Genetics
Ben Affleck is Jack Ryan, and Tom Clancy couldn't be happier. Or maybe it's a coincidence that just as the 30-year-old Affleck took over the part from the 60-year-old Harrison Ford in ''The Sum of All Fears,'' the author has come up with a novel, Red Rabbit, that leaps back to the later years of the Cold War, when Jack was a 32-year-old CIA analyst. Clancy has made no secret of the fact that he felt Ford was too old for the role, so it seems likely he pictured Affleck (and a lucrative movie deal) while penning ''Rabbit.''
Then again, maybe the author realized he'd written himself into a corner by putting Ryan in the Oval Office with 1996's ''Executive Orders''; Presidents don't usually find themselves in the middle of thrilling action scenes. Unfortunately, neither does ''Rabbit'''s Jack, who's enlisted to help smuggle a KGB employee out of Russia in the early '80s. He's told his ''only job will be to watch what happens,'' and, sad to say, that's pretty much all he does.
The defector is Oleg Zaitzev, a communications officer with information about KGB chief Yuri Andropov's plans to assassinate Pope John Paul II for expressing solidarity with the anti-Soviet labor movement in his homeland of Poland. Codenamed Rabbit (''the CIA term of art for a person wanting a fast ticket out of whatever bad place he found himself in''), Zaitzev provides the title for a novel that moves more like a tortoise. At 618 pages, ''Rabbit'' is roughly half the size of Clancy's last doorstop, ''The Bear and the Dragon,'' yet you know you're in trouble when it takes nearly 500 pages to reach this line: ''The mission was now fully under way.''
In fact, ''Red Rabbit'' offers so many scenes of people sitting and talking about what could happen to Rabbit that you might mistake this for a John Updike novel (there's even a chapter called ''Rabbit Run'') if a single line of it were well written. Clancy would no doubt plead realism in his defense. ''It...
View Full Essay