The Bear and the Dragon | Tom Clancy

The Bear and the Dragon | Tom Clancy | THE BEAR AND THE DRAGON: Too Long & Self-Referential

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The Bear and the D...

	The Bear and the Dragon Tom Clancy G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2000 - 1028 pages average customer review:based on 1067 reviews view larger image
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Not bad

I have enjoyed reading this book, maybe not great by Clancy's standards but not as bad as many reviewers are giving it. Obviously if you are of the political left you will not like it. However, i am bothered by the number of typos that i found in this book.

Clancy needs to go back to writing techno-thrillers and get new editors!

THE BEAR AND THE DRAGON: Too Long & Self-Referential

Tom Clancy has made his fame and fortune writing of the techno thriller exploits of Jack Ryan. His first books in the series, beginning with THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, delivered thrills as promised. But with THE BEAR AND THE DRAGON, Clancy has gone to the well once (possibly more considering EXECUTIVE ORDERS) too often. If Clancy were a novice author, it is not likely an editor would publish such a bloated and going-nowhere novel. The problem is not that Clancy has lost the ability to write. Rather, as he has churned out one bestseller after another, he has increasingly become the worst of all literary plagiarists; he has copied from himself. What is clear from merely holding such a massive novel (1,100 pages plus)is that if one comes to THE BEAR AND THE DRAGON from say, EXECUTIVE ORDERS, there is the sneaking suspicion that Clancy will place the titular hero Jack Ryan in a secondary capacity, have him mouth platitutes about his feelings about his new and unwanted job, and have Ryan react to rather than interact with the novel's complicating elements. In addition, Clancy here continues to fill out his novels with excessive details about bombs, missiles, and technical wizardry that do not materially add to the thrust of the action. As I was following the numerous and ill-connected subplots, I grew to realize that by page 900, Clancy had committed the worst sin a novelist could commit: the sinking feeling that Nothing Much Is Happening. An egregious example occurs when a male CIA operative subverts a female Chinese stenographer in Beijing into betraying her country solely on his amatory capacity to seduce. She is the flat character that occasionally pops up in any novel, and in her cringing and servile attitude toward her seducer, I myself felt like turning her in to her Communist party bosses. By the time the real business of the book happens, the obligatory chapters where missiles fly, guns explode, and nameless soldiers die, the end of the book was thankfully near. In this case, the conclusion involving a reworking of Tiannamen Square was so implausible that I could now see why Ryan wins as often as he does--his enemies are unintelligent buffoons. And if the Bad Guys of the book command the reader's attention even with their wayward ways, then you are quite sure that the hero needs to be rebuilt into someone who is more decisive than passive. It is time for Jack Ryan, in future Clancy novels, to appear in more chapters and to grapple more directly with upcoming bears and dragons.

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