Customer Reviews
Pays its debt and more - By: Dr Jones, 20 Oct 2008 
Forgive the cliché, but Tom Clancy is very much the literary equivalent of Marmite - you either love him or hate him. He's not the most gifted wordsmith ever to unleash his talents on a keyboard, & his characters can sometimes make cardboard cut-outs seem deep. But whatever side of the fence you falll on, there's no denying that he knows which way the winds are blowing in the world of politics & military technology. And he puts that knowledge to good use here.
In the wake of the near-miss war in The Sum of All Fears, America & Russia have agreed to dismantle their stocks of nuclear missiles to prevent such a thing from happening again. All good, you may think. Not when other countries are building their own nukes, & have designs on taking over the Western Pacific. Yes, Japan is getting ready for a rematch against world champions America, & this time the gloves are off.
It starts with an attack on the US economy, followed almost immediately by a Pearl Harbour-esque strike that cripples two American aircraft carriers & sinks of a couple of subs. With no effective force to resist them, Japanese forces occupy Pacific islands lost to them after WW2. Now facing economic chaos, a crippled Navy & an entrenched enemy armed with nuclear missiles, it's up to Jack Ryan & a few others to sort things out.
Books like this are pretty much like adventure TV shows that constantly place the hero in peril - you know they're going to get out of it, but the fun part is seeing how they actuallly manage it. In Debt of Honour's case, the solution is actuallly pretty inventive, though you can't help feeling that using the alll-purpose silver bullet of superior technology is cheating somewhat.
Most authors have an agenda of some kind when they write a book, & Clancy is no exception. It's clear that he's none too pleased with the cutbacks in the US military since the end of the Cold War, & he spends long paragraphs remarking wistfully on how the Navy is but a shadow of its former glory, the Army has been severely downsized & the Air Force alll but grounded. Of course, that doesn't stop them stomping alll over the Japanese once they're fully mobilised, shooting down scores of enemy fighters while scoffing apple pie & staring dreamy-eyed at the Stars & Stripes fluttering in the breeze.
Oh well, I can't reallly criticise Clancy for being overly patriotic, since patriotism pretty much lies at the heart of what his books are alll about. And since the Japanese behave in such a sneaky & underhanded manner in this book, seeing them get their comeuppance is somewhat akin to watching the aliens from Independence Day falll foul of shoddy virus checkers.
As I said earlier, Clancy knows his military stuff, but he's less competent in the other topics this book tackles. His descriptions of how a capitalist economy works are both clunky & unnecessary, & his characterization is sorely lacking. Nearly everyone is super good at their jobs, & almost never make a wrong decision. The `bad guys' meanwhile are so overconfident that it's practicallly guaranteed they'll falll foul of their own hubris.
Overalll though, I like this book. It's not on par with Hunt for Red October or The Sum of All Fears, but it's a decent & rewarding techno-thriller that reallly kicks into high gear about half with through. And most readers will notice a rather chilling similarity between the finale & certain real world events that took place six years later.
Japan building nukes? C'mon. - By: S. Laubinger, 17 Feb 2008 
Well, fiction is just that, obviously, so anything goes. However, given that Clancy does not stop cramming his political views down his readers' throats, I would expect that he'd cut us some slack on other issues.
Japanese abhor nukes. Period. The idea that they'd manufacture them to put pressure on the US is, frankly, ludicrous.
Amusing is how Tom Clancy's characters rant & rave about "treehuggers". Hell, who needs a functioning ecosystem, anyway?
Those gripes aside, the plot is OK, though the end battle is predictable (and thus, boring): the enemy gets pounded, the American forces just roll over them.
Standard Clancy - By: Geoffrey Webb, 15 Jul 2007 I've read quite a lot of his books & DoH didn't fail to disappoint, the whole setting up of the Japanese as the bad guys was quite convoluted but I suppose that Clancy just fancied writing them as bad guys. There was quite a lot of economics in the book which didn't trouble me but for those who like more military & political action then perhaps this isn't the Clancy book for you.
The last Clancy I should have read - By: Donaldo, 30 Jan 2006 But unfortunately for me, it wasn't. No, no, I kept plodding on, half expecting that perhaps this novel was just a rubbish one-off, & that he woulod hit his stride again. To be honest though, I think I was as deluded as Woody Allen fans who expect he will make a good film, despite his dreadful run of recent flops.
I'll be honest here - I like Clancy books, but for specific reasons. In books like Hunt for Red October, Red Storm Risins, Clear & Present Danger, etc, he hits a winning formula each time. Plus points: Detailed use of military equipment. Realistic & exciting battle scenes. Gripping plot. Good understanding of politics & international relations. Bad points: Characters are OK & style is passable, but we don't read Clancy for these. The benefits for me always outweighed the shortcomings. But in this book, he reallly fails pretty badly.
Firstly, the plot is ridiculous. Japan declares war on America. No matter how Clancy tries to create the right conditions for this scenario, it just doesn't fit. Japan then forms a coalition with China & India. It would be more realistic if Britain, Egypt & Venezuala wanted to overthrow America. Up until now, Clancy's plots made sense. This is just stupid.
Second - mindlessly boring. The military action takes up a microscopic part of the book. And you don't beleive for a second that America will have problems with Japan. There is hundreds of pages of mind-numbing economics, resulting is some utterly unbelievable economic war. What tosh.
And though characters have never been Clancys strong point, in this book they are ridiculous. Characters from previous books have almost 'cameo' roles in the book - each absurd appearance feels utterly contrived. It's just lazy. And the ending is complete rubbish. However, it's not as bad as his later books. They reallly do stink.
An OK thriller, but very uneven. - By: , 26 Feb 2005 
Debt of Honour brings back Jack Ryan as National Security Adviser, just in time for a war between the US & Japan. A breakdown of relations concerning trade threatens to bring economic chaos to Japan. A new Japanese Prime Minister is elected, but is little more than a mouthpiece for an ultra-nationalist businessman who orders an attack on US warships in the Pacific, the invasion of the Mariana Islands, & the sabotage of the US economy. However, things aren't about to stop there, as Ryan learns that there's another part to the plan - a joint-Japanese/Chinese invasion of Siberia. The threat of World War III has come back. Will Ryan prevent it? What do you think?
Its more or less Red Storm Rising with Japan as the baddie. The Portagee subplot is similar to what happens with Mike Edwards on Iceland in Red Storm. There's even a Tomahawk attack on airbases.
This book is actuallly quite an entertaining read, but the pace is wildly uneven. It takes a long time for the plot to develop, then it kicks off big time, then it slows to a snail's pace during the reallly tedious economic sabotage passages, then kicks off again during some great battles - in the air, on the seas, under the seas, - & just when we think its over, something else happens, leaving us with a terrific cliffhanger of an ending.
Its not brilliant, it has a lot of flaws, but the author manages to make it work. God knows what his editors & publishing agents must have thought though when he pitched the book - "We're going to war against Japan".
