggling routes.

  2. The Terrorist Organization obviously has a dastardly plan to “shake America to it’s foundations.” Once the alliance is in place, their Evil Operational Genius™ sends in his terrorist teams.

  3. Much buildup takes place now on both sides. Think about Executive Orders kinda with Patriot Games. Lots of moving of pieces on the board.

  4. Dastardly Plan happens, but is somewhat thwarted by the happenstance presence of (you guessed it!) the Caruso boys!

  5. Caruso Boys, who had been having conscience attacks about becoming assassins, see carnage wrecked by terrorists (like some zany revelation that, “Dear God, There are Evil People in the World!”) and do a complete 180 and become ruthless assassins.

  6. Jack Ryan, Jr. deduces the source of funding for the dastardly attack on America, and the agency sends in the Caruso boys to start killing the motherfuckers responsbile.

  7. One by One, the evil terrorist cell dies horribly painful deaths (probably the best part of the book is the method by which they die). And the Caruso boys work their way up the chain to the EOG™.

  8. But wouldn’t you know it: just as they are about to slay the EOG™, a waiter accidentally spills drinks all over their expensive Italian suits. So, for some odd reason, when the EOG™ goes into the men’s room to use the facilities, none of the Caruso boys is able to muster up a simple excuse to head to the men’s room after him to clean up. For some reasons, they are simply unable to slay the EOG™.

  9. But thankfully, they happened to be having dinner with their intrepid and brilliant cousin, Jack Ryan, Jr. So Jack gets the job of slaying the EOG™. After this contrived setup, Jack goes into the men’s room and does his job.

  10. They then realize that what they eliminated was just one arm of the Evil Terrorist Organization, and that the true head of the organization is still lurking out there planning more operations.

  11. The end. No shit.

Yeah, that’s how its end. So we gotta wait for further books to explain how America wreaks her vengeance upon the evil Columbians as well as finding out who the Sharif is and slaying him as well. In the old days, Clancy would simply tie this up into one massive book, but I guess he’s run out of ideas since the Cold War ended, so he’s just stretching it out into several books.

Frankly, it was a so-so book. The Evil Terrorist Plan is something that I had come up with years ago. Seriously. In those paranoid weeks after 9/11, my mind was constantly trying to come up with a “what could be next” scenario, and this was one of them.

The Jack Ryan League of Extraordinary Family Members is getting a bit tiring. For all of Clancy’s talk of America being about merit and social mobility and all, his heroes seem to embody this aristocratic mold of “simply being better than everyone else because of good breeding” or something like that.

And for those of you wanting a whiz-bang tour of how America’s superb military would ass spank the next Enemy of Liberty by employing technologically-advanced weapons used by superbly trained Americans using the best Kick-Ass tactics this side of the World War II-era Wehrmacht, you’re bound to be disappointed.

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Thanks for the review. I’ll probably wait until it comes out in paperback to check it out.