Review: The Hunt for Red October

The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Talk about being late to the party. It’s been 34 years since almost everyone in the country read this book. For perspective, that means it’s now as long since it was published as 1984 was from the days of Stalin. So a lot has changed, even as Clancy’s Jack Ryan gets a third or even fourth life in the new TV show reboot.

I doubt I’d have read this if not for finding it on sale and being on the hunt myself for something distracting. I figured, if nothing else, this would be a good thriller and keep me occupied.

I’m surprised to find that, with the notable exception of the final 50 or so pages, this is not much of a thriller. Instead, as I now recall from contemporary reviews, this is distinguished largely by its technical acumen. (I remember there were reports the CIA was concerned Clancy had gotten access to classified information; how else, they wondered, could he have known so much about the U.S. Navy’s resources. Clancy answered that all he’d done was to read Jane’s and other public information. He’d just read it very carefully.)

The early parts of this work – or, maybe better said, must have once worked, by letting us see Ryan and other analyst sorts doing the same thing Clancy did as a writer. They take scraps of discrete information, rub them together, and produce a conclusion. In a few cases here, that pays off at a narrative level. Unraveling the mystery of the Red October’s new advanced drive system has a nice feel to it, and I enjoyed the sense of being part of solving the mystery.

For large portions of the bulk of this, though, this turns into engineering porn. We get techies talking in a shorthand that would be utterly tedious if they weren’t also involved in hunting or evading one or another adversary. Even in that context, though, it can drag. Maybe when this material had the aura of being genuinely new – when it felt as if we were glimpsing a war that might happen – it had a different feel. Today, I’d like to see a good editor go at it. I suspect this would work just as well, likely better for the tightness, if it were half as long. (And I suspect, without having seen any of the films or TV shows growing out of it, those derivative productions have indeed accomplished that tightening.)

I’m glad at last to have a sense of what Clancy is all about. I have tried to appreciate that other sales titan of the 1980s, Stephen King, and I find him similarly wanting. There’s something there, but it seems to me attenuated. Take that for the little it’s worth since these guys count their sales in the millions, and I count mine on my fingers, but, there, I’ve said it.

And, at bottom, it’s fair to say that Clancy (and, of course, King) are vastly beyond someone like Dan Brown.


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