In (Qualified) Defense of Robert Ludlum's Prose

The deficiencies of Robert Ludlum's prose as measured by the conventional criteria of "good style" are of course notoriously legion.

Taking up this subject I will not attempt to debunk the criticisms, because having read, indeed reread, a good deal of Ludlum in recent years I know how much truth there is to them. Indeed, I would be less than honest were I to deny that Ludlum's often melodramatic, heavy-handed, even amateurish tics as a writer (the profuse use of exclamation points and italics and the word "Madness!" and transitional phrases almost Victorian-in-their-telling, etc., etc.), and the general wordiness to which they conduce, have often got on my nerves while reading through his oeuvre, and that indeed I discussed those tics less than I would otherwise have done simply because this would have made my reviews intolerably repetitive as the list of my reviews of his books on this blog lengthened.

Still, if I grant the point I have felt that critics beat up on Ludlum's prose far too much--that, indeed, reading The Gemini Contenders I could not but think of how far he was superior in this area to that more recent writer of religiously-themed mysteries, Dan Brown. (The fact remains that Ludlum was writing for actual adults, whereas I am not so sure about Mr. Brown.) Moreover, even while considering the ways in which Ludlum's prose is not all I might have liked it to be I also find myself thinking of how very effective as a storyteller he is in spite of that fact, and this not only at the level of head-spinning plotting, but how well he conveys to the reader the states, the conditions, of his characters. To cite but one example The Bourne Supremacy Ludlum makes us feel how his protagonist is coming apart in the extreme circumstances, and ready to turn murderously on those he sees as his tormentors--while in The Matlock Paper he manages to make us feel that way about a whole society.

Such achievements are a reminder that storytelling is about much, much more than elegant prose--and that when all is said and done relatively minor failings of form recede into insignificance when that storytelling is strong enough, with such storytelling owing much, much more than proponents of the "art of beauty" allow to content. To, in a word, the writer having something to say, next to which how they say it is secondary. To his credit, Ludlum did have much to say about the world we lived in then, and still live in now, and managed to say it clearly and effectively even as he spun some of the most popular thrillers of his era, which at their best have much to commend them as thrillers--which is rather more than can be said for many a writer of "beautiful sentences."