The Best and Worst Parts of Patriot Games

Poster for the film version of Patriot Games

     Patriot Games by Tom Clancy and in comparison to my first post on this book, the action is still quite slow. Still, the best parts of the book are the action sequences, meticulously detailed by Clancy to give the readers a picture in their mind of what's going on. For example, in the beginning of the book, there was an assassination attempt on members of the British Royal Family in London, complete with a car bomb and AK-47 flailing Irish nationalists firing into the Rolls-Royce. This is how the story starts, with our protagonist Jack Ryan knocking out one of the terrorists and killing another, for which he gets knighthood. A little later in the book, the captured Irish national, Sean Miller, is being taken to a prison on the Isle of Wright via an armored truck. But at a stop at a bridge, members of the Ulster Liberation Army (ULA), an ultra-violent, Maoist paramilitary group Miller is a member of, use bazookas to blast the doors of the van open and free Miller. The following quote describes what was going through the mind of Sergent Highland, a cop in the van with miller during the escort and shows perfectly the way Clancy describes people's minds.
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      "Highland wanted to say something , but knew nothing would really matter. he wouldn't even entertain them with a curse - and it came to him that he understood Miller a little better now. the realization shocked him out of his fear. Now he knew why Miller hadn't spoken to him. What d**mded fool things go through your head at a time like this, he thought. (Clancy 169) This type of narration is also one of the best parts because it gives you what the character is like, how they act, think and live.