By Tom Clancy. Grade: B
A man named Mohammad sits in a café in Vienna, about to propose a deal to a Colombian. What if they combined his network of Middle East agents and sympathizers with the Colombian’s drug network in America? The potential for profits would be enormous – and the potential for destruction unimaginable. A young man in suburban Maryland, who has grown up around intrigue, is about to put his skills to the test. Taught the ways of the world firsthand by agents, statesmen, analysts, Secret Servicemen and black-ops specialists, he crosses the radar of “The Campus” – a secret organisation set up to identify local terrorist threats and deal with them by any means necessary. His name is Jack Ryan Jr.
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The plot is set around a fictional, off-the-books counter-terrorist intelligence agency “The Campus”. Every counter-terrorist agency has its own way of dealing with terrorists. Turns out The Campus’s way of dealing with these terrorists is to stay under the radar, identify these terrorist cells beforehand and then eliminate the threat without raising any questions. The Campus recruits three people – a Marine, an FBI agent and an economics graduate with a family history. Jack Ryan Jr. (believe it or not, he took a double majors in economics and mathematics) is at the information, desk-oriented end of The Campus, looking or the trail leading to the bad guys in various numbers, or as said in the novel “doing the arithmetic with a nose attached to it”. Twins Dominic (the FBI agent) and Brian (the Marine) Caruso are the “muscle”; the enforcers of The Campus assigned the task of eliminating the bad guys.
A terrorist cell hell-bent on wreaking havoc and bringing chaos in America joins hands with the dreaded Colombian drug cartel to infiltrate the boundaries and take millions of lives in the name if their religion. It is upto The Campus, with its blood-and-iron, prevention-is-better-than-cure policy to launch a pre-emptive strike so that the impending catastrophe is averted.
I am going to take this opportunity to shed some light on the fact that innumerable novels and nonfiction pieces have been written on intelligence agencies only. Just the mention of any intelligence agency in the synopsis plays a deciding role in every stage of reading right from picking the book to relentlessly pursuing and sticking with its plot. That being said, The Teeth of the Tiger is a fairly average attempt at this genre.
The new thing with the novel is that the intelligence agency is fictional this time, which means more scope to play God. The characters were well sketched but this time, the characters are very limited in number.
The problem with the plot is that it is very commonplace in its narration. The plot progresses at a very steady pace and can tend to become a plateau. There are practically no twists which have the capability to bring the reader to the edge of his seat.
Another shortfall could be with the synopsis. The synopsis puts up Jack Ryan Jr. as the hero while the plot doesn’t corroborate this fact. The attention span or the length given to each of the three characters is equal, if not imbalanced, which is contradictory to what the synopsis says. Plus, by virtue of Jack Ryan Jr. being at the information gathering end of the plot, it by default means that the other two characters, the twins, are bound to be more interesting, much to the incongruence of the synopsis.
A couple of things worth mentioning:
Many times during the course of the novel, the story progresses in short, in fact very short paragraphs. Just like short sentences, short paragraphs have a way of grasping the reader’s attention in a topsy-turvy fashion.
“There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His messenger… There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His messenger… There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His messenger – thereisnogodbutallahandmohammedishismessenger.”
The last sentence is, as you can see, a repetition of the already repeated sentences. But by taking out the spaces, the author has accentuated the urgency and the rapid manner in which the sentence was spoken.
Let’s just say that the quote at the back cover “if you want to kick the tiger in his ass, you’d better have a plan for dealing with this teeth”, fell short of the promise and proved to be just a catchy caption.
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