SUBJECTIVE READER REVIEW FOLLOWS:I've become a Clancy fan, and Debt of Honor--in its totality--may be one of the best novels ever written. I will quickly caveat that statement by saying that Clancy is one of the most prolific writers in history, as I had to ready 500 pages to get to the point where the book got really exciting. Then it was spellbinding. Now I sometimes think I'm a long writer, but my cursory review says this book is 390,000 words, or about five times the length of most commercially sold novels. At times it was like a war of attrition just to hang in there, waiting for the spectacular, but it got there, believe me. For readers who have not begun the Clancy catalogue, I highly recommend looking Clancy's website and learning the basic themes of the novels because they come in a developmental order as Jack Ryan ascends the ladder of greatness. This one is where he is magically, if not tragically, elevated from the President's National Security Advisor to President himself. A lot of tricky things happen along the way, but if you're gonna read Clancy's catalogue you've got to make it through Debt of Honor, which I'd say has the most unbelievably incredible ending of any novel ever written. So indulge yourself when you've got a month to read a novel and tackle Debt of Honor; it is a legacy Clancy left for us to read, become educated with and admire his ability as an almost unparalleled author of action adventure thrillers.SPOILER PLOT SUMMARY FOLLOWS:Pearl Harbor II-50 Years Later. Although WW II had been over 50 years, the simmering hatred boiled barely under the surface of a cluster of Japanese businessmen who really ran things, as opposed to the Diet--or elected Japanese Constitutional entity. In previous incarnations of Clancy, the Denver nuke(Sum of All Fears) had led to a severe dismantling of ICBMs by Russia and the US, leaving them with only nuclear tipped cruise missiles as a deterrent--more like a second strike capability. Raizo Yamata, Hiroshi Goto, Kozo Matsuda and others bristled under the US limitations of a Self Defense Force and had quietly obtained state of the art US weapons and made them better. By pure happenstance, an auto tragedy affecting two US families traced to faulty Jap fuel tanks on a Cresta trip off huge emotional waves as the US citizens become enraged over the apparent indifference of the Japs over the tragedy, and Al Trent stirs up the media and quickly authors a Fair Trade Act to force Japan to equalize inspection of US commodities with Japanese ones coming to the US. The Japs see this as potentially bankrupting their country and Hiroshi Goto quickly takes steps to stir up the Jap citizens for retribution. In the interim, Goto has worked with his mentor Yamata to take Russian rocket boosters and created nuclear ballistic missiles, hiding them well. In Phase 2 of their plan, they sink to US SSNs close to Japan and cripple two CVNs, 'by mistake.' With US forces reduced to peace time levels, the Japs begin bringing in thousands of troops into Saipan and Guan, reclaiming them as Japanese territory. Step 2 is Yamata's buying out George Winston's holdings in the Columbus Group, which he uses to start a market cataclysm with crafty computer code that wrecks the US ability to chart market transactions. Jack Ryan is called upon to rescue the world's economy and employs trickery and succeeds as Robby Jackson begins plotting a military response with greatly diminished assets. The Japs have set up an alliance with China and India to seize the Russian 'Northern Asset Area' after putting the US military in a stalemate that takes a few weeks to develop. Finally deploying the strike force, Ryan and Jackson defeat the Japs and destroy their nukes, which had been cleverly hidden. While this is taking place, an impeachment investigation of VP Ed Healty comes to a head as he resigns. IN the ensuing elation over having overcome the Japanese attempts to dominate their area of the world once again, an embittered elderly Jap JAL pilot develops his revenge for all of his relatives having been killed by the US. Sato's plan to hit the US is to fly a 747 into the US Capitol as it's filled with all three branches of the government of the elevation of Jack Ryan to VP. Jack and family have been sequestered in the House Office Bldg while the vote is taken to elect him the new VP, moments after which Sato flys his 747 into the Capitol Bldg, destroying it and killing over 900 people including the President. Ryan is quickly sworn in as the new POTUS and the country is in shock.
