Jack Ryan And The Roman-Fleuve

Actually not just the roman-fleuve but also film-fleuve, if that is actually a thing - I think you know what I mean. Tom Clancy's techno/military novel sequence is not (bear with me here) without literary merit. If nothing else it is a wonder of sustained pacy story-telling and consistent characterisation and, in the dreadful age of Trump, it gives us in Jack Ryan a leading character of almost super-human quality.

Jack Ryan as a movie/television character has had a chameleon life, being played by a handful of actors and leaping around in time. So far as I can tell the filmic and/or televisual Ryan has not yet ascended (as he does in the books) to the Oval Office but one can almost hope that he does - he would be the best fictional President since the saintly Jed Bartlett. Clancy was a Reaganite (which this blog has never used as an insult) and heaven knows what he would have made of an arch-coward like Trump. I hope he would have detested him.