Robert Ludlum's books on Jason Bourne are now well-known due to the excellent films starring Matt Damon. Yet returning to the books after having viewed the movies leads to disappointment on many levels.
The plot of the book has very little to do with the movie - and several plot points in the film are completely contradictory to the book. But the biggest contrast, I believe, is in the speech and manner of the characters. In the movies, Jason Bourne/David Webb is reserved, efficient, deadly. Even though his memories are spotty, he doesn't sink into despair.
But the book - Ludlum's writing - is rife with doubt, emotion, despair, confusion... and the most annoying thing is the way Ludlum writes dialog. Everyone in his world speaks with an excess of exclamation points and italics that emphasize stress with every third sentence. It is extremely annoying!!! After all, what person really speaks as if every third word has to be shouted into the atmosphere!!???
Couple this clunky and unnatural dialog with a plot as convoluted as a bucket of spaghetti and, after a while, reading it becomes a chore. I put down this book four times in the course of reading it to dip into other novels that were actually more fun to read. No more Ludlum for me. I will see the movies again - they are fun. The novels are not.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Cashelmara
By Susan Howatch, published in 1974. Certainly not a new book, but new to me.
This was actually sent to me by my Australian BookCrossing buddy, who told me it was one of her favorites. I liked it, and I do like this type of book, too. It is a style/genre that isn't written much any longer, but was very typical of the 1970s and 1980s -- the family epic novel. They became formulaic after a while, and deteriorated into glittery tomes where everyone was rich, alcoholic, sexually promiscuous, and gorgeous. But Cashelmara, like another favorite novel (To Serve Them All My Days), is more finely and skillfully drawn.
We begin with Edward, an English lord of mature years, a widower with four surviving and mostly adult children. Besides his London home, and his English estate, he also owns the family estate in Ireland known as Cashelmara.
On a trip to America, he meets some distant cousins, and eventually proposes to young Marguerite. When they marry, he is somewhere near sixty and she is seventeen. When she comes to England to marry him, she then has to learn to cope with her new stepchildren - three women older than she is, and the only son, Patrick, who is just a few years younger. Edward doesn't appreciate her attempts to smooth relations between her husband and his children, and Marguerite quickly understands that the marriage is not going to be what she thought.
The next section is from Marguerite's viewpoint, and relates the birth of her and Edward's two sons, and a daughter that lives only a short time. Other section include one from the point of view of Edward's son Patrick, Patrick's wife Sarah, Sarah's lover, the criminal Maxwell Drummond, and finally Patrick and Sarah's son, Ned.
Some of the topics - homosexuality, infidelity, and murder - were probably more scandalous to readers in 1974 than they are today, but Cashelmara is still a good, gossipy read.
This was actually sent to me by my Australian BookCrossing buddy, who told me it was one of her favorites. I liked it, and I do like this type of book, too. It is a style/genre that isn't written much any longer, but was very typical of the 1970s and 1980s -- the family epic novel. They became formulaic after a while, and deteriorated into glittery tomes where everyone was rich, alcoholic, sexually promiscuous, and gorgeous. But Cashelmara, like another favorite novel (To Serve Them All My Days), is more finely and skillfully drawn.
We begin with Edward, an English lord of mature years, a widower with four surviving and mostly adult children. Besides his London home, and his English estate, he also owns the family estate in Ireland known as Cashelmara.
On a trip to America, he meets some distant cousins, and eventually proposes to young Marguerite. When they marry, he is somewhere near sixty and she is seventeen. When she comes to England to marry him, she then has to learn to cope with her new stepchildren - three women older than she is, and the only son, Patrick, who is just a few years younger. Edward doesn't appreciate her attempts to smooth relations between her husband and his children, and Marguerite quickly understands that the marriage is not going to be what she thought.
The next section is from Marguerite's viewpoint, and relates the birth of her and Edward's two sons, and a daughter that lives only a short time. Other section include one from the point of view of Edward's son Patrick, Patrick's wife Sarah, Sarah's lover, the criminal Maxwell Drummond, and finally Patrick and Sarah's son, Ned.
Some of the topics - homosexuality, infidelity, and murder - were probably more scandalous to readers in 1974 than they are today, but Cashelmara is still a good, gossipy read.
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