Review: The Bourne Supremacy, by Robert Ludlum

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

The premise of Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity (which differs significantly from the premise of the well-known 2002 film adaptation) is that American intelligence, determined to catch the super assassin-for-hire Carlos the Jackal, creates the legend of another super assassin-for-hire, Jason Bourne, who takes credit for Carlos' kills in the expectation of driving Carlos to come after him and put an end to this rival invading his turf and threatening his business, enabling the authorities to once and for all bring down the Jackal. But alas the agent playing the part of Bourne, as a result of amnesia suffered in an incident in the course of his assignment in which he was shot and nearly drowned, beginning a series of acts on his part that cause his controllers to think he has betrayed them, as a result of which the man who was Bourne, while trying to figure out who he was and what he was doing, not only had Carlos and his men out to put him down, but also his own employers . . .

I was very impressed with it when I first read it, way back when. I was less impressed by it later. Even if one gets beyond the way in which Ludlum expected readers to identify the villain with the real-life Carlos the Jackal but really gave us a totally made-up figure under that name far more serviceable to the plot (age, appearance, activity all altered out of recognition), that super-assassins-for-hire like Carlos and Bourne in general are pretty much pure fantasy, and that the rather convoluted scheme for using Bourne to draw out Carlos was a layering of an even sillier fantasy over the other fantasy, making for the kind of "I'm the only one who can catch him, because I know how he thinks!" and "This time, it's personal!" action movie logic-driven Duel of the Master Operatives that has also come to seem awfully cliché after all these years (even with the whole memory loss thing, which wasn't nearly so original as some seem to think it was)--and indeed redolent of decline in Ludlum's moving away from the kind of intricate political thriller that made Ludlum's earlier books (a Matlock Paper, a Trevayne, a Chancellor Manuscript) so much more intriguing to me these days in favor of "safer," more readily salable, conventional good guys vs. bad guys action movies-on-paper.)(The fact that Hollywood was willing to make an action movie out of the paper version again and again, as it ignored Ludlum's other books, seemed to me confirmation of that reading of the situation.)

Indeed, in his two subsequent efforts Ludlum appears to have tried to strike a balance between an action movie on paper and something more like his '70s-era novels, at times with impressive results. (On recent revisitation I found the first forty percent or so of The Aquitaine Progression very, very impressive--but felt that afterward the novel, in spite of some good later bits, became something much flatter and more generic, and the less satisfying for being stretched out to such length.) However, after that Ludlum was, like so many writers who have had a major success, especially as they become more prone to repeat themselves, tended much more toward sequels, with the first straight sequel the follow-up to The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy--I suppose, not just because The Bourne Identity ended with the flesh-and-blood human being who had been acting the part of Bourne, David Webb, just beginning his recovery and Carlos the Jackal still on the loose, but because the relatively easy premise made a continuation easier to write (certainly by contrast with a novel that wrapped things up the way Gemini Contenders or Chancellor Manuscript did, or the way things stood at the end of a Trevayne, or even the more conventionally action thriller-structured The Holcroft Covenant, given the big twist at the end).

To Ludlum's credit if the basic premise of Bourne Identity is silly, Bourne Supremacy puts a clever twist on the silliness. This time instead of Jason Bourne taking credit for Carlos' kills, another killer is posing as Jason Bourne, exploiting his legend. Of course, Jason Bourne was just a fraud intended to draw out Carlos, and Bourne, especially as he is increasingly being buried by Webb, is not about to go after the Bourne impostor to protect his bad name the way Carlos did. Indeed, at this point there are very, very few things that could possibly make Bourne/Webb get back into the game in the old way. However, the same old D.C. functionaries who have played havoc with Webb's life in the past find that the impostor Bourne is now in the service of a mad Chinese politician whose ambitions may well ignite a world war, and so would dearly like for Bourne to come back, and take out the impostor as presumably only he can. To that end they follow up their less than half-baked scheme for trapping Carlos with another less than half-baked scheme, concocting a situation in which a vengeful Asian magnate kidnaps Webb/Bourne's wife Marie to force Bourne back into action (with Webb/Bourne supposed to be oblivious to the fact that in reality American intelligence has done the job).

How do things go from there? The first quarter of the novel is actually quite fluid and gripping, with the initial shock of Marie's kidnapping right out of their home, and then the way the functionaries on whom Webb/Bourne has relied for help transitioning "back in from the cold" gaslight him and give him the bureaucratic runaround has a very visceral quality. Webb's desperation, and his rage at those treating him this way, really come through--and as the man that Webb had been for so long, and has now tried so hard to suppress, resurges within him Ludlum really makes us feel that this other personality is back, and taking over, as Ludlum, keeping a tight focus through this section of the story, follows Bourne through the initial phases of his quest to take down the impostor Bourne, and get his wife back.

