Stillbourne
/The Bourne Deception
…he saw his reflection staring back at him as if from out of some mythic, sentient forest. The paleness of his face startled him. It was as if he were looking at a future version of himself who was already dead, a version from whom the fire of life had been suddenly and cruelly drained, not by time but by circumstance. In that face he recognized not himself, but some stranger who had stepped into his life and, like a puppet master, had directed his hands and feet onto a ruinous path.
That’s the prose of someone thinking 24 frames-per-second, who’s realized that his viewers are actually readers and feels the need to explain the symbolism in every cliché he comes up with. And Lustbader explains everything.Where a word would do, a sentence presents itself. Where a sentence would do, a paragraph blossoms. Bourne is shot in the chest in Deception’s prologue, and he nurses the wound for the rest of the book. On page 344, in the aftermath of a big fight, and after the book’s dozen previous fights and their dozen attendant chest pains, there’s this:
Pain suffused him, radiating out from the bullet would he’d sustained in Bali [the only bullet wound he has]. His violent actions and the beating he had taken had a deleterious effect on his healing, just as Dr. Firth had warned. Just like after the second surgery, he felt like he’d been struck by a speeding train.
Lustbader sits next you as you read, prologue to finale, poking you in the side and shouting “Hey idiot! Remember that!” And when he’s not shoving wooden footnotes into the text, Lustbader is elaborating in other, more ridiculous ways.By the end of the book I’d come to hate the simile. A character slides something across the table “as if maneuvering his queen into checkmate position.” Jason Bourne’s memories are “dark and murky, as if seen through a projector with a faulty bulb.” Sometimes similes pile up. A character looks at a villain and
It was as if he were looking at a photograph of eyes rather than the real thing…It was as if there was no one home, as if the soul of the man did not exist…like something ancient and evil.
Sometimes they’re hopelessly awkward. Here’s a complete sentence describing a battlefield:
Great mounds of black earth, scorched and smoking as if from the pits of the underworld, half-covered random bits and pieces of bodies, as if some insane creature had decided to improve on the human form by first dismantling it.
Sometimes you get the Lustbader triple-decker: simile, metaphor, anthropomorphism.
Coming home to the desert, Soraya thought, was like returning to a longed-for lover: The sand whispered against your skin in intimate caress. In the desert you could see things coming at you. Which was why people like Amun lied, because the desert told the truth, always, in the history it covered and uncovered, in the bones of civilization from which the eternal sand had scoured away all lies.
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Lustbader also transmogrifies in the bedchamber. “She used to trace the line of his lips when he smiled like that, as if she were a blind woman able to glean a hidden meaning with her fingertip.” My favorite? “Soraya felt Amun beside her as if he were a small nuclear plant.” All this flowery language is too much in earnest to be tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also meant to be part of something deeper. “Morning broke in the soft colors of pink and yellow against the pale blue sky. Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva rose as Bourne opened his eyes.” Grounding the story in Bali allows Lustbader to employ a foofaraw of goofy spiritualism. By the end of the novel, we’re not sure if Bourne survives (as he must) by his own skill or by the will of Shiva, who apparently watches over him. Shiva, you see, is not only the god of destruction, but the god of recreation too. It’s totally symbolic. |
And our author sees Bali with Orientalist eyes. “Balinese were aware of everything and forgot nothing.” Their young move “in that liquid, sinuous way of all Balinese children.” Jason visits a holy man (“skin dark as mahogany”) who tells him about Shiva. Bourne doesn’t believe it at first, but he comes around. You can’t blame him. Majestic sunrises begin every day (“light shone upward like a beacon beating back the tattered remnants of night”). He can’t escape a gunfight without running into a stuffy nincompoop spouting metaphysical nonsense (“Life is dangerous, Jason, like anything governed by chaos”). Mirrors are everywhere (“Bourne regarded his face in the mirror…Whose reflection stared back at him?”).Lustbader isn’t just spiritual but topical as well. Bourne’s adventures take place in what is nominally present-day earth, and Deception takes a stab at trenchancy. Thus good-guy Soraya falls for Amun Chalthoum, he of the diminutive nuclear plant, also head of the Egyptian intelligence service. She’s in love but “the trouble was that too often his trade included methods of interrogation and torture that would make even those running Abu Ghraib sick to their stomachs.” Lustbader shoehorns an awkward nod to animal rights into a chase through a bullfighting stadium. He describes a bullfight and the excitement of the crowd. Then: “At least, that’s how these corrida fans saw it. Others, like the Asociación para la defensa del anima, saw quite another picture.” Occasionally the editorializing doesn’t smack you in the face. There’s shrewd commentary on semantics: “[Bad guy] Parker liked the word homeland. It was so much more powerful, more evocative, more virile than the word nation.” But just when you think it’s nice to read a shoot-em-up that brushes up against sophistication, good-guy Moira calls her security firm “Heartland Risk Management,” and you know Lustbader missed the irony.The plot is just as careless: a bad guy trusts a character the good guys are using to spy on him in a book where no one trusts anybody; a random tour guide near a building Bourne wants to get into just happens to have a cousin working in said building. And the clichés are worse: the mirror scene; the deserted parking lot; the wise old gangster; the wise old native; the wise young native; bad guy who blames good guy for the death of his beloved even though it obviously wasn’t his fault.Gore Vidal reviewed the top ten bestsellers in 1972, noting:
…most of these books reflect to some degree the films each author saw in his formative years, while at least seven of the novels appear to me to be deliberate attempts not so much to re-create new film product as to suggest old movies that will make the reader (and publisher and reprinter and, to come full circle, film-maker) recall past success and respond accordingly.
Vidal was writing before the modern blockbuster, before Jaws and Star Wars and their countless imitators. Popular movies and bestselling books have been locked in a terminal co-orbit since. They increasingly speak the same symbolic language, comfortable and infantile. The only thing that distinguishes them is the medium. Lustbader can pile on all the god-awful rococo similies he wants, but people keep coming back to this stuff because piffle is easy. Reader and writer nod to each other when the hero glimpses himself in the mirror (what have I become?), when the young native whispers a profundity (modern society has lost simplicity and thus wisdom), when the sun rises in the prologue (clouds must form and deranged assassins are coming).Near the beginning, a skeptical Jason Bourne visits the hut (it wouldn’t be a condo) of the holy mahogany man, who tells him gravely, “You know, all this has happened before. And it will happen again.”Mahogany man speaks truth. The Bourne Objective is scheduled for next year.___Greg Waldmann is a native New Yorker living in Boston with a degree in International Affairs. He is Open Letters Monthly's Politics Editor.
