The Bear and the Dragon (Jack Ryan) | Tom Clancy

The Bear and the Dragon (Jack Ryan) | Tom Clancy | Like a Kevin Costner movie

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The Bear and the D...

	The Bear and the Dragon (Jack Ryan) Tom Clancy Berkley, 2001 - 1152 pages average customer review:based on 1067 reviews view larger image
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good but not great

READABLE but certainly not the best.

my complaints are: the book is too long for no reason.

also, too much jingoism!!! i love america too but give it a rest instead of every other page.

too much love it or leave it stuff. though the plot was ok. not great but ok to read.

Like a Kevin Costner movie

I like long books, really. A complicated plot with a host of side characters is a great experience and something only a book can give. This book doesn't give that experience. Despite Tom Clancy's tendency to rehash plots over and over I had high hopes for this book with a premise more realistic than any he previously published. The Chinese and Russians have a long history of border skirmishes and plotting full-blown combat from that history would be simple, right? Clancy instead creates crisis and conflict with simple character flaws, like greed and arrogance and, of course, the tired "no one understand how anyone else thinks" story arc.

The book is like a Kevin Costner movie in more than just length. Every few pages the story stops cold to preach a sermon, in two cases literally: The Chinese are child molesters! Abortion and Atheists are EVIL! These sermons pop-up again and again so often they are the main thing I remember from the book and do nothing to embellish or advance the plot.

Some sub-plots and minor characters seem to be thrown in for no reason but to lengthen the book. There's an entire assassination sub-plot with a dozen characters, over a hundred pages or so and comes to nothing. The would-be assassin is quietly arrested nowhere near the target, the end. Other characters from previous books, such as Bart Mancuso from "Red October" seem to be thrown in just to show they're still alive. Even John Clark seems tacked on although he is pulled out for a pivotal role at the very end. The worst character treatment is Jack Ryan. Gone is the smart and occasional brooding Ryan, it now brooding Ryan 24/7, who spends almost all the book sneaking cigarettes from his secretary, whining how he hates being president or why can't the Chinese have Western sensibilities.

There is some of old Clancy here though. When the real action finally gets started in the last third of the book, Clancy's gift for describing military action and maneuvers in detail comes out. I'm not interested in giving away too much here but the last third makes up (barely) for all the preaching, whining and useless sub-plots of the first two-thirds.

I think part of the problem is move away from Jack Ryan as the central story-moving character. Having Ryan stuck in the Oval Office prevents that and Clancy could have introduced another character to fill the void but didn't. The resulting story is disjointed with a large cast each moving story along a little bit. My personal uninformed opinion is Tom Clancy needs a strong editor who can trim stories like this down to a healthy size and pace.

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