Fergus, Quondam Happy Face's Reviews > The Bourne Identity

Jason Bourne’s amnesia is identical in so many ways to my own.

For one thing, I’ve forgotten the salient points of most of the Ludlum oeuvre, though I filled my idle commuting and travelling moments with most of them, between 1977 and 1984.

And why then can I nevertheless remember highlights of the Dickens, Shakespeare and Bronte works I read more than 10 years earlier?

Duh. Great writers don’t pull their punches!

You always remember a real Wallop.

Ludlum, on the other hand, thrives on shadow boxing. And filling his books with shadow characters.

You know, when a friend and I attended the opening night of the Matt Damon flick they made of this book, the stereotypically leftist intellectual couple in front of us INSTINCTIVELY connected the dots in Ludlum’s shadow dance.

Guess you’ve gotta be a TV fan. I couldn’t do that.

TV fans catch every one of those outré aperçus that the spotless onscreen hero mumbles in a breathless undertone.

Unlike me, they’re au fait.

I’m quite the opposite: my meds shroud my brain in a pea soup fog.

So I SLEEP at night - rather than staying awake wondering what my boss REALLY meant when muttering at me.

So there’s a benefit there.

Anyway, as one who misses the hidden connections between Jason’s incoherent mumblings and the latest covert weaponry - and thank heaven I do! - Ludlum is at least as good as warm milk to put me to sleep.

The best thing Ludlum and other writers of his ilk have done for me is to tell me there’s more substantially satisfying writing out there than mindless paranoiacs like him can produce.

And again, thank heaven, Mr Bourne, that the closest I come to paranoid amnesia in my oh-so-pedestrian days is in my many dumb seniors’ moments!