Book Review: Locked On

I told my dear wife that I wouldn't use all my Wednesday in-between class time to blog, and I won't.  I swear.  I also have some reading to do for my afternoon class.  But I did want to get this little review - ok, not so little, but at least I'm trying - out of the way.  A hint: if you're in a hurry, skip to the Recommendation section.  The rest is mostly filibuster on the novel's good and bad points, and won't bring you closer to true Enlightenment, I'm sure.

Source: Amazon.com

Locked On, by Tom Clancy, with Mark Greaney

From the book’s cover:

Tom Clancy's All-Star lineup is back. Jack Ryan, his son, Jack Jr., John Clark Ding Chavez and the rest of the Campus team are facing their greatest challenge ever.
Jack Ryan, Sr. has made a momentous choice. He's running for President of the United States again and thus giving up a peaceful retirement to help his country in its darkest hour. But he doesn't anticipate the treachery of his opponent, who uses trumped up charges to attack one of Ryan's closest comrades, John Clark.
Now, Clark is in a race against time and must travel the world, staying one step ahead of his adversaries, including a shadowy organization tasked to bring him in, all while trying to find who is behind this.
Meanwhile, Jack Ryan, Jr., Ding Chavez, Dominick Caruso and other members of the Campus-the top secret off-the-books intelligence agency founded by Jack Ryan during his first term in the White House-deal with a question of their own: Why is a Pakistani military officer meeting with Dagestani terrorists? The answer will ultimately lead to a desperate struggle, with nothing short of the fate of the world at stake.


Synopsis:

What we’ve got here is another Clancy novel with all the major players, which is a nice change when compared to all the Clancy stuff that has come out over the past decade or more that was only using the man’s name.  But wait, this one has somebody else’s name attached to it also, indicating it might not be a true Clancy novel in the so-called “Ryan Universe.”  How does that affect the bottom line?  I’ll get to that in a minute.

As with any Tom Clancy work, there is a lot going on here, so I’m going to try to keep this to the bare essentials.  We have bad guys in Pakistan who are working in the government, but also against the government (The ISI, which is not implausible, considering their real-world activities are somewhat suspect).  We have an Osama Bin Laden-type character known as the Imir (I probably spelled that wrong), who has been captured in the previous novel Dead or Alive.  A note on that, I didn’t read Dead or Alive, as I figured it was just another one of Clancy’s co-authored works. These books had turned me off in the mid-90s with the introduction of the “Net Force” series.  I was disappointed in the first Net Force book, as I thought at the time that it’d be more of Clancy’s standard fare, and when it wasn’t, I bailed on his potential as an author of any future novels.

Ok, back from that aside.  In Locked On we have the Jack Ryan, who Clancy made famous in his novels and who has been played to lesser or greater effect by Alec Baldwin (good), Harrison Ford (great in the day he did them, but I don’t know if he could do more these days), Ben Affleck (not his worst role, but not the Jack Ryan The Sum of All Fears needed, in my opinion), and soon Chris Pine (I’m biased ahead of time, but we’ll see).  Here with Ryan are all the other characters that Clancy built during the late 80s into the early 90s, as well as a few new additions, like a potential girlfriend for Jack Ryan Jr.

The book starts off with the capture of a major terrorist leader in the Russian province of Dagestan, and then escalates into a complex web of tactical operations on the part of the anti-terrorist team Clancy formed in his semi-recent novels, action packed gun battles, espionage, a scene of nasty but abbreviated torture (after all, you don’t do any real serious harm to a beloved character - see What I Didn’t Like About It), and a climax involving a potential Pakistani caliphate and a war with India and a nuclear attack on Moscow and possibly the United States.  In the midst of this is a legal battle between sitting president Kealty and president wannabe (again, that is) Jack Ryan.  I perceive that here the novel seems to get into a lot of Clancy’s personal beliefs, and I’ll talk about this both in What I Liked... and What I Didn’t Like.

Not to spoil the story, but everything turns out alright in the end.  The plot steams along in places and drags in others, and you get a fairly well-rounded techno thriller and a continuation of the Jack Ryan saga that may or may not have been necessary.  But I’ll waive the obligation to make that assessment until I give my recommendation on the book.

A recent photo (I assume) from Facebook of Tom Clancy.  He looks kinda smug for a guy who hasn't written a really good novel since the 1990s.  Must be all those millions of dollars. / Source: Facebook.com

What I liked about it:

You gotta hand it to Clancy, he sticks by what he knows.  No radical liberal ideals thrown in to confuse the heck out of us (there is the Imir’s lawyer, but Clancy’s contempt for the character is seen through the thinnest of veils) and get us to think Tom has gone all soft-hearted and such.  I am not 100% sure about his political beliefs, but - based on his novels - I’d say they are pretty conservative.  Pretty darn conservative.  Of course, that isn’t entirely a bad thing.  I have conservative leanings in some issues.  In this case (support for the military, the issue on whether a high profile terrorist suspect should be tried in a military court, and some other things that Clancy dumps in concerning the part of the plot between candidate Ryan and President Kealty), I mostly agreed with his sentiments.  And I have to respect a man who sticks to his beliefs, even in his fiction writing.  Whether I agree with it all or not doesn’t detract from the ring of fidelity in Clancy’s prose.

On one of those points of belief in the book, I found Locked On to be especially valuable, though a tad bit behind the times.  The question is whether or not a high profile terrorist, such as an Osama Bin Laden-type, should receive his day in the federal court system.  The argument Clancy presents is that, on the one hand, a foreign national being held by the United States should also be allowed access to the same justice system that all Americans are supposed to enjoy.  On the other hand, Clancy argues - and this is where his heart is, we can tell - that a terrorist would use the public system as a pulpit and as a sympathy crutch, and that this would inevitably be an ineffective method of trying the suspect in pursuit of a lawful conviction.  

I’d say that this issue is one that could be addressed in and of itself, without all the rest of the book’s drama and action and such.  Do terrorist suspects deserve their day in court?  Or should they be tried before a military tribunal that, according to our justice system, can be done behind closed doors and without all the hoopla that the federal system sometimes engenders?  Fortunately, Bin Laden never got the chance to become a lexus for this sort of debate.  Er... not fortunately for him, I mean.

I say this all as being part of What I Liked because I found it to be one of the best parts of the novel.  The action in the book was fun, but seemed kinda hollow when compared to Clancy’s earlier works (See Clear and Present Danger especially).  The book delivers the thrills, but... well, let me address that below in What I Didn’t Like.

The many faces of Jack Ryan.  Pictured are Chris Pine (we'll see, but I'm not holding my breath), Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October (why not Alec Baldwin, who actually played Ryan in the film?  Do you really even have to ask?), Harrison Ford in Patriot Games and then also Clear and Present Danger (that movie was not nearly as good as the book, which is a surprise as it is actually a decent movie) and Ben Afleck opposite Morgan Freeman in The Sum of All Fears (the sum of all my fears was that the movie was never going to end, though I must say that the nuke scene was pretty compelling and even  gave my wife nightmares). / Source: MannytheMovieGuy.com

What I didn’t like about it:

Back to Clancy’s beliefs.  It can be argued that there is too much transparency between Clancy’s work and his personal beliefs.  Perhaps I am naive, but it seems to me that his early works didn’t stray so far into political leanings.  This became an issue around the time of Executive Orders, I believe.  Perhaps I missed it in earlier novels.  Probably because they were so good.   Truly, I haven’t read anything since that time that didn’t seem to be of lesser quality, especially in the Ryan series, and also that had too much personal politics shining through.  Do personal politics equal a lesser quality book?  Though it is true that correlation does not imply causation, it is also too much of a coincidence to completely ignore, in my eyes.

The weaker elements of the plot don’t need rehashing, so I’ll just say that I didn’t find the book to be as much of a techno thriller as it might have been, though I wouldn’t presume to say I could do better.  Clancy is still a master of his craft, even though he is not on the ball like he used to be.  Let’s just say that the book is exciting, but from time to time I felt like I was “reading” a video game action scene.  It is either a sad commentary on fiction or a strange commentary on video games when action scenes depicted in print evoke the feeling that this section is really tough and is going to have to be played over again when the lead character inadvertently bites the dust.  Though I am now only a casual gamer, I think I know the feeling well enough.  You gamers know what I mean.  Heck, even somebody who has watched over a shoulder as another person plays a tense sequence can relate.

Last gripe and I’m done.  Not to spoil it too much, but a major character gets put in a compromising position by some bad guys and is tortured.  Am I disgusted by the scene?  Yes.  Do I suspend belief because of the realism or by the sheer repugnancy of the act?  Sorry, but I have to go with the latter.  Yes, Clancy does well in describing the basic details (a hammer used to smash our character’s hand) and threatens us with worse (almost a scalpel in the eye).  And I’m not cheering for gore and pain for the sake of it.  Not by any means.  But I felt that the character got off relatively easy.  A last second reprieve before some real disfiguring and crippling harm was done.  I realize nobody likes to see a beloved character go through the ringer, but I must argue that a last second save is anticlimactic.  Don’t get us all ready and then say “Not tonight, I’ve got a headache.”  If you’re going to do torture, you can A) Do it without making us witness the entire scene in precise detail and squirm through a gruesome blow by blow, as it were - the mind can make up lots of bad and feel horrified and yet still also remain ignorant to a lot, after all - and B) Do it for all its worth.  Don’t pull the “just kidding, I won’t really hurt the star of the show” moment that so many spy/action movies are infamous for.  Ok?

The nukes that Pakistan built for itself during the 1990s, under the direction of Munir Ahmad Khan, are of great concern to the International community, and play a major role in Clancy's book.  But as I argued regarding the scene of torture in Locked On, we get another last second reprieve here as well, though this part was much more exciting and emotionally invested for me, personally. / Source: CritcalPPP.com

What I learned, if anything:

This was not a terrifically educational book.  There were a few interesting details on spycraft that could be learned from a casual perusal of Wikipedia.  I do recall one “Aha” moment that I had, but (and I know my wife in particular hates it when I say this) I don’t remember what was said or done that sparked it.  I guess my point is, I didn’t learn much from Locked On.  But then again, I didn’t go in with that intent.  So it’s all good.

Recommendation:

I need to split this recommendation down a dividing line.  Do you like Tom Clancy’s earlier stuff, and at the same time, can you forgive the overuse of his name in association with inferior products?  If so, this one isn’t too bad, and I’d recommend it.  But if, on the other hand, you’d prefer to read just one Tom Clancy book that whets your appetite for the man’s reputation, or even more so, you want to read one definitive Tom Clancy novel and then not pick up his stuff ever again, then this is not the book for you.  It was neither really good nor really bad, and so it gets no strong recommendation from me in either direction.

Learn more about Locked On, by Tom Clancy, on Amazon.com

The parting comment:


That's ironic, Mr. Putin, coming from somebody who used to be in the KGB, i.e.: the intelligence agency of the most bureaucratic state the world has ever known.  Still, its not a bad joke.