This is the second novel I’ve read where I’ve already watched the movie several times. I’m excited to see how it compares, and so far the events have been on par with the movie, one to one actually. It’s so close that I can’t help but think the novel has a bit of a leg up on other books, even moreso than ‘Jurassic Park’ did. The layout and atmosphere of the submarine, and the actors who play the characters, are so distinctive that they naturally fill up the spaces in my mind without any effort on my part. There hasn’t been much visual description of the interior of the submarine beyond how gray it is. Beyond that, the atmosphere is mostly inherited from how the crew behaves, so I think if I hadn’t seen the movie it might be a little more difficult to figure out exactly what everything looks like. This gives me an idea though. Pulling from other media is a powerful tool that I think I can take advantage of more than I currently do. If something very specific already exists in some other form and I can allude to it to fill in descriptive gaps that I would otherwise have to expand on, then that could be a huge save on word count.

But back to the book at hand. I must say it is a little bit dry so far. Clancy’s style is not nearly as suspenseful as le Carre, and seeing as this is Clancy’s first novel, I don’t expect overly much out of it. It’s really impressive that this became such a hit, but I don’t think it escaped all the issues that show up in most debut novels. There’s a bit of heavy exposition, sometimes the descriptions are overly vague, while other times he goes a too far into the minutia, characters all have their motivation plainly spelled out within seconds of meeting them, and every once in a while I find some odd phrasing that makes me scratch my head. It is certainly a page turner though, and that’s really all that matters to me at the end of the day. I’m sure the suspense will ramp up as things go along and he starts to hit his stride. I’m excited to see where things go from here.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley