The Bourne Trilogy

“Cain is for Charlie, and Delta is for Cain“

I finally finished reading all the three Robert Ludlum’s novels written around the fictional character Jason Bourne a.k.a David Webb… Having watched the first two movies, I just had to read the novels before I went for Bourne Ultimatum on 3rd August.

But, once I started reading the first novel, I realized that the movies, though based on the same lines, are still completely different from the novels. For example, in Bourne Supremacy, the novel takes Bourne to Hong Kong and his wife is very much alive, but in the movie, his wife is killed in the first 15 minutes itself and he never goes far east.

I really liked reading Bourne Identity, but didn’t like Bourne Ultimatum at all… Considering that the movies are just amazing, it was a little difficult to read these novels in beginning. I got really interested in Identity, only after about the first 150 pages. The way Ludlum tries to get the reader to understand Jason’s mental state is really amazing. Also, Ludlum’s use of a lot of French (in Identity) and Chinese (in Supremacy) makes the novel a lot more realistic (but annoying to read at times).

I didn’t like Bourne Ultimatum because it was too long and winding, with a lot of plots and sub-plots that were loosely related to each other. Jason Bourne is 50+ in this novel and knowing that it’s just a bit to hard to imagine him doing all that is written in the novel. Also, so much information was repeated over and over again. I just ended up skipping a lot of pages in the end…

Anyways, so much for the novels…. the movies have been quite amazing. I am really looking forward to the last movie in the Bourne Trilogy. The first two were just amazing and I want to see what’s Bourne up to now…