Pros: What seemed implausible in '94 is now our biggest fear.
Cons: Clancy's style...
The Bottom Line: This is one of Clancy's best novels, taking Ryan (and the reader) to a rendezvous with destiny that is as devastating as it is riveting.
Debt of Honor, Tom Clancy's eighth novel (and seventh in the Jack Ryan series) brings the former CIA Deputy Director out of a brief retirement and back into government service. With the dust settling from the various crises depicted in The Sum of All Fears, Jack Ryan joins the two-year-old Durling Administration as a replacement for an inadequate National Security Adviser. Although he has been making money on Wall Street and thinking of becoming a teacher again, Ryan has missed serving his country and is restless and feeling unfulfilled. So when ex-President Robert Fowler's successor, Roger Durling, asks him to work in the West Wing to reinvigorate his floundering defense and foreign policy, the stalwart Ryan accepts what he thinks will be his final government post.
Just in the nick of time, too. Across the Pacific Ocean, Japanese industrialist Raizo Yamata and a small but powerful group of business and military leaders is planning the unthinkable: a surprise attack against the American financial nerve center, coinciding with a conventional assault against the shrinking U.S. military presence in the Pacific. Even worse, Yamata and his confederates in and out of the Japanese government have secretly built a small but deadly stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
Yamata is motivated by a debt of honor he believes he owes to his family, decimated in 1944 when American forces landed on the island of Saipan. He harbors great hatred for the "gaijin" who wrested the Mariana Islands from Japan and made his parents and siblings jump off "Banzai Cliff" rather than face the disgrace of being captured by the American Marines and soldiers. Now, at the zenith of his financial power, Yamata has assembled a group of like-minded industrialists, politicians, and even military officers to cripple the U.S. and reclaim Japan's rightful place as a true global power.
Clancy masterfully tells a complex yet compelling story of an unexpected conflict between two technologically advanced nations, while explaining in detail the psychology of economics, the bizarre nature of diplomacy and its scripted niceties, the nature of wars of aggression (Ryan classifies such wars as "armed robbery writ large"), and the corrosive effect of the revenge motive on nations and individuals.
As in most of the Ryan novels, new characters (Chet Nomura, Raizo Yamata, Zhang Han Sen and George Winston) are introduced even as readers catch up with familiar Clancy players (Robby Jackson, Ed and Mary Pat Foley, John Clark, and Domingo "Ding" Chavez). And even though the plot is complicated -- particularly when Clancy goes into details about economic theory -- the story moves briskly and inexorably to a literally explosive and shocking climax.
(Spoiler warning: If you have not read this book and don't want to know how it ends, this is the perfect time to stop reading this particular review....)
Although the most of the novel's plot focuses on the Yamata-instigated American-Japanese War, with exciting scenes describing battles on the air, land, and sea (evoking memories of Clancy's best-selling Red Storm Rising), it's the last few chapters that really, truly matter.
As in most of Clancy's novels, there are various subplots that weave in and out of the "main story" like a golden thread that "stitches" the huge supporting cast of Debt of Honor and their roles in the drama. Some, like Ding Chavez's romance with one of John Clark's daughters and his post-graduate studies in college just add personal touches to secondary characters. Others, like Vice President Edward J. Kealty's past coming back to haunt him and the Durling Administration, seem irrelevant at first until we see where Clancy is taking Jack Ryan (and the readers). Clearly, Kealty is a liability to Roger Durling and whatever hopes he has of winning another term in the Oval Office on his own merits. Clearly, Kealty must go, as quietly as possible, but someone has to replace him as Vice President.
Of course, that "someone" is John Patrick Ryan, whose tenure at the Central Intelligence Agency and -- briefly -- as Durling's National Security Adviser has been marked by steadfast service to the nation. Durling promises Jack that the Vice President's post is only a temporary job; Ryan only need stay the balance of Durling's term before the next Presidential campaign cycle. After that, Jack can leave government service to pursue whatever opportunities and challenges present themselves in the private sector.
But fate (or Clancy's imagination) will change everything as a revenge-minded Japan Air Lines pilot, still grieving over the loss of his brother (an Admiral in the Japanese Self Defense Forces' naval arm) and his fighter pilot son in the recent conflict, commandeers a 747 (thankfully devoid of passengers), kills his own copilot, then flies it to Washington, D.C. and crashes it onto the U.S. Capitol just as the new Vice President is to take the oath of office at a joint session of Congress.
Although Clancy's style is still awkward -- Stephen King, for all his excesses, is a far better "writer" than ol' Tom -- this novel is absolutely superb. I found myself totally absorbed in watching Yamata's plot unfold -- helped along not only by other individuals willing to see America humbled before the world, but by something as tragically ordinary as a car crash, venal political maneuvers by ambitious politicians, and injured national pride on both sides of the Pacific. (And, I have to be honest; when I first read this novel 10 years ago, I didn't see that ending coming.) Clancy is at his best when he's describing covert operations and modern combat scenes, and he doesn't disappoint in this regard. He also reprises his "continuity" technique of referencing events in other novels, particularly when he's dealing with the past lives of John Clark, Domingo Chavez, and Jack Ryan.
Of his last few books, only Executive Orders manages to top Debt of Honor's intensity and power to keep the reader engaged and entertained.
Clancy takes a bold look at what our nation's leaders are calling "the new world order". A world at peace, where yesterday's enemies are tomorrow's al...More at HotBookSale
Every novel by Tom Clancy has been a jaw-tightener and a nail-biter of the first order , as the San Diego Union described Without Remorse. But Debt of...More at Buy.com
Clancy takes a bold look at what our nation s leaders are calling the new world order . A world at peace, where yesterday s enemies are tomorrow s all...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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