I watched The Bourne Identity and it got me on a spy kick, so I’ve been playing lots of Hitman and reading spy novels.
First up was The Gray Man, which is more “men’s fiction” of a particularly shake-your-head-at-the-page vintage. The titular Man is named Court Gentry, for god’s sake. He’s The Best Assassin Like Evar and totally badass, but a bad guy takes the family of his handler hostage, and TGM must get across Europe in 3 days to save them. But the baddies took the family hostage so they could draw out TGM, and have hired twelve hit squads from other parts of the world to try to kill him on the way, and in each fight he gets really badly wounded, so despite my head-shaking I found myself drawn in by the gonzo ridiculousness of it all. He’s constantly in situations that made me say “how the hell will he get out of this??” Which is a good place to be in a thriller, even if it’s manifestly stupid. My disappointment with it is that he has no character. He’s just a Man on a Mission. You get a lot of his decision-making, but there’s nothing interesting motivating him (little girls are in danger yawn) and he’s never really tempted or pulled toward the dark side. Best moment: a Libyan special forces operative calls a snowmobile a “motorcycle on skis”.
Then I started I Am Pilgrim which is wonderfully written and very interesting, with some really great characters out of the gate, but there’s a lot of ugliness in the world its portraying, and it was too much for me. I have a new baby as of early December, and the callouses on my soul are pretty thin right now, too thin for this book. I want to get it someday though; the first 50-70 pages are excellent.
Now I’m reading The Bourne Identity, which is pretty interestingly different from the movie. In the movie, Bourne offers Marie (a bumbling hippie-type) some money to take him from Zurich to Paris; in the book, she’s a Canadian analyst and he kidnaps her from a hotel conference, forces her to drive him around, and slaps her and prods her with a gun when she starts feeling her oats. But then he rescues her from being raped, and they end up falling in love. Sigh. There’s lots of financial details and good spy shit as they try to recover the big bucks he’s got in a bank, and the main antagonist seems to be Carlos, some super-badass assassin with a worldwide network of informers and patsies who’s setting Bourne up for many of his (Carlos’) crimes.
The storytelling and writing are pretty blah. We’ve come a long way in how we tell stories with drama. Case in point: A scene mid-book where a couple senior US intelligence officials are trying to figure out where he is, and come to realize they’ve likely been misled about Bourne’s crimes for years—by Carlos. In a more modern story, I think there’d be some lead up to them realizing they’ve been played, and the chapter would end on a holy shit moment. Here it just sort of comes out in conversation, they keep batting the idea around for a bit, and the chapter ends when a Senate Oversight guy calls them out for not coordinating better and getting played. All the details are there, and even some quality condemnation of US intelligence efforts, but it’s just not terribly…zesty. Writing this has got me re-engaged in it, but Imma be honest, I’ve been flagging for a bit.