Still, as Ludlum had repeatedly demonstrated a chase like this isn't a sufficient foundation for a six hundred page doorstop like Bourne Supremacy--while we already know the nature of the trick the government is playing on Webb, and the identity, objects, motives of the villain of the piece from the first briefing, so that if we learn additional details later there is really no great mystery to hold our attention through the proceedings. At the same time, if Webb is far from having recovered the entirety of his memory, the whole problem of "Who am I?" so central to The Bourne Identity was clarified in the prior book (and indeed, we, and Webb, know all too well what the answer is). Likewise what interest Carlos derived from association with a real-life figure, or what Ludlum made him over into, a man who at times seems the shadow ruler of Paris from behind a confessional screen, does not have its counterpart here. This book does have the interest of a change from Ludlum's usual locations (the northeastern United States, and Western Europe, particularly that arc of territory extending from the English Channel to Rome, and the associated waters and isles) in its use of China as its principal setting, but that is a matter of backdrop rather than story, the more in as, if the geopolitics of the premise contain some intriguing elements (not least a villain with a motive such as we would not usually get in a thriller such as this), Ludlum develops them to only a limited degree.

Ultimately what Ludlum opts for is giving the story two axes rather than one. There is Jason Bourne's quest to get his wife back, with taking down the impostor and stopping the madman using him a means to that end--and there is what happens with Marie after the folks from Washington kidnapped her, given that, if no more than Jason knowing the nature of the game in which they are caught up, she manages to escape from the facility in which she is being held, so that she is herself the object of a hunt (because, after all, being unable to produce Marie when Bourne does the job and comes asking for her release could easily have very ugly consequences for the schemers who dragged him into this affair), which Ludlum accords almost equal time through most of the book's middle, alternating his chapters so that for the greater part of the text we get one (or two) about Bourne followed by one (or two) about Marie followed by one about Bourne again, etc., etc..

The result is that the Jason Bourne novel is instead a Jason and Marie Bourne novel, problematically I thought given that it seemed that a Jason Bourne novel is what we were promised, and that Marie's side of the story quickly sprawls in its turn, with her friend from her Canadian government days Catherine Staples actually becoming a much more active figure within the goings-on than Marie herself for a long stretch. This side of the story, if ultimately important in the resolution of the main plot, still mostly gives us a lot of minor figures within the conspiracy to manipulate Bourne engaged in lament and blame games over how their essentially demented scheme has gone "off the wire," as other minor figures look on aghast at the foolishness, and sociopathy, involved, with even the more substantive-seeming other bits time and again proving inessential. (Late in the story we learn that the Big Bad has penetrated the operation, forcing Marie's kidnappers to not just try to find her as she continues a flight dragged out by misunderstandings and unnecessary occurrences as they try figuring out what Bourne himself is doing, but also root out the traitor in their midst--even though his existence could easily have been excised from the story without any damage to its fabric.) It is not much compensation for taking us away from what seems the proper line of the story, and the slowing of the pace of its progress.

Meanwhile the scene changes and the advancement of the narrative with them get increasingly choppy due to transitions that give the impression of a novelized film rather than a novel (with, at one point, Bourne and a comrade landing on China's southern coast, Bourne asking a contact they have just met to arrange their passage to Beijing, and then, bam, there they are at Beijing's international airport). This combined with how in Bourne's side of the story as in Marie's there are lengthy incidents which were, strictly speaking, unnecessary (so does it seem with the episode in Tiananmen Square) to make the narrative harder to follow. Indeed, as if Ludlum himself is getting weary of his own tale, after the midpoint we see his sense of humor at times inappropriately present (as in the goings-on surrounding Tianannmen Square, which comes to hinge on an act that, if we are speaking of Bourne characters, seems much more General Mackenzie Hawkins than Bourne). Meandering, and both harder and less satisfying to follow along, the tension predictably slackens, but it does pick up again when the True Bourne finally, properly, faces down the fake, and Bourne advances with his captive to a reckoning with his manipulators that I recalled vividly decades after first reading it, and which held up impressively against my old memory all these years later--helped by the fact that we go beyond Webb relying on Bourne to get through the adventure to Bourne himself seeming to be eclipsed by something else, even darker . . .

Writing out that confrontation Ludlum may be susceptible to accusations of writing himself into a corner and pulling his punch to get out of it when a murderously vengeful Webb/Bourne allows himself to be talked down from the ledge onto which he has gone out, so to speak, but even after that what came before still retains a good deal of its impact. Of course, coming with nearly a hundred pages of the story left to go this means that taking down the madman who was the whole reason for the D.C. bureaucrats drawing Webb/Bourne into the game reads almost like an epilogue to the drama giving the book its emotional core, but it is a fairly entertaining epilogue all the same that really does wrap up the very messy affair. Thinking again of the tendency to draw out stories excessively that increasingly characterized publishing in that era and since, of which the size of Ludlum's books could seem all too representative, it seemed to me that if Ludlum's development of an overcomplicated tale out of his unlikely premise made it less satisfying than it would otherwise have been, the taut action thriller Ludlum at its core is still very evident and effective in it, and made the reread well worth the while.

For a full listing of Robert Ludlum's novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog) click here.