📚 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.