Dead or Alive

 

Dead or Alive by Tom Clancy with Grant Blackwood

Tom Clancy novels were everywhere during the 1990s.  No one could tell a yarn about the real world of politics, espionage, and the inner workings of international terrorism better than Clancy.  Many argued that he simply had to be a Washington insider.  How could someone be able to know things so intricately unless they were on the inside?  When one of his novels written in the late 1990s climaxed with an event very similar to what happened on 9/11 a few years later, it was downright eerie. It was ironic because it was after 9/11 that Clancy lost a bit of his steam.  This book was written in 2010 – a full seven years after the last one, and I didn’t pick it up until 11 years after that.  So my mind had some catching up to do in the memory department.

For better or worse, it didn’t take me long to become reacquainted with the recurring characters and the overall atmosphere.  Most of the important people are back: Jack Ryan, John Clark, Mary Pat Foley, Ed Foley, and Domingo Chavez among others.  I enjoyed the book overall, but I couldn’t help think that I’ve read this same book by Tom Clancy before.  Many times, in fact. The main plot here unfolds somewhat as follows:

1.       There are some really bad Mideastern Islamic terrorists that are planning an attack so huge in scope, that it will make 9/11 look like a tea party.

2.       The U.S. Government, though, has been emasculated as of late due to too many bleeding hearts and tree huggers currently in office.  The new powers-that-be insist that “such a world doesn’t exist anymore” and slash intelligence and military budgets to shreds.

3.       Our heroes on the inside who are the victims of the budget slashing “know better” and they have to work clandestinely outside the law in order to save the people of America along with generous helpings of baseball and apple pie.

I could go into more details, and there are a LOT of details, but that’s pretty much all you need to know.  In fact, Clancy seems to go a bit overboard with details.  There’s a lot of different players and actions going on.  Once we get to page 200 or so of this 950-page hardback, we’re still meeting new people that are somehow relevant to the plot. That’s an awful lot of characters to keep up with in a story.  None of this is boring or tedious, however. Clancy always does an excellent job keeping his readers interested even if he’s only providing background or history of a character.  Even when there’s an awful LOT of history and background with everyone and everything.

Example: We meet a character who’s pulling into a parking lot at a government facility.  Clancy will tell us all about the background of the facility, much of its history, how its changed for the worse, and on and on.   When our character finally gets out of the car and walks up to the security guard, Clancy will again digress into a long-winded soliloquy lasting several pages about the security guards, their history, how they’ve changed, and on and on.  Our character finally walks into the building and looks around at the lobby of the facility, and….well….you know the rest.   So there are many times when not a lot happens over a lot of pages, yet we really don’t seem to mind because Clancy really is an entertaining author.

Sometimes his hyperbole is a tad too much. We’re not supposed to like the current POTUS in the story, yet Clancy feels he has to paint his subject with all of the worst possible tendencies and idiosyncrasies you can imagine.  The President in this story has absolutely no redeeming features, and Clancy does not mince words.  Then we come to his descriptions of the terrorists, and there are several of these individuals. Now, I’m not an expert on Islam, but I would imagine a Moslem would be mightily offended by Clancy’s description of these sick individuals and their twisted misguided devotion to their faith.  We constantly read sentences such as “Allah would rejoice at the killing of the infidel….”, “Children would die, but Allah would be pleased….”, “It was Allah’s hand that would  guide him in the torture and suffering of the greedy Westerners…..”   There must have been more than 50 such descriptions in this book.  It’s a bit much.  Again, I seem to recall these sentiments from Clancy’s previous books as well.

There’s also a lot of side action here, many of it seems unnecessary and only included to pad the pages.  There was one scene dealing with a hostage rescue at a Swedish embassy in Tripoli, and another with an assassination attempt that seemed rather superfluous. There’s also a lot of unfinished story, so I’m sure the future Jack Ryan novels that were written pick up in places where this one left off.

On a bizarre fact vs. fiction note, this story talks a lot about 9/11, but I’m not sure if 9/11 ever actually “happened” in the Tom Clancy/Jack Ryan fiction world.  I’m sure this can be a challenge for an author. How does one reference real events in a fictitious story, when the story actually began before such real events occurred?   I could be wrong here, but this might be something that a detailed reader may want to remind themselves of before they open the front cover.

It really is an enjoyable, interesting read though.  The hardback is 950 pages, but they’re swift pages.  The pages aren’t too cluttered with detail, so you can move your way through the book rather quickly.  I’m sure I’ll read more of the Tom Clancy/Jack Ryan novels, and I’ll probably enjoy them overall.  If you’re looking for anything “new” though, you might be disappointed.  It’s the same old same old. But it is a pretty fun ride as long as you know what to expect.