Review: The Bourne Ultimatum, by Robert Ludlum

In publishing a third Jason Bourne novel a mere four years after the preceding book Robert Ludlum could seem to simply be milking a past success, but one could also argue for a finale to the saga somehow seeming right at that point--perhaps more so than Ludlum could have known given how fast events were moving in those days. After all, the sequel he published to The Bourne Identity did not resolve the issue still unsettled at the first book's close, namely the fact that the assassin Carlos the Jackal was still on the loose, with no less incentive than before to settle the score with his "rival" Jason Bourne--or, for him the same thing, the academic who had years ago played the part of Bourne as part of American intelligence's campaign to bring him down. That the world to which Carlos and Bourne both belonged was, circa 1990, was fast passing--the Cold War drawing to a close, the wave of international terrorism of which Carlos has been for a period the face waning with it, and the ghosts of Vietnam that haunted Jason Bourne were, in America at least, fading away--lent all this an additional edge. So did the fact that those who had fought all those battles were getting on in years, and the time in which they could plausibly go on playing games in the field--could personally settle old scores against each other--was fast running out. (Indeed, Jason, who contrary to those who may picture Matt Damon when they think of Bourne, was already closer to forty than thirty in the first adventure, here looking ahead to his fifty-first birthday, while Carlos is a good many years older than that--and if still possessed of not just his organization but apparently all his old capacities, has also been diagnosed with a terminal illness that makes him not long for this world.)

Still, if this was a logical time to give us that last Duel of the Master Assassins, such a duel was comparatively thin stuff for an '80s-era Ludlum "super-thriller." The result was that Ludlum spun a bigger narrative around it. To his credit he utilized the elements of that passing world of which Jason and Carlos were so representative for the purpose. Thus is it the case that after the trap at a Baltimore amusement park announces that Jason Bourne's old enemy Carlos the Jackal is back and gunning for him--and his family--Jason's investigation quickly leads to a characteristically Ludlumesque conspiracy rooted in Bourne's past, namely the corrupt, pocket-lining clique over at Command Saigon who had controlled the Medusa battalion in which Webb/Bourne fought back in the Vietnam War. Not only got on in years but come up in the world since, they had also moved on to corruption on a far grander scale, the men who had run Medusa now chairs of the Federal Trade Commission and Supreme Commanders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as they fully exploit their connections and positions to extend their wealth and power through a shadowy international business empire. Attempting to use Medusa to entrap the Jackal, the resulting intrigue involves actors from La Cosa Nostra to Moscow, all of whom have their own, sometimes multiple, agendas.

However, if appropriate thematically, it meant a different book from its predecessors structurally. Rather than Bourne and Carlos racing into battle, the plot, a merger of the intricate conspiracy-in-high-places stuff of the earlier Ludlum with the shoot 'em up stuff the Bourne novels in particular emphasize, sprawls even by the standards of Ludlum's later books, the prior The Bourne Supremacy included--with the result that the Duel takes a while to properly get going. Indeed, in the first couple of hundred pages of the novel Jason Bourne disappears entirely from the reader's view for long stretches as Ludlum lays the groundwork for later events, we are a third of the way in before Jason and Carlos make contact, and we are more than halfway through the story before the battle is really and properly joined and the fights, shootouts, explosions begin in earnest. Ideally all of the build-up would have given the showdown when it came the more impact, but the book ends up overstuffed and overcomplicated rather than impressively intricate, with much of what it is overstuffed with and overcomplicated by doing nothing to forward the progress of the story (with Webb's wife Marie's attempt to find Bourne in France in particular coming off as an attempt to give her a bigger part in the story even more awkward than what we saw in Supremacy), and others treated at excessive length relative to their ultimate importance (as with the Mafia's involvement). It does not help that Ludlum reuses a good many elements from past books to less effect here than he achieved the first time. (The Medusa network may be very appropriate thematically given the connection with Bourne's past and the end-of-an-era aspect the book has, but Medusa is also a much less fully imagined, and much less insidious and high-stakes-seeming entity than the Matarese, or Geneon.)

