The Bourne Identity (the book)

Title : The Bourne Identity (535 pages)

Author : Robert Ludlum (1980)

Genre : Action

Rating : A-

This Month I Read...
Thanks to the Matt Damon movie, The Bourne Identity is undoubtedly Robert Ludlum's best-known novel. A bullet-riddled-yet-still-alive guy gets plucked out of the briny and discovers he's got a bad case of amnesia. He spends the rest of the book/movie trying to regain his memory; dodging bullets from (and then killing) a slew of professional assassins; and attempting to figure who is so all-fired anxious to kill him.

What's To Like...
The book is radically different from the movie, so there's a totally new plot and ending. In fact, the only similarities between the two are :

1.) Our hero has amnesia.

2.) The heroine pulls a "Patty Hearst", gradually morphing from unwilling kidnappee to active GF and confederate of Jason Bourne.

3.) There is an outfit called Treadstone.

The plot is complex; the action is non-stop; and the book is a page-turner. There is both a good climax and a "door" left open for a sequel or two.

What's Not To Like...
I'm still nonplussed about the amazing foresight of Jason Bourne to have the number of his Swiss bank account implanted in his hip. Sheesh, how convenient.

The Treadstone in the book (which is very different from the movie's version) seems to be suicidally lax in security when it comes to high-level meetings.

Lots of other people b*tched about the movie being so different from the book, and this is probably valid if you read the book first. I didn't, so this isn't an issue for me.

Sequel, Threequel, Fourquel, Fivequel...
Ludlum of course mapped this out to be a trilogy, so one should expect some huge loose ends at the conclusion of Bourne-1. In addition to the Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum, a guy named Eric van Lustbader has penned another two books in the series (after Ludlum was so rude as to die), titled The Bourne Legacy and The Bourne Betrayal.

So if you can't get enough of the saga, there's a couple thousands pages-worth of sequels out there. I'll take it one book at a time. Bourne-1 was a great read. We'll see if Bourne-2 can keep up the pace.