Red Rabbit

Red Rabbit

Author	Tom Clancy
Language	English
Series	Ryanverse
Genre	Thriller novel
Publisher	G.P. Putnam's Sons
Publication date	2002 (1st edition)
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardback)
Pages	618 pp (hardback edition)
ISBN	ISBN 0-399-14870-1 (hardback edition)
OCLC	49925127
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 21
LC Class	PS3553.L245 R39 2002
Preceded by	The Bear and the Dragon
Followed by	The Teeth of the Tiger

Red Rabbit (2002) is a New York Times bestselling novel by Tom Clancy. It revolves around the 1981 plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II.

Plot summary

Jack Ryan, CIA, helps with transporting a Russian defector and his family to the United States with the help of the British SIS. He confirms the KGB plan to kill Pope John Paul II (who, at the time the novel takes place, had just been elected). As in many stories in the Jack Ryan universe (often described as the Ryanverse), the story incorporates several historical events, including the 1978 assassination of Georgi Markov and the World War II era Operation Mincemeat. While Clancy does not rewrite the public version of events surrounding the nearly-successful assassination of the Pope, he does involve Ryan and his team in a typically clandestine manner.

Critical reception

Upon its release the novel received somewhat poor reviews. Critics praised Clancy's believable account of the plot, but disdained the lack of suspense. Reviewers for CNN and The New York Times considered the development of the main plot slow and tedious and noted that sub-plots remained underdeveloped and unresolved. Reviewers for Publishers Weekly and Esquire believed the involvement of Clancy's main character Ryan in the main plot to be highly marginal.

Discrepancies and inaccuracies

If the novel is set in 1981 (when the real-life assassination attempt was made), then several historical references made in the novel would be anachronistic:

• A plane landing at London Heathrow Terminal 4, while Brezhnev is still head of the USSR. Terminal 4 did not open until 1986, after his death.
• A brief mention of Ronald Reagan firing striking air traffic controllers. The attempt to kill John Paul II happened on May 13, 1981. Reagan didn't fire the controllers until August 5, and the strike didn't even begin until August 3.
• A preschool-age character is a fan of The Transformers animated series, which didn't debut until 1984.
• Ryan mentions a lack of Starbucks during breakfast; in 1981 Starbucks had just a single Seattle location that didn't even sell coffee yet (just coffee beans). It is highly unlikely that Ryan would be aware of this tiny operation, let alone mention it to others in England and expect them to know what he was talking about.
• There is much discussion of the baseball season by the characters:
  • The New York Yankees are mentioned as having an awful season when in fact they appeared in the World Series that year.
  • The characters expect the Series to be between the Baltimore Orioles and the Philadelphia Phillies. This was the World Series match up for 1983, not 1981. The Yankees in 1983 finished 91-71, in 3rd place in the American League East. The bad season mentioned in the book may have been 1982, when they went 79-83 and came in 5th.
  • Some of the characters mention Cal Ripken, Jr. as a rookie at the major league level. While Ripken did make his major league debut in 1981, it wasn't until August 10.
• The Baltimore Colts are mentioned as having moved to Indianapolis when in fact they moved in 1984.
• References to the Falklands War, which took place in 1982, after the attempt to assassinate the Pope.
• References to Mikhail Suslov's ill health and death; Suslov didn't die until January 25, 1982, eight months after the attempt to kill John Paul II.

However, there is evidence that Clancy has deliberately altered the real-world timeline, perhaps because the novel is set after Patriot Games, which itself is set after the birth of Prince William on 21 June 1982. In the novel, the original KGB order regarding assassination plan has the official reference "15-8-82-666". This places the assassination attempt sometime after 15 August 1982.

Other issues include:

• References to a pint of English beer being 16 fluid ounces in the story are incorrect. While the US pint may be 16 ounces, the Imperial Pint used in the UK is actually 20 Imperial ounces (19.2 U.S. fluid ounces).
• References to York being the biggest city in the North of England are incorrect. Manchester is the biggest metropolitan area in the North of England and conurbations such as Leeds, Liverpool and Newcastle are also substantially more populous than York.
• When attending a concert featuring Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, Ryan is impressed by the harpsichordist's ability to match his volume to the orchestra, yet harpsichords are incapable of varying the volume of struck notes, one reason the pianoforte ("soft-loud") was invented.
• The repeated description of Magyar (the Hungarian language) is debatable, with Clancy describing it as an Indo-Altaic language, while it is now generally classed as a Uralic language. This is amplified by the assertion that the two languages closest to Magyar are Finnish (generally accepted) and Mongolian (highly controversial), while Estonian is actually commonly accepted as a Uralic language and thus a closer relative.
• Facts given concerning Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty are inaccurate. While Clancy asserts that Mindszenty was detained during World War II, he was actually not a Cardinal at that point. He was also released following the end of the war and subsequently detained a few years later, unlike the account given in the story.
• The entire use of the AVH is inaccurate in the story. The AVH was abolished in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and, following the instatement of János Kádár, Hungary remained without an intelligence agency. See AVH for more details.
• Yuri Andropov is depicted as referring to Stalin as "the great Koba". "Koba" was a pseudonym used by Stalin early in his career, and it is improbable that it would be used in such a context. Moreover, Andropov's government officially condemned Stalin.
• References to the 1978 murder of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov by the Darzhavna Sigurnost misstate the location of the attack as Westminster Bridge. In fact, he was jabbed with a poisoned-pellet umbrella at Waterloo Bridge in London.

Characters

Jack Ryan: The main character, CIA junior analyst. Colonel Ruslan Goderenko: KGB Station Rome Colonel Bubovoy: KGB Station Sofia Major Zaitzev: KGB Defector, communications worker Ed Foley: CIA Station Moscow Mary Pat: Ed's wife, also CIA