This is where I got off the Jack Ryan boat.I first read The Hunt for Red October in my early twenties, and I was pretty blown away by it. It was a main course of cold war intrigue with a very slight hint of John le Carré, with a generous dollop of Michael Crichton's flair for the technothriller, plus a big hunk of Frederick Forsyth's penchant for gritty realism, all with a little boy's fascination for guns and militaria. In the succeeding eight months, I devoured three more Clancy books and couldn't wait for more.Cracks began to appear in the boilerplate around The Sum of All Fears. The no-nonsense Jack Ryan character began to appear as a complaining, overworked, secret smoker with a preternatural common sense who, unwittingly, keeps getting promoted into increasingly glamorous positions of power.What really threw me off with that book was Clancy's extremely naive, proposed solution to the Middle East peace problems (basically, everybody shakes hands and lets bygones be bygones and the free world lives happily ever after). Still, building a DIY nuclear bomb was pretty cool, even if the result was a dud (a fizzle, if you want to be Clancyesque). The book rode that climax into a 'Jack Ryan saves the world with good old common sense' scene cribbed from the classic 1964 movie 'Fail-Safe.'So that is where I began to have doubts about superthrillerwriter Clancy.Here, Clancy is suffering from a lack of enemies in the post-cold war era, so why not dredge up and polish off some bitter old enemies, specifically a militaristic Japan? And how about the new, ultra-right-wing Japanese prime minister delivering a histrionic speech with stylistic roots in 'Triumph of the Will'? Then we have the Japanese invading the Marianas, and we're off to the races in this fantastical soap opera.Clancy, as had become his custom by then, pads this book with a combination of polemic and political intrigue, while positioning Jack Ryan for another big change in job titles (at least this time he named an antagonist character Kealty instead of the pedantic 'Fowler').One of the book's minor highlights, interestingly enough, was a long, very expository stretch where Wall Street is brought almost to its knees by a Japanese-originated hacking attack. This whole section could have been cut from the book entirely and not made a ripple in the rest of the story, but I thought Clancy's simple-to-the-point-of-corny solution--that Wall Street is built on, above all, confidence--nonetheless had a grain of truth to it and was fairly effective. To a financial neophyte, anyway.There's also a great, satisfying scene with John Clark, Ding Chavez, AWACs aircraft and lasers.Japan's right-wing house of cards collapses very quickly, which is also a style that had become a trademark of Clancy's over the years--the good guys are So Good that the bad guys throw in the towel in the first round. But a first round TKO is not the fight you paid for, so the fight will continue outside the ring.A stunner of a climax, which foresaw 9/11, leaves the US government in ashes and leapfrogs Jack Ryan not one but two big job changes ahead of where he started the book. Where to go from here? Political fantasies abound! Stay tuned to find out! Same Jack time, same Jack channel!And while the ending was entertaining and satisfying--especially because this was the first Clancy novel with a bona fide cliffhanger--the whole thing finally snapped me to my senses and I realized how cartoonish Clancy had become, relying on massive plot devices to set his stories upon.So this became the last Jack Ryan book I bothered reading. I skipped Executive Orders, partly because I was intimidated by its sheer size--many reviews blasted that book as a bloated, editor-desperately-needed phone book of a tome--and there was just no way I wanted to wade through that, or anything of his since. The only reason I return to Clancy now is to read--here and especially on Amazon--the frequently entertaining, scathingly negative reviews of his later books, where his political slant had become strident to the point of comedy and his quality control had broken down massively.And when the reviews are more entertaining than the books, it's time to get off the boat.
What do You think about Debt Of Honor (1995)?
Another solid Clancy novel! A lot of parts in the book seemed to drag because Clancy would get into long and lengthy descriptions but the plot really held my interest. What I didn't see coming was the ending, I won't say what happens for those of you who like Tom Clancy and haven't read Debt of Honor yet, but I'll just say this, you'll never see it coming!I'm guessing that the next book in the series, Executive Orders will pick right up where this book ended. I was gonna read it next but after how lengthy and descriptive Debt of Honor was, I'll have to wind down a bit, HAHA! But it's on my to read list.
—Corey Tardif
It has been a long time since I’ve been engrossed in a Tom Clancy novel, and it is sad that I will no longer be so privileged. My first exposure, as I believe would common to many readers, was The Hunt for Red October. These few words address Executive Orders and Debt of Honor. Read by Michael Prichard and John MacDonald, respectively, these books total approximately 87 hours of listening. I would suggest reading Debt of Honor first, as it is a tale that ends with information critical to the beginning of Executive Orders.Tom Clancy’s generation, the baby-boomers, was one of the Cold War, and as a youngster, listening to tales of World War II, and as time marched forward, the Gulf War, and the overall Muslim-country-based angst. Well, guess what … these books reflect exactly that … Japan is the bad guy in Debt of Honor - and the Muslim terrorist is foundation of Executive Orders. The U.S. Capitol is destroyed, threats against the president and is family lace the pages. Ebola is unleashed, there are good-guy politicians, bad-guy politicians, good ‘o boys, sex scandals, and more. Typical of Clancy, these books are very detailed in the war strategies and technology of the era. No cell phones, but a world-wide-web is born.Clancy, through his character Jack Ryan, is a flag-waving patriot … a red, white, and blue type A guy. The views are conservative. May have those readers with a liberal bent rolling their eyes a bit.My preference in audiobook narration is pretty simple. If I am enjoying the listen and not hitting re-wind a great deal, the narrator is doing a good job. No complaints.There are thousands of reviews on Clancy books, ergo not much for me to add. There is a baby-boomer writer flavor. The authors of this generation were encouraged to pen 800 page novels. Think John Jakes, Robert Ludlum, James Clavell, Allen Drury … these long, wordy, books are fun. The plots and sub-plots are rich and detailed … sometimes wavering from the story, but always intriguing and usually educational and historically accurate. Books are not written like this any more. Too bad.
—Samyann
Debt of Honor, among other things, is the story of Jack Ryan and his role in a conflict between the Japan and the United States that eventually leads to war between the two countries. Personally, I found this book to be very boring because of the fact that it was overly long. Throughout the book, I saw multiple parts where the author, Tom Clancy could have just ended the book, but he kept going on and on. Eventually, I just found that he dragged out the events to the point where I was, instead of being excited and on the edge of my seat, was just waiting for the book to end. Prior to reading this book, I had read the series, Net Force, which is also by Tom Clancy. I found that series of books to be quite entertaining. They also were just the right length, not too long and not too short. I thought this book would be almost like it in terms of length. Alas, I was wrong.I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys LONG books or anyone who likes Tom Clancy or the Jack Ryan series in general.
—Wesley
