Book Review: The Road to Omaha, by Robert Ludlum

Robert Ludlum's MacKenzie Hawkins-Sam Devereaux novels seemed to me even more off the main track of his work than the novels Ludlum published as Jonathan Ryder. Those, at least, were thrillers (indeed, as it turned out, the Ryder novel Trevayne was one of his best such works), whereas his Sam Devereaux novels were comedies--all as I had found Ludlum's attempts at humor uneven. In truth I had sometimes enjoyed them (as with Valerie Converse's New York cab ride in The Aquitaine Progression or the misadventures of Brendan Prefontaine in The Bourne Ultimatum), but the weaker aspects of Ludlum's writing tended to put him at a particular disadvantage here. His tendency to make caricatures of his characters, ethnically as in other ways, went into overdrive here, with results that could seem crude and offensive rather than funny (like Krusty the Clown performing his '50s-era routine before a '90s audience), all as his less than efficient use of words seemed particularly disadvantageous when he went for laughs. Meanwhile this particular book, coming late in a period in which Ludlum was repeating himself (counting the return of Inver Brass in The Icarus Agenda this was his fourth sequel in a row), often to diminishing returns (certainly evident in the immediately preceding Bourne Ultimatum), could seem as if it had been on the shelf since the time when Ludlum wrote The Road to Gandolfo as he focused on his more profitable straight thrillers, and just brought this one out when he did out of sheer exhaustion before putting the pen down and letting the Ludlum name become the Ludlum "brand" slapped on the covers of the increasingly generic intelligence procedurals published under it from The Scorpio Illusion forward.

Still, suspecting this was the last "true" Ludlum novel I dove into The Road to Omaha--and all too predictably found it a slog. Rather than laughing at Sam Devereaux's predicament I found myself feeling sorry for him as I sympathized with his desire to just be left alone by the egomaniacal lunatic grifter General Mackenzie Hawkins (Ludlum's apparent admiration for whom jarred), all as the writing lived down to my lowest expectations. Indeed, during a rather protracted and complicated pursuit sequence through Boston that overtaxed my willingness to continue following the story I put down the book, unsure as to whether I would bother returning to it. But in the end I did so, and if it took me quite some time to "get into" the story (it didn't happen until I was almost halfway through this six hundred pager) I did get into it.

With the set-up out of the way, and Ludlum proceeding to develop the broader plot (this time Hawkins, with Devereaux once again dragged in, is suing the government "on behalf" of a Native American tribe Hawkins has determined may rightly own the land on which Strategic Air Command headquarters is built), he managed to put the scale and intricacy to which his narratives were prone to good effect, his taking in the bigger picture giving him plenty at which to direct his not merely comedic but satirical barbs, especially as we saw more of the villains of the piece and their machinations as they presumed to head off Hawkins' challenge to the government by other than strictly legal means. In the process Ludlum actually transforms General Hawkins from the (comic) villain he was the last time around, when he was simply after a big score, into an antihero fighting for justice (in his deranged way), all as Sam Devereaux goes from being Hawkins' hapless victim to this comedic epic's answer to Joel Converse, an accomplished attorney battling his Vietnam-era ghosts as he also battles the book's conspirators with the law as his weapon, with the book better off for it. Indeed, Ludlum gives free rein not just to the comedic impulses that did not always well-suit, for example, his Bourne sequels, but also to the politically critical impulses he made clear were still alive and well in his introduction to the reprint of his earlier Trevayne (impulses, if anything, exacerbated by the repellent state of American politics as Ludlum found it at the end of the 1980s) evident here to a degree not seen since the days when he was writing novels like Trevayne and The Chancellor Manuscript, giving the comedy its edge--with it helping greatly that displayed a healthy disrespect for the Establishment. Ludlum's depiction of Randolph Gates in The Bourne Ultimatum was just a hint of what he is to offer here, as Ludlum offered up some fairly inspired ideas, not least making the Director of Central Intelligence a literal "goodfella," selected for and installed in his position by the yacht club clichés who own the country's defense-industrial base (though they would never have such over to dinner, of course, such a personage "socially unacceptable," don't you know)--all as if you ever wondered what an "all star" government counter-terrorist team with John Wayne, Marlon Brando and Laurence Olivier on it would be like (I didn't either), you find out here (sort of). Some of it even looks like prophesy in hindsight--like the combination of crudity and ignorance characterizing the dialogue in the book's Cabinet meeting, and its White House chief of staff who gives the press the middle finger as that press goes on being deferential in its wearisome pompous way.

The result was that what began as something of a chore became a pleasure as the pages flew by with results that were consistently amusing, and every once in a while even laugh out loud funny. By the end I was glad I had stuck with the book, which seemed a not unfitting close to the oeuvre of what I as much as ever think of as the "real Ludlum," the more in as where commercial fiction is concerned, what it had been possible to present as the material of a straight thriller in 1977 could only be presented as comedy in the political milieu of 1992, a less and less free and tolerant place where satire was concerned--all as, as we now know only too well, history's course was such course that in a very short time satire would be completely incapable of comparing with the stuff of our ever more em dash substitution-filled headlines for sheer absurdity and obscenity, exaggeration to any useful end simply impossible.

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