📚 The Bourne Identity (Jason Bourne, #1)

Author: Robert Ludlum
Pub­lished: 1980
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Fin­ished on: 2018/01/21
I’m a big fan of the Jason Bourne film, the orig­i­nal tril­o­gy is one of my favourite series of films and ones that I reg­u­lar­ly return to when I want to watch some­thing famil­iar. When I saw The Bourne Iden­ti­ty in a char­i­ty shop for a cou­ple of pounds I had to pick it up.
I enjoy read­ing books that have been turned in to film and see­ing how they stack up. I’ve always won­dered how the Bourne books mea­sure up to their film coun­ter­parts, nor­mal­ly the two are quite close with a few bits miss­ing for the sake of time, with parts being cut that are not crit­i­cal to the sto­ry. That’s real­ly not the case with this book.
Over­all it’s an enjoy­able read, it’s a bit hard going in places, the detail is high and the depth of the sto­ry is inter­est­ing. It’s a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent sto­ry to the film. Although the film has clear­ly been based on bits of the book, the key sto­ry line beyond Bourne’s amne­sia is com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent and it took me a while to adjust my expec­ta­tions accord­ing­ly. I had to force myself to divorce the the film from the book I was read­ing before I could let myself get drawn in to he story.
I might return to it in a cou­ple of years and see whether my view of it has changed. My over­all impres­sion has been coloured by my expec­ta­tion of the book being more sim­i­lar to the film I enjoy so much, I’d like to read it again with­out hav­ing to go through the process of find­ing that out and see if I enjoy it more.