Revisiting Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity

When I first started reading Robert Ludlum my first (even though it was long before the movie) happened to be The Bourne Identity, which I remember early on encountering in a three-book volume also containing Ludlum's two immediately preceding novels, The Holcroft Covenant and The Matarese Circle. By and large these three books, and the novels that followed them through the '80s and after, defined Ludlum for me, while I paid rather less attention to the earlier books. This was partly because they were less likely to be on a library shelf, less likely to be on sale in a bookshop. But it was also because those older books seemed less interesting. When I happened across The Osterman Weekend, for example, the domestic, suburban setting, and the comparatively low key character of the thriller, did not hold my attention as well as the action-adventure approach of the novels about Jason Bourne et. al., and did not pursue them further. Indeed, it was to be years, and a considerable broadening of my taste in thriller fiction, before I went back and gave those books another shot, and actually found some pleasant surprises in this works.

These days, I think, I prefer them to the later books. Part of this is that I have less interest than before in shoot 'em up action, and more in the other ways in which thrillers can engage and entertain--while I might add, prizing the economy of the earlier, more compact books. There is, too, their freshness. After all, The Bourne Identity was Ludlum's twelfth novel in a decade's time--all within what was more or less the same genre. A good many writers get very repetitive long before that--and Ludlum did not wholly escape that tendency. Just a few novels in he was already reusing a number of his ideas--with scandalous revelations about American financing of the Nazis in their early days from The Scarlatti Inheritance; the pursuit of documents containing explosive secrets and small, secret factions scheming to engage in systematic blackmail of elites to further a small, secret faction's policy agenda from The Gemini Contenders; and the appearance of Black nationalist paramilitaries who blackmail the hero into cooperating in advance of the final showdown from The Matlock Paper; all appearing again in The Chancellor Manuscript.

The reuse of earlier ideas was still more pronounced in The Bourne Identity. The enlistment of an academic by the authorities in their operations, exploiting his desire for revenge against the enemy for the harm they did to his family, after which those same authorities treat him as a dangerous rogue (The Matlock Paper)--with the character's revenge seeing him fight in a major war against Asian Communists on whom he blames the destruction of his wife with reckless aggressiveness (as was the case with General MacAndrew in The Chancellor Manuscript). The element of international terrorism (The Holcroft Covenant, The Matarese Circle). The use of a real-life figure as a villain for added interest (The Chancellor Manuscript), though with that figure reimagined as a pulp fictional super-assassin (Ludlum's Carlos seeming to me to owe more to the Tinamou from The Holcroft Covenant than to what was actually known about Carlos). The particular reliance on settings in New York, France, Switzerland (The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Gemini Contenders, The Holcroft Covenant). The hero, unlike many a Ludlum protagonist, having a background as an operative that prepares him for the rigors of action-adventure (like Brandon Scofield in The Matarese Circle). And the great twist, that the agent does not know who he is, another, larger use of an earlier Ludlum theme, namely the plumbing of obscure, fragmentary memory to solve a puzzle (The Gemini Contenders, The Chancellor Manuscript)--with this variation on it less original than many appreciate. (Ludlum had not previously used it, but it was by no means new to the spy genre. James Bond himself lost his memory in Ian Fleming's original You Only Live Twice, hardly an obscure work.)

Of course, authors often do amass a body of work in which they utilized a great many ideas, and then bring the better ones together in their master work, the familiar parts producing something greater than their sum. But I am not sure that he uses them to better effect. The plotting of The Bourne Identity strikes me as less inventive or technically impressive or dramatically compelling than, for example, the plots of The Gemini Contenders or The Chancellor Manuscript--while certainly offering nothing to compare with the twist ending of The Holcroft Covenant. Indeed, the story is fairly simple compared to those predecessors, and this seems to me to be tied in with another difference, namely that Ludlum's edge was becoming dulled in an important way all too reflective of the mood of the country. The '70s-era novels like The Matlock Paper, The Gemini Contenders, The Chancellor Manuscript, and even The Scarlatti Inheritance, The Holcroft Covenant and The Matarese Circle, are more politically charged, angrier works than the Ludlum novels which followed. Thus the Jackal was not an element or tool of some oblique conspiracy on the part of the powerful like we saw with the terrorists in The Holcroft Covenant or The Matarese Circle, but simply the villain as conventionally recognized. And the object of the mystery, the stakes of the conflict, are narrower and more personal as Jason Bourne endeavors to elude his pursuers and figure out what--who--he had been before the loss of his memory. Even the authorities come off as rather less ruthless than they were in prior works. (Bourne came to them damaged and angry, rather than being cold-bloodedly manipulated the way James Matlock or Peter Chancellor was. Then they honestly believed the agent had gone rogue--turned killer. It is not so surprising that they do what they do next--and telling that this time around that agent is brought back in from the cold.)

Considering the contrast I also find myself considering that division within the spy genre that Julian Symons talked about, with critical, subversive thrillers looking at the dark deeds done by the powerful in the name of national security on one side ("People in high places betray the rest of us who put them there," Chancellor remarked in the book by his name, summing up the spirit of that angriest of Ludlum's novels)--and on the other, orthodox, nationalistic, status quo-affirming spy thrillers. The Bourne Identity, unlike many of Ludlum's preceding books, falls pretty squarely into the second category, no doubts existing in the end about who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. And considering that The Bourne Identity would seem to be Ludlum's biggest hit (the #1 novel of 1980, to which two of his next five books were direct sequels, and by far the most read Ludlum novel for a very long time), I can't help wondering if the relatively conventional, uncontroversial nature of the book on this level has not factored into its popularity, and Hollywood's willingness to make a franchise out of it while the planned adaptations of books like The Chancellor Manuscript and The Matarese Circle languish in development hell.