The Bourne Supremacy

The Bourne Supremacy
Robert Ludlum

One of the things I really like about the Bourne movies is that Bourne is always in control, always wins, is explicitly and thoroughly trained and brilliant at what he does. One of the things I really like about the Bourne books is that Bourne loses control, has fits of incapacitation, sometimes falls for traps, and has multiple personality disorder. It is fitting in a tight, compact package like a film that Bourne also be a tight compact package, but it is much more interesting reading if he falls apart and the narrative includes some of his shattered thoughts. (Gosh, I sound cruel.)

The Bourne Supremacy has to do with a different Jason Bourne showing up and making some unnerving kills, trading under the name of the legacy. That's pretty much where the similarities between the book and the film end. For one, Marie is kidnapped, not shot, and the covert forces of the US and Britain know that it is not "their" Bourne who has shown up and assasinated a high-ranking diplomat. The main problem is not embezzlement, it's a strategy to incite full-scale war in Asia. Oh, and the book takes place in Hong Kong and China, not Europe and New York.

As in the first book, the fight scenes tend to be repetitive (his foot "lashes up" countless times) and overcomplicated - print is not the media for blow-by-blow. On the other hand, we get internal dialogue and emotion, and it's generally well-written and entertaining. Marie, being alive, gets to do things like make hell for the CIA agents who kidnapped her, and escape to wander around Kowloon. Bourne gets to shoot up Mao's mausoleum and speak Mandarin and Cantonese.

The characters are well-developed and flawed enough to be both believable and likeable. The storyline is twisted enough to warrant surprise at the end, and the pace is fast enough that I forgot where I was and nearly missed my public transit stop on more than one occasion. It's not the film; these are altogether different characters, with altogether different stories. But the book is gripping, decently written, and very much entertaining. I'll probably read it again several times, raised eyebrows on the metro notwithstanding.