Pros: Suspenseful, exciting from first to last. Tight, engaging, thought-provoking. Mind bending.
Cons: Love interludes are slow going, but purposed. Ending conspiracy does not end controversy.
The Bottom Line: Highly recommend Ludlum's expansion of ideas about mind altering techniques of black ops. Well beyond Jason Bourne, with a warning about trying to control history.
wickengel's Full Review: Robert Ludlum - The Ambler Warning: A Novel
"Harrison Ambler" has a problem: he does not know who he really is, and what may or may not be his past keeps coming back to haunt him--and kill him. A product of ultra-secret mind altering techniques, this shadowy Consular Operations assassin, code name "Tarquin," has the unforgivable and apparently inextricable talent of being a human lie detector.
Caught in a webwork of a high level conspiracy to control world events by removing persons who might interfere with policy, Ambler saw through the deception while on a black ops mission in Taiwan. For his sin of insight, he is not only slated for termination by his own government after having broken out of the maximum security Parrish Island Psychiatric Facility for fallen agents, but he is also stalked by an assassin from China who seems to know his every move before he makes it.
With The Ambler Warning, Robert Ludlum has improved on his Jason Bourne novels (see my epinions) by daring to explore the black CIA experimental programs that can shape fundamental aspects of personality and identity. As with the Bourne figure, Ambler is perfect at accomplishing his clandestine missions. Unlike Bourne, Ambler has been resuited with an identity that, he becomes convinced, has nothing to do with who he really is. Ambler becomes convinced that he has been given memories of sights, sounds, even smells that are vivid fictions drawn from facts.
Clay Caston, the auditor whose mission at first is to track down Ambler, is a believer in probabilities and playing by the