Link: Jack RyanOverall: 7/10Book: 6/10The new Jack Ryan. Long anticipated. Picks up right where "Teeth of the Tiger" left off.
This instalment follows the well-tested All-Star-formula: In addition to the next-generation-protagonists from "Tiger", almost the entire old guard is back: Arnie van Damm tries to get Jack Ryan Sr. to return to the political arena, Sally makes an appearance, John Clark and Ding Chavez are in town again, et cetera. The antagonists are, as before, the members of the "Umayyad Revolutionary Council", the fictional equivalent of Al-Qaeda.
The plot itself is pretty basic: Unsurprisingly, the bad guys are once again up to no good. Being bad guys, they can't resist leaving a trail of dead bodies in their wake. The good guys notice and follow the trail, and the only remaining question is whether they'll track their quarry down in time. The rest is details.
Usually, when there are two names on the cover, and one is far more well-known than the other, as is the case here, the well-known name designates the person who contributed the concept (at most), while the less well-known name designates the person who actually wrote the book. Here, the situation seems to be a little more complicated. I'm basing this on the observation that Clancy has a rather distinctive style - or, to put it less delicately, a rather
poor style.
I tend to evaluate writers on five levels: Research, world-building, plotting, story-telling, style. Each is (or should be) based on the previous one. First, a writer should research how stuff works, both in the real world and in the relevant mythology and/or genre literature. Then, they should create a setting for their story, based on that research. (Breaking with tradition is by no means a bad thing, just as long as the writer is fully aware that they're doing so.) Then, they should create a plot, which should give the impression of arising naturally from that setting. Then, they have to wrap that plot into an actual narrative, which involves choosing a point of view, the appropriate level of detail for the descriptive passages, recognizable voices for the important characters, and so on. Finally, they have to wrap that narrative into, well, language - as best they can, and possibly adjusted to the target audience.
Clancy is a great researcher and world-builder, on the whole. As with most authors, his plotting varies from book to book, but I'd call it solid at worst. Unfortunately, though, his story-telling oscillates between clumsy and tedious more often than not, and the best that can be said for his style is that it is consistent.
With that background, I expected it to be fairly straightforward to determine which of the two names had done the actual writing. Not so! The story-telling is generally smooth, and there are stylistic devices way beyond this series' traditional repertoire, so it's clearly not pure Clancy. But there are also passages which sound so much like Clancy that it's hard to imagine anyone else could have written them. The most likely explanation I can think of is that Blackwood wrote the whole thing, and then Clancy re-wrote individual passages he didn't like, or possibly that Blackwood wrote the final version but incorporated passages that Clancy had written earlier pretty much verbatim. A less likely explanation would be that Blackwood made a deliberate attempt to emulate Clancy's style, and the passages that stand out are simply those with which he succeeded best.
Be that as it may, except for the inconsistencies, there's little to complain about, since we're getting the best of both worlds: Clancy's research and world-building, delivered in a somewhat more elegant manner than usual. The weakest link in the chain is the middle one: The summary above is really almost all there is to the plot. Sound and satisfying, but in no way novel or exceptional.
Narration: 7/10This is the first performance by Lou Diamond Phillips that I've listened to, I think. And a very solid one it is, I'm delighted to say. It takes a certain kind of voice to deliver the long, technical monologues that are one of the hallmarks of Clancy's works without losing the audience's interest, and Phillips has one of those. As to character voices, his range could be a little broader, but his default voice serves perfectly for the majority at any rate, so there's no real problem. A more significant shortcoming is his non-American accents, or rather the lack thereof, especially as far as the various British characters are concerned. These are at times too unconvincing to maintain suspension of disbelief. But, as those times are few and far between, this is still not a serious problem.
