Tom Clancy
The pope threatens to resign, move to Poland, and resist the Communists. The Soviets decide that the only solution is to kill the pope. A KGB officer has a fit of conscience and decides to defect in order to warn the West that the pope is in danger. He defects without trouble. The British try to save the pope’s life, but only succeed in capturing the Bulgarian who was supposed to kill the Turkish assassin.
That tension-free plot takes up 618 pages of this, Clancy’s worst book to date. Clancy’s never produced Great Literature, but he used to be able write a book that was hard to put down. This one’s hard to hold up. It’s slow, repetitious and filled with mind-numbing irrelevant details. Jack Ryan’s morning routines and his thoughts on living in England are repeated many times. A sub-plot involving Mrs. Ryan practicing medicine in England is never resolved. Evey single time a message is sent (and there are many of them), we’re treated to an explanation of how it’s coded, transmitted, what kind of car the courier drives, what route he takes, and how the message is decoded. Clancy’s writing has turned vulgar; the normally circumspect Ryan is a foul-mouthed chauvinist and even the 3rd person narration is sprinkled with gratuitous four-letter words.
It’s hard to imagine how and why Clancy produced such a flop. Is this simply an attempt to meet a contractual commitment? Is he suffering from some wasting disease? The answers to those questions would be far more interesting than the book itself.