In Print: The Bourne Legacy by Eric Van Lustbader

Years after Robert Ludlum wrote The Bourne Ultimatum, years after the death of Robert Ludlum, the movies brought renewed interest in the Jason Bourne franchise. Eric Van Lustbader got to write the fourth book in the series, The Bourne Legacy.

This was quite interesting for me to read right after reading the original trilogy. It was as if Van Lustbader read those books and came up with the same conclusion I did: all the characters surrounding David Webb / Jason Bourne were liabilities and were hurting the story. In this book he killed off two almost immediately and sent the wife and kids off never to be heard from again until the final page. I was fine with all that. In fact, I was kinda glad.

So here's the concept: a group of terrorists want to disrupt a summit, so to do so they throw up a smoke screen that has the authorities around the world chasing Jason Bourne around the world. Throw in another assassin with a personal vendetta hot on Jason's heels and you have a real page turner.

The author also tossed in some details that made me think. For instance, in The Bourne Ultimatum, Bourne was 51 years old. He aged in between the first three books. But in this one there is no reference to his age at all. In fact, he was more virile. Also they made references in this book to missions he had gone on previously that were never mentioned in the original books. Jason had command over many more languages than he did previously, knowing how to read, write and speak Hungarian and fluent in Russian. In The Bourne Ultimatum Ludlum made a point of the fact that Bourne did NOT speak Russian.

That's all fine, though. The character has been redefined and made more timeless. Rather than aging our hero as the years go by, he's become more like any other book series hero - ageless. He's just as at home in today's modern age as he was in the Bourne Identity written during the 1970s shortly after his stint in Vietnam. With the re visioning of Jason Bourne he can easily become a book series hero like one of my favorites, Remo Williams from The Destroyer series created by Murphy and Sapir.

So, I'd have to say that this book covered all the things I liked about the Bourne novels: smart action and adventure, and skipped the stuff I disliked: the whiny family always screaming "You owe us!" It looks like they are trying to make the book version of Bourne more like the movie character. As long as they don't go too crazy, it's a great franchise. This was a book full of twists and turns and definitely worthwhile to read for the Bourne fans. Check it out!