Meanwhile, in spite of the fact that "This time, it's personal" the Jason Bourne we get here is less compelling than the Jason Bourne of prior books. Again, the secret agent who has lost his memory was not an unprecedented idea in 1980, but Bourne confused about who he is and what he has done, hunted by his employers as well as his enemies in that first book and capable of the back-to-the-wall feral ruthlessness that saw him kidnap Marie way back when; and, too, the Bourne the Washington bureaucrats acting on raison d'etat cruelly manipulated into doing their dirty work in The Bourne Supremacy, and driven over the edge in the process; had a rather sharper edge than the "Bourne" we see here. Even if he every now and then says something that seems murderously callous, it is mostly David Webb we see on the page. Indeed, we often see Webb desperately holding on to what remains of the Bourne persona to get through the crisis he is facing rather than making us feel his settled, civilian, self is ever really in danger of being overwhelmed by it. In this it matters that Bourne is never so isolated and pressed as before, in this battle against Carlos having a host of powerful allies on his side from the start of the story--and that if there is friction between him and the government functionaries they are less that of a man going over the edge after its misuse of him than a case of a "loose cannon cop" pleading for a little more time from his desk-pounding captain in which to bring down the bag guys.

Of course, that leaves the matter of the mechanics of the duel between hero and villain. To his credit Ludlum has his successes here, especially as the story gets more focused. If Paris may be overfamiliar ground for Ludlum and Bourne alike, the maneuvering surrounding the Le Coeur du Soldat bar was particularly robust, and the involvement of the Soviets that contributes to the final showdown taking place behind the Iron Curtain, on ground with a special significance for the KGB-trained Carlos, was a good idea. I'm not sure that finale amounted to all that it could have dramatically, given both how little we see of Carlos directly (the character remains a near-cipher down to the end, with all that means for any realization of the dramatic potentials of this super-villain's meltdown as he approaches the end of his story), and an element of surrealism, even science fiction, in the depiction of the final battle that can feel a bit jarring given the tone of the story prior to that point (and what we generally expect of Ludlum). Still, it is undeniably a big finish, the kind that gives us as much assurance as any ending can that there won't be a next time, with the saga capped off by a suitable final chapter assuring us that with that secret war over the living will be getting on with their lives.

Again, though, it is some hundreds of pages before all that is really underway, while taking the book as a whole I find it easy to understand why first picking it up way back when I got pretty impatient with the earlier part of the tale, all as this time around I often found that rather than the overall thrust of the tale it was some minor subplot or character or detail holding my interest. Little as they did for the advancement of the larger story, they brought a lot more humor to the story than I expected. Granted, the results are far from consistently successful, but Ludlum definitely had his successes here. (The intersection of the paths of Gates, Prefontaine and Fontaine, if falling a bit flat when it comes together, and then falling by the wayside for hundreds of pages, provided by some very entertaining misunderstandings, and even satire, for a stretch.) Indeed, Ludlum here may be open to the charge of getting too joke-y. (Amid the carnage and havoc of the big finale Ludlum finds occasion for Jason Bourne to say the word "plastics" to a callow young Californian named Benjamin. Seriously.)

That Ludlum so often played the events of the story for a laugh seems reflective of the reality not only that he had long had an inclination to the comedic--as seen not only in his early The Road to Gandolfo but his "straight" thrillers as well. Like the increasing tendency to sequels, it also reflects the fact that he had been at the thriller game for two decades, his name on the cover still selling books in "top ten of this year's Publisher's Weekly list" numbers, but, in spite of every now and then experimenting with new elements, mainly working off of older ideas to diminishing returns, and, I suspect, bored with the effort and making a joke of things as so many writers do at such a stage in their careers. In fact it would be my guess that this was the reason why the next Ludlum novel was a direct sequel to The Road to Gandolfo, The Road to Omaha--a novel I regard as being the last "true" Ludlum novel, just as The Bourne Ultimatum is for me the last "true" Ludlum thriller before those efforts like The Scorpio Illusion and The Apocalypse Watch that had me wondering whether Ludlum really wrote them at all.

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