AUTHOR BOURNE AGAIN
HOW DO YOU TAKE ON AN ICONIC CHARACTER CREATED BY SOMEONE ELSE? BRIAN FREEMAN KNOWS.
When the Robert Ludlum estate chose me to take over Ludlum’s famous Jason Bourne series, my first reaction was excitement: What an amazing opportunity.
My next reaction was terror.
How do you step into the shoes of a bestselling giant of the literary world like Robert Ludlum? And how do you bring new energy to an iconic hero who has already lived so many lives in books and movies?
After all, Jason Bourne first muscled on to the page forty years ago in The Bourne Identity and subsequently appeared in more than a dozen books, both by Ludlum and by novelist Eric Van Lustbader. And millions of people around the world know Bourne from the Matt Damon films.
So my approach was: Let’s re-boot the entire series. The original Jason Bourne had his roots in the 1970s era of Vietnam and Watergate, which wouldn’t work in 2020. Instead, I wanted to capture the essence of Ludlum’s character – but take him into the modern era with an entirely new plot and background. Fortunately, the Ludlum estate gave me free rein to go back to the beginning and essentially start the series over.
The result was last year’s The Bourne Evolution. Fans of Bourne will instantly recognise the fractured killer who has lost his memory and is struggling to understand who he is. But the story is fresh and timely, driven by the excesses of Big Tech and the power of social media to control what we think and do. Readers can enjoy it even if they’ve never experienced any of the earlier iterations of Jason Bourne. (But if you want to picture Matt Damon in the role, that’s OK, too.)
Readers told me that it felt like Robert Ludlum had written the book himself, which is high praise. But trying to imitate Ludlum’s distinctively breathless prose style would have felt like a caricature.
Instead, I let the spirit of Ludlum’s writing flow through my own style, and the result was a hybrid that hopefully captures the propulsive energy of Ludlum’s books.
But where to go next?
In many ways, my second Bourne novel The Bourne Treachery was harder to write than the first. I saw my first Bourne book as a tribute to Ludlum’s original novel, but in The Bourne Treachery, I had to make the series mine. If all you do is write action novels where the hero stays the same, then the series quickly gets stale. So I had to give myself “permission” to let Bourne grow and evolve in all-new directions.
The new novel explores Bourne’s wellfounded distrust of the government operatives who have consistently manipulated and betrayed him. The book starts with Bourne and his partner and lover, Nova, trying to smuggle a Russian doubleagent out of the historic walled city of Tallinn, Estonia. But the mission is a failure, thanks to a sophisticated assassin who calls himself Lennon. When Bourne is brought back three years later to deal with a new threat from Lennon, he discovers that nothing about that original mission in Tallinn was what he thought – and his own past soon becomes his biggest threat.
That’s my vision for the all-new Jason Bourne: He’s caught up in conspiracy-laden action thrillers, but he’s also not a superhero. In fact, what makes Bourne so appealing is that he’s broken and passionate, a man trying to rebuild his life from the blank slate of his past. He may have lethal talents, but he’s much more than a killer.
After writing psychological thrillers for two decades, I wondered if it would be strange to take over another writer’s character. Then I remembered that I’ve known Jason Bourne even longer than any of my own heroes. I first met him back in 1980, when I was a teenager reading The Bourne Identity.
Of course, if you’d told me that forty years later, I’d be writing books with my name and Ludlum’s name on the cover, I would have thought you were crazy. But here we are.
So Jason Bourne is back. I hope you find him to be every bit as complex and exciting as Ludlum’s original creation.
The Bourne Treachery, by Brian Freeman, is out now, published by Head of Zeus.