I'm not reading this! It sucks!
goudabonbon and I watched The Bourne Ultimatum on video about a month ago (I'd already seen it theatrically), and the combination of that and some commentary about movie adaptations on toddalcott's blog made me think that I wanted to read the book. I read the first two Bourne books in the 1980s -- for some reason, I think I read Identity twice when I was in high school -- and I had a hankering for a long page-turner I could just burn through.
So I put The Bourne Ultimatum on reserve at the library, it arrived on Thursday, and I started reading it...
... and it's terrible! The prose style is like being assaulted with unnecessary, superfluous, redundant adjectives -- not to mention hysterical exclamation points! This is the second paragraph of the book:
"Manassas! The key was here! The key that would unlock the subterranean door that lead to Carlos the Jackal, the assassin who wanted only to destroy David Webb and his family... Webb! Get away from me, David! screamed Jason Bourne in the silence of his mind. Let me be the killer you cannot be!"
(I should point out that in the continuity of the Bourne books, in contrast to the films, "Jason Bourne" never really existed: he was a fictional assassin/operative invented by intelligence agents to flush out real hitman Carlos the Jackal. When one of the agents, David Webb, was injured and suffered amnesia, he followed clues that led him to believe he really was Jason Bourne. It's like the George Chapman stuff in North by Northwest. He learns his true identity at the end of Bourne Identity, then has to "be" Jason Bourne in The Bourne Supremacy, and gets a bad case of multiple-personality disorder.)
Giving up on Ultimatum after less than 30 pages, I wondered: was Ludlum always this bad, or is Ultimatum a particularly bad example?
Desperate for something good and pulpy, I picked up the Library of America's Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s (which my mother-in-law gave me), found one of the short novels I hadn't read yet, and picked Pick-up by Charles Willeford. It's quite good. Whew!
So I put The Bourne Ultimatum on reserve at the library, it arrived on Thursday, and I started reading it...
... and it's terrible! The prose style is like being assaulted with unnecessary, superfluous, redundant adjectives -- not to mention hysterical exclamation points! This is the second paragraph of the book:
"Manassas! The key was here! The key that would unlock the subterranean door that lead to Carlos the Jackal, the assassin who wanted only to destroy David Webb and his family... Webb! Get away from me, David! screamed Jason Bourne in the silence of his mind. Let me be the killer you cannot be!"
(I should point out that in the continuity of the Bourne books, in contrast to the films, "Jason Bourne" never really existed: he was a fictional assassin/operative invented by intelligence agents to flush out real hitman Carlos the Jackal. When one of the agents, David Webb, was injured and suffered amnesia, he followed clues that led him to believe he really was Jason Bourne. It's like the George Chapman stuff in North by Northwest. He learns his true identity at the end of Bourne Identity, then has to "be" Jason Bourne in The Bourne Supremacy, and gets a bad case of multiple-personality disorder.)
Giving up on Ultimatum after less than 30 pages, I wondered: was Ludlum always this bad, or is Ultimatum a particularly bad example?
Desperate for something good and pulpy, I picked up the Library of America's Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s (which my mother-in-law gave me), found one of the short novels I hadn't read yet, and picked Pick-up by Charles Willeford. It's quite good. Whew!