My Tom Clancy Rant

I just finished reading Tom Clancy's 750-page tome, Without Remorse. Given the sheer size of the volume, and Clancy's interesting but not quite captivating writing style, finishing it is somewhat of an achievement for me.

I don't know about you, but there are some things about Clancy's writing style that irritate me to no end, and which strike me as just sloppy or careless:

- He repeatedly does this thing where he doesn't bother to identify the character he's writing about until the end of the paragraph or, at its extreme, for even an entire page or more. I find it irritating because I have to put what I'm reading in a mental holding pattern until I finally get to the character's name, so that I can put the whole thing into a meaningful context. He writes entire thoughts, conversations and actions that belong to no identifiable person(s) or place(s). It makes for some confusing reading, and forces me to go back and re-read paragraphs often. When the book is already 700 pages of mediocre writing, that's a lot to ask of a reader. And Clancy doesn't just do this for a paragraph or for a few pages; some of his books contain villians that remain unidentified for literally chapters upon chapters; you can read nearly half the book and not know who the bad guy is, where he is, or what his motivation is. I wonder if anyone else has this problem with his writing. It sounds like a clever and sophisticated technique in theory -- identify the character at the end rather than the beginning -- but I just don't think it works in the real world. Maybe Clancy likes to mimic in his writing the real-life shadowy nature of villians by not clearly identifying them (though he does it with heroes too), but I just find the tactic irritating.

- Another irritating thing Clancy does is the way he handles character names, introducing them first by one name, then referring to them later by another. Clancy doesn't just come out and say the guy's name is Dan Murray; Somebody says, "Hi, Dan." Dan says and does some things, and then he is later referred to as Murray. The reader has to put the two together, sometimes across multiple pages, just to figure out the guy's full name.

- Put these two problems together, and it's no wonder I never really understood who the villians were in Without Remorse, which was really frustrating to me. In fact, the bad guys' shenanigans was "the boring storyline" for me. You know how a novel will have a few different storylines going at one time, and one is really interesting, while another is really lame? The best books happen when all the storylines are captivating, and equally so. That certainly doesn't happen here in Without Remorse, and I've never seen it in a Clancy novel, come to think of it. There's just a certain arrogance or sloppiness to these points of style of his that mar an otherwise quality story, and detract from my enjoyment of reading it.

- Generally, I think Clancy takes too long to tell a story...his style is just not captivating enough to me to justify 500-700 pages, and the stories he tells could be told much more succinctly. Brian Haig and Lee Child are welcome to write a 700-page novel anytime they like, and I will send them a Thank You card when they do. Clancy just doesn't write well enough for me to be able to enjoy his verbosity.

I do find it interesting that Clancy is reportedly an English Lit major, and a former independent insurance business owner, with no clear professional ties to the military (poor eyesight apparently precluded such a career). Knowing this enabled me to appreciate a layer of his writing that I didn't notice before, such as his occasional use of Latin in the manuscript, as well as numerous literary and cultural references, from Shakespeare to Victorian architecture. I could really see the English Lit influence in his writing that I'd never noticed before.

Knowing this about him also helps me imagine how he does his research and does the craft of writing. It also helps me appreciate his achievement in becoming a bestselling author many times over (no small feat), a multi-millionaire writer (a really no small feat!), and licenser of movies, video games, and a number of spinoff novel series that have created hundreds of millions of dollars for him (which is a heckuva a lot more than I can say, so..."all due credit"). He's not some fighter jock who got lucky on the writing circuit, he's an ordinary, working author from day one, like many of us. Good for you, Tom!

And all this success with mediocre writing! Wow, if he can do it...

Seriously though, I am going to try reading another Clancy novel, Red Rabbit, so I'll probably end up adding some more irritants to this short list. I do love Clancy's subject matter, I just wish he was a more captivating writer.

What do you think?