Classic Book Review: "Echoes of Honor" by David Weber - Honorverse 8
A REWRITE OF THE HORNBLOWER BOOK "FLYING COLOURS"
Many of the "Honorverse" stories are either obviously influenced by characters and situations in C.S. Forester's Hornblower novels or pay open homage to them.
But the eighth Honorverse book takes this to the next level in that it almost exactly parallels one of Forester's novels - Flying Colours.
It begins on a very dark note as Honor's parents and family, currently at her Steadholder's residence on Grayson, are watching a news broadcast from Haven, having been warned to expect bad news - and the broadcast purports to show her execution.
It's not really a spoiler to say that she isn't actually dead, because anyone who read the previous book knows that Honor and her friends have escaped. And indeed, most people reading this book will know that she will appear in another dozen or so novels set after this one, and anyway chapter two of the book depicts the sick puppy in the People's Republic of Haven (Peep) propaganda department who had been in charge of faking the film footage of Honor Harrington's hanging, who is gloating about what a convincing job he's done.
However, sabotaging an enemy battlecruiser in which they were prisoners, blowing it up, and getting off in an assault shuttle while tricking the Peeps into thinking they're dead was difficult enough for our heroes. Stealing a ship on the most secure prison planet in the galaxy, a place nicknamed |"Hell" for good reason, and making it home from 200 light years behind enemy lines is a whole new order of difficult.
And because they never do anything the easy way, capturing enough ships to rescue half a million prisoners of war and political prisoners on the planet and bringing them home too is likely to prove more difficult still ...
There is a lot more to this story, though, than Honor Harrington and her comrades escaping from the planet Hades, also known as Hell. The chapters or groups of chapters alternate between telling episodes in the story of that escape attempt, sections set back home in Manticore, Grayson or other allied planets telling you what the alliance is doing to try to maintain the initiative, develop new weapons, and win the war, and sections told from a "Peep" perspective explaining what the other side are doing to try to ensure they win it.
When I was first drafting the paragraph above I originally wrote of the Peeps as the "bad guys" and then changed it to "the other side." Some of the people in the Peep leadership, and some of those working for them especially in the SS, certainly are bad guys and that's how the good guys will think of the Peeps for quite a few books to come. However, there are decent people working for the People's republic of Haven and trying to do their best in a difficult and morally complex universe, and Weber manages to avoid making everyone on the enemy side cartoonishly evil.
Indeed the day may come when some of Honor's present enemies may become allies against a far greater evil ...
Like other books in the series, "Echoes of Honor" is a very well-written story and if you pick the book up you will have difficulty putting it down.
You can buy "Echoes of Honor" from Amazon at
Echoes of Honour (Honorverse): Amazon.co.uk: Weber, David: 9780671578336: Books
More details of the series as a whole are given on this site at
Book Series overview: David Weber's "Honor Harrington" universe book reviews.
I can strongly recommend "Echoes of Honor" and indeed the whole series.
Mitth'raw'nuruodo
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