And yet - shameful to admit - one keeps reading.

It's difficult to tell whether he's writing worse or it's just getting easier to spot his tricks.

Ludlum's most overwrought, speciously motivated, spuriously complicated story to date. So much is as obvious as an above-ground nuclear test: in the case of ''The Bourne Supremacy'' the decision by certain State Department honchos to reactivate the super-assassin Jason Bourne because someone in Hong Kong is murdering people in Bourne's name.īut why is this such a threat to world peace? So what if the People's Republic of China decides to break off talks with the British over the future disposition of Hong Kong? Is it our failure or the author's that we fail to feel sufficiently threatened by this? We begin to feel as paranoid as poor Jason Bourne, who, when asked to be Bourne again, has still not entirely recovered from his experiences in ''The Bourne Identity,'' although rest assured that even in his ragged state he makes Superman look like so much blue cheese.Įven nature confuses us in ''The Bourne Supremacy'': ''Night was coming,'' we learn on the first page, ''proclaimed by a blinding orange sun piercing an immense, jagged, fragmented wall of clouds in the west -sharply defined shafts of uncompromising energy about to plunge over the horizon, unwilling to let this part of the world forget the light.'' (Is this night's revenge on Kipling's dawn, for coming up ''like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!''?) ''The Bourne Supremacy'' may be Mr. Or have we missed something? One of the keys to what makes a Ludlum thriller so nerve-racking is the difficulty we have distinguishing between what we have been told and have not understood and what we don't understand because we haven't been told in the first place. It might as well be lost in the mists that in a typical Ludlum chapter opening ''rose like layers of diaphanous scarves above'' Hong Kong's ''Victoria Harbor as the huge jet circled for the final approach into Kai-tak Airport.''

''OH, my God!'' one character in Robert Ludlum's 13th and latest doomsday thriller, ''The Bourne Supremacy,'' keeps gasping, staring with his mind's eye at the reader knows not what.

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