Cheap The Sum of All Fears (Book) (Tom Clancy) Price

A decent read, but by far not Clancy's best
I've enjoyed everything I've read by Clancy, and "The Sum of All Fears" was no exception. Despite its narrative sprawl and occasional lack of focus, it is good Clancy: a well-paced plot with a long dramatic peak that lasts about 100 pages and ushers in a fairly satisfying ending.

We know the basic plot: missing weapons-grade nuclear material gets made into a huge, multi-stage bomb by German and Middle Eastern terrorists. It is taken stateside, and Jack Ryan and his government buddies must overcome bureaucracy and their own disagreements in order to keep this act of terrorism from throwing the world into total chaos.

At its best moments, "The Sum of All Fears" exhibits Clancy's trademark rapid-fire shift of scene; I can think of few authors who can orchestrate, as well as Clancy does, the sort of globally organized tension that caps off this novel. From submarines in the Pacific to hotel rooms in Denver, from the Pentagon to the Middle East, Clancy pushes the plot forward surely, vignette by vignette, in a manner that usually manages to keep from feeling choppy or disjointed. This strategy helps to create HUGE tension, as the scene flits from back-room to front line and registers the immediate reaction and counter-reactions of all involved.

"The Sum of All Fears" was also prescient in imagining the possibility of a major terrorist attack on American soil. 9/11 proves Clancy's imagination terrifyingly adept. And although his novel delivers the requisite demonized evil-doers, the Native American terrorist Marvin Russell is painted surprisingly sympathetically, giving fuller and more shockingly human shape to the horrible act in which he unwittingly participates toward the novel's end.

My reservations about the novel are few but important. First, there are meanderings, especially the annoying football conversations, which are neither illustrative nor interesting. Their dialog is stilted, as if Clancy himself is forcing the subject, and this is only partially redeemed when the sport of football becomes, by novel's end, peripherally related to the plot. Like the detailed technical profiles of military hardware that one has come to expect from Clancy, the football arguments halt the movement of the story. But at least the technical details are interesting.

Then there's the opening premise--the adoption of Civil Rights-era peaceful resistance by Palestinians--which is a real whale of a hypothesis (no less an authority than Jack Ryan claims "the Arabs have figured out how to destroy Israel" [62]). After this imaginative 100-page introduction, though, Clancy more or less drops the entire idea; it disappears completely, and I could almost hear him saying, "Wait, I can't do that--who wants to read a novel about peace?!?!" Left in at the beginning, it sticks out like a spare part and a crass simplification of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Despite my problems with "The Sum of All Fears," though, it was a fairly enjoyable read, and the pay-off at the end was good, since Clancy builds tension masterfully. But it's by far not his best work. "Patriot Games," for example, is tighter and better written; if you're looking to read your first Clancy, I'd start there.

One of Clancy's best
I wish the film had been this good. Clancy hasn't written a book this great for a long, long time. I wish he'd study his work here and duplicate it (not literally!) in his next novel, because evidently the money has gotten to his head and he's lost it. He once told a classroom of students at his old high school that his inspiration to write is the car he drives. He's turned into a hack!