The Bourne Ascendancy - Eric van Lustbader
“The King is dead. Long live the King!”
With those words, the crown passes in a monarchy. In the literary world, the passage of the crown is couched in hundreds of pages of legalese and minuscule print, but – as in a monarchy – there’s no guarantee that the successor to the throne will become a beloved figure. When Robert Ludlum passed in 2001, Eric van Lustbader ascended “the Bourne Throne”; picking up the mysterious former Treadstone agent and carrying him forward…
…into a world of increasing improbability. Ludlum published only three Bourne novels over a decade, van Lustbader has pumped out a new volume annually since 2007. The frantic pace, unfortunately, has not been kind to the series. A case in point is The Bourne Ascendancy.
Weary of the spy game, the polyglot, master of disguise, master of multiple martial arts, and master of every weapon known to mankind who calls himself “Jason Bourne” has taken up a new trade, blacksmith. No, he doesn’t forge iron items with a hammer and anvil and he isn’t a farrier, either: Bourne has become a double for hire. This contract ends in a hail of gunfire, Bourne captured, the sole survivor of a massacre at the hands of the terrorist El Ghadan. The big guy has a job for Bourne; a job suitable to his skills: assassinate the President of the United States (hereafter referred to as POTUS – constantly) at a time and place of the terrorist's choosing. If he refuses or fails, his dearest friend Soraya Moore and her two-year-old daughter Sonya will suffer the consequences. With that charge, Bourne is set loose to devise a plan and do the deed – all in a single week. |
On the other side of the globe, a gorgeous Secret Service agent (who has been secretly shtupping POTUS) has been charged with stopping Bourne. Or at least she thinks she is… and on another corner of the globe a second gorgeous woman, Bourne’s lover the Mossad agent Sara… or is it Rebekah? Or Ellie? Anyway, the hottie infiltrates El Ghadan’s network with startling ease. And the Secret service chickie becomes a world-class jockey in three days. Meanwhile, Bourne heads into Waziristan, disguised as a Syrian who speaks fluent Pasto, Waziriwhatsis, Arabic, Farsi, and heavily-accented English (though never revealing he also speaks fluent Russian) as a foot soldier in the army of some Russki arms dealer. And he stumbles across El Ghadan’s Achilles heel in the middle of the Swat Valley. Pish.
I give up – it just gets more unbelievable from here.
Van Lustbader not only jumps the shark in this installment of the Bourne series, he lands on the damned thing's dorsal fin and rides it into the sunset like Slim Pickens on the nuke in "Dr. Strangelove." Even ordinary willing suspension of disbelief gets strained beyond recognition by the improbable combination of Bourne’s many skills and his apparent ability to make time stand still. The guy's a one-man wrecking crew, who also somehow manages to survive not one but two massive explosions. Call me incredulous, but the original Bourne was merely a smart, well-trained human being – this Bourne is a superman of comic-book proportions.
Van Lustbader doesn’t do his other characters any favors either, especially the U. S. Government. POTUS (the acronym is employed at least 200 times) prefers having adulterous sex in the Oval Office to actually governing, and half his staff is part of a secret cabal that hopes to foment war so that their investment portfolios will grow. They’re not only venal, they’re downright evil. Between a weakling sex addict president and a gaggle of neocon advisers, Lustbader paints an office that looks like something from a banana republic – at best. The women are – as one might expect – supermodel good-looking as well as deadly and, of course, at least one’s a lesbian (the better to hook in teenage male readers, I suppose).
No, about the only redeeming feature of The Bourne Ascendancy is the visit from POTUS’s 16-year-old daughter, who somehow manages to italicize one word in every sentence. Given the manner in which Ludlum sprinkled italics at random in his later works, this smacks of an inside joke. One wonders if the authors of all those four-word, five-star reviews at Amazon got it…
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