The Bourne Identity (novel)

The Bourne Identity

The Bourne Identity first edition cover
Author	Robert Ludlum
Original title	The Bourne Identity
Country	United States
Language	English
Series	Jason Bourne Bourne Trilogy
Genre	Thriller, Spy novel
Publisher	Richard Marek
Publication date	February 1980
Pages	523 pp (First edition)
ISBN	0-399-90070-5
OCLC	5675357
Dewey Decimal	813/.5/4
LC Class	PZ4.L9455 Bo PS3562.U26
Followed by	The Bourne Supremacy

The Bourne Identity is a 1980 spy fiction thriller by Robert Ludlum that tells the story of Jason Bourne, a man with remarkable survival abilities who suffers from retrograde amnesia, and who must seek to discover his true identity. In the process, he must also reason out why several shadowy groups, a professional assassin, and the CIA want him dead. The story takes readers on a suspenseful and action-packed journey into a world of deceptions and conspiracies, offering a compelling psychological portrait of Bourne, and giving them the chance to experience from his point of view the life-or-death decisions he makes as he seeks to piece together the dangerous puzzle of his missing past. It is the first novel of the original Bourne Trilogy, which also includes The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum.

Peter Cannon of Publishers Weekly named The Bourne Identity among the best spy novels of all time, after John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.^[1]

The novel was the basis for the scripts of the 1988 television movie of the same name starring Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn Smith, and the 2002 film of the same name, starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente and Chris Cooper.

Plot

The preface of the novel consists of two real-life newspaper articles from 1975 about terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as "Carlos the Jackal."

The story opens with gunfire on a boat in the Mediterranean Sea. One man is cast into the waves before the boat explodes, and is later picked up by fishermen, who find him clinging to debris. They also find he is suffering from amnesia, apparently as a result of a traumatic head injury, with occasional erratic intrusions or flashbacks to the past, but is unable to make sense of them. The only definite evidence of his former life is a small film negative found embedded in his hip containing the information required to access a bank account in Zurich.

When he goes to Zurich to gain access to the bank, a clerk recognizes him. From this the man concludes that his name is "Jason Charles Bourne", that he has relations with a firm called Treadstone Seventy-One Corporation, and that his account holds 7,500,000 Swiss francs (equivalent to $5,000,000 in the novel). Circumstantial evidence leads Bourne to suspect that he should go to Paris, so he wires most of the money there. At the bank and his hotel, men suddenly try to kill Bourne, so he quickly takes another hotel guest, Canadian government economist Marie St. Jacques, as a hostage in order to escape. After escaping from Bourne, St. Jacques reports his whereabouts to men she thinks are police, but they turn out to be Bourne's pursuers and professional killers who try to rape and kill her. When Bourne rescues her at the risk of his own life, St. Jacques decides to help him.

They head to Paris to find clues about Bourne's past. Once in Paris, Bourne learns that his attackers' leader may be "Carlos," who is described as the most dangerous terrorist of his time, responsible for numerous killings in many countries and well connected in the highest government circles. For reasons only partly comprehensible to himself, Bourne develops a compulsion to hunt Carlos. As the story develops, Bourne follows clues that bring him closer to Carlos, leading him to places such as a designer clothing store used as relay for Carlos. Though Bourne twice briefly sees Carlos, he does not manage to catch or kill him. To his distress, Bourne also finds mounting evidence that he himself is a rival assassin called ″Cain.″ Meanwhile, he and St. Jacques are falling in love.

It turns out that Cain is an alias that had been assumed by Bourne—whose real name is not even "Bourne"—to hunt down Carlos; Cain took credit for kills as a way of challenging Carlos as part of a top-secret American plot. The plot is called Treadstone Seventy-One, and the truth is known only to eight men selected by covert agencies of the U.S. government; everyone else assumes Cain to be a real person. Due to Bourne's six-month silence (while he was recuperating) and the unauthorized diversion of millions of dollars from the Zurich account, the Treadstone men start to believe that Bourne has become a traitor. They are entirely convinced of his guilt when one of Carlos' operatives storms the building in which Treadstone is based, kills those inside, and then frames Bourne for the murders. The man now responsible for Treadstone attempts to lure Bourne into a meeting outside of Paris to kill him. Bourne escapes the trap, but does not succeed in proving his innocence.

