Red Storm Rising - Tom Clancy

Time for a little diversion this morning; Clancy has always woven some element of military action into all of his bestselling 'Jack Ryan' series, Hunt for Red October and Sum of All Fears being cases in point but he always has a load of political/moral baggage getting in the way; to the extent that sometimes you wonder what Clancy might be able to produce were he to break away from Ryan for a moment and go all out to do the job properly. Well, he did and the result is Red Storm.

There's no Jack Ryan, no CIA, very little politics, little dead wood, just 725 pages of action, strategy and humanity that rattles along at a fantastic pace. The scenario is that hoary old favourite of World War 3, except Clancy decides to do things slightly differently; no nuclear weapons and their attendant mega-death count, this is a conventional war fought with conventional weapons in conventional style. Set in the 1980's this is a classical study of why a nation goes to war - usually because the blokes in charge fear war less than the consequences of no war. In this case the ignition point (quite literally) is a terrorist strike on the Soviet Union's chief oil production and refining fields. Faced with slow strangulation and unwilling to reveal their weakness to the West by asking for help, the Communists decide that there is plenty of oil in the Persian Gulf. All they need to do is march in and take it.

Problem: NATO will kick up a stink.
Answer: Okay, we'll trash NATO first, then.

And so it begins, with the curtain raiser being the exquisite Operation: Polar Glory. Clancy really lets his imagination and experience loose in this one by taking a handful of individuals on both sides and letting them just get on with the business of fighting a war instead of chaining them down with a lot of baggage that detracts from the story. We go from Atlantic convoy duty to armoured divisions fencing in Germany to the escapades of a group on the run in Iceland to underwater SSN operations and back to the convoys in a repetitive cycle, but within that cycle the episodes are rotated, so that nothing appears formulaic and thus boring.

Clancy displays a panache that is sometimes woefully missing from his other works, concentrating on action on the frontlines instead of plans in musty offices. There is some of the latter of course because soldiers uniformly do some hard thinking before they hazard their lives, but only as much as necessary to set the scene and tone - the naval engagements are the best by far, including the aforementioned operation, tense sub-hunting and a Soviet strike on the Nimitz.

There's only one problem I have with this book, as indeed with all Clancy's works; he seems to have succumbed to the Hollywood Disease, also known as the 'Saving Private Ryan' syndrome. By this I mean that all Europeans (particularly we Brits) are displayed as bumbling idiotic cowards who have to be rescued by the smart, sharp, tough Yanks - and since this comes through in all his books, one suspects that this is Clancy's personal view instead of 'getting into character' as it were. A tendancy to tar everyone not under the Stars and Stripes with the same brush is irritating at best and explosively infuriating at worst; I know that Clancy is primarily writing for an American audience and I also accept that we on the other side of the Pond are not uniformly the sharpest tools in the box. But then again, there are many in the Land of the Free (tm) who ain't exactly swift in the head either. There's an institutional arrogance that's very grating and somewhat misplaced should he have bothered to do a little checking. For example Europeans are said to

Know beans about handguns

All fine and dandy except that the US military uses the Beretta (Italian) and the Secret Service (Presidential bodyguard) uses the SigSaur that comes from Germany!

Thus there's an overwhelming urge to scream Get it right at the most basic of levels. Dopn't let my agonised ravings put you off, though. This is a class way to spend a few hours.

7 out of 10.