My theory about airport novels is that they are designed to make buyers aspire to fly first class, stay in fancy hotels and hire limousines. What should be a fast and forgettable time-pass is bogged down by descriptions of gold watches and excess horsepower. I had put Robert Ludlum in that category and picked up his novels only after I saw the Bourne movies. In those movies, Jason Bourne parkours his way in and out of deep water, foreign embassies and bomb explosions, and covers every longitude and latitude in about three days. In a medium-size backpack he carries enough passports, clothes, hair dye, cash and safety deposit keys to create any number of identities. When does he charge his cellphone? Or buy fresh bullets? Never mind, the movies were fast and fun, and not so forgettable. If you blinked you’d miss an entire plot thread, and they had just enough dark psychological angst to make me pick up the books.
But the Bourne books are interminable. Sequel after sequel lays out the story of the top agent who has amnesia and is hunted by his own minders. They were written more than 20 years ago, so our hero must look for phone booths and write things down in diaries. And now there is the Bourne franchise, in which other writers have been assigned to continue the series.
The raciness of Bourne is confined to Matt Damon on screen. Only parts of the Bourne books keep us on the edge of our seats. When Ludlum shoots for racy in general he somehow loses us entirely. Who really knows what happens during The Osterman Weekend? A man is set up by a shadowy government agency to frighten his friends into betraying something or other. I couldn’t figure it out. Real events and real history are necessary to get us into that kind of writing.
The Scarlatti Inheritance has those essentials, and it has the virtue of ambiguous characters and some financial hocus-pocus as well. A woman who rules a family empire outsmarts her rogue son, who has become a Nazi. As World War II winds to its close, her deputy sticks his neck out yet again to defeat the remains of that rogue. Behind it all is the uncomfortable fact that the Third Reich was bankrolled by industrialists and millionaires on both sides of the Atlantic. It is this, rather than the chases and gunshots, that keeps the novel compelling.
When Ludlum published The Chancellor Manuscript in 1977, the Vietnam War was fresh in the memory of Americans and war atrocities were well concealed. Also, J Edgar Hoover had not been dead many years. The novel is about Peter Chancellor, a writer who has made a career out of bestsellers based on political and military revelations. He collides with a mysterious gang committed to save the world from Nixon’s totalitarian aspirations. Hoover was the man who streamlined the Federal Bureau of Investigation and made it a well-oiled, fearsome machine. He also used it to settle scores and enforce his ideas of American morality.
Chancellor expresses the ideas that drive Ludlum. They both trade in that fuzzy area of fiction that is meant to be a “personal statement”. (Chancellor’s words.) When Chancellor’s books are categorised as just fiction by one character, another retorts, “It was too close. This Chancellor used a lot of wrong terms and incorrect procedures but on the bottom line, he described what happened.” Ludlum covers his bases well here, without sticking out his neck.
While they’re appointing other writers to produce Ludlums, perhaps they’ll ask someone to write a thriller around this century’s most menacing troika: Bush, Cheney and Rove. Cheney’s snarl expresses venality as well as Hoover’s jowls. Maybe there are secret files somewhere being held over the heads of senators so that the wrongs of Bush II cannot be exposed, much less righted. Such a book would at least describe what happened. It doesn’t look like anyone else will.
Latha Anantharaman is a freelance writer and editor based in Palakkad