In Paris, Bourne has managed to convince a French General named Villiers to help him. Bourne realizes that Villiers' wife is a mole for Carlos. When the General hears about it, he finally kills his wife and Bourne takes the blame in order to bait Carlos into following him to the United States. Only after Bourne has left do St. Jacques and Villiers manage to convince Treadstone members that Bourne is innocent, and is continuing to hunt Carlos. In New York, Bourne is confronted by Carlos. They wound each other, but when Carlos is on the verge of killing Bourne, some of the remaining Treadstone members arrive at the scene and force Carlos to retreat.

The epilogue sees St. Jacques being told about Bourne's past, most of which had been revealed in fragments already: He had been an American Foreign Service officer stationed in Asia during the Vietnam War. When his wife and two children were killed, he joined a paramilitary unit in Vietnam. During one mission, he discovered and executed the double agent Jason Bourne. He took the name years later when he was recruited for Treadstone.

At the novel's end, it is revealed that "Bourne" has recovered from the encounter with Carlos and probably lives together with St. Jacques. He remains the only one to ever have seen the face of Carlos and may be able to recognize him as a public figure, but is unable to do so due to his erratic memory. As a consequence, he is protected day and night by armed watchmen, in the hope he will one day recover enough to identify Carlos. The plot closes with him remembering his first name.

Concept

Robert Ludlum gave two interviews to Don Swaim of CBS: in 1984 and then two years later in 1986. Ludlum discusses how he came up with the first two novels in the Jason Bourne trilogy – The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy. The idea behind the Bourne trilogy came after he had a bout of temporary amnesia. After his first book, The Scarlatti Inheritance, was published, he could not remember 12 hours of his life. This event, combined with thrilling real-life spy stories, inspired him to write the Jason Bourne trilogy.^[2]

The name "Bourne"

In the novel, the name is portrayed as the random last name of a double agent. Only once, in passing and without further explanation or emphasis, the homophone "Bourne" / "born" is mentioned, during the showdown between Bourne and Carlos in the last chapter:

to stay alive he had to get (...) away from the place where Cain [i.e. Bourne] was born. Jason Bourne ... there was no humor in the word association.

ABC News speculated that the name was actually "most likely" inspired by Ansel Bourne, a famous 19th-century psychology case due to his experience of a probable dissociative fugue.^[3] Ansel Bourne one day left his previous life build himself a new life with a new profession elsewhere under a new name ("A. J. Brown"); after two months, he woke up with no memories of this new life, but with memories recovered up to this time and returned to his old life. The rare and controversial dissociative fugue has been described "a state in which an individual has lost their identity" by Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter. "They don't know who they are, and they've lost all information about their past. They go on functioning automatically."^[3]

Publication history

Sequels

Ludlum wrote two sequels to The Bourne Identity: The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum, forming the Bourne Trilogy. After Ludlum's death, author Eric Van Lustbader continued the story of Jason Bourne in The Bourne Legacy (2004), The Bourne Betrayal (2007), The Bourne Sanction (2008), The Bourne Deception (2009), The Bourne Objective (2010), The Bourne Dominion (2011), The Bourne Imperative (2012), The Bourne Retribution (2013), and The Bourne Ascendancy (2014).

Adaptations

The novel has been adapted as The Bourne Identity, a 1988 television movie starring Richard Chamberlain and Jaclyn Smith. The story was also partially adapted in the 1989 Tamil movie Vetri Vizha starring Kamal Haasan.

The 2002 film The Bourne Identity starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente and Chris Cooper has largely modernized the material and is only very loosely based on the central premise of the novel.

Trivia

The Dutch band Golden Earring used The Bourne Identity as an inspiration for their song "Twilight Zone" which appeared on their 1982 album Cut. It was the group's sole Top 10 Pop single on the US Billboard Hot 100 and hit No. 1 on the Billboard Top Album Tracks chart, the band's only No. 1 hit in America. The music video, directed by Dick Maas, features a storyline with lead singer Barry Hay as an espionage agent gone rogue who is inevitably apprehended by three henchmen (played by the other members of the band).

References

1. ↑ "Crime Fiction Dossier: Top 15 Spy Novels".
   "The Rap Sheet: Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy"
2. ↑ Wired for Books: Don Swaim Interviews: Interview with Robert Ludlum
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Lee Ferran (3 August 2007). Bourne's Real Life Identity. ABC News (retrieved November 3, 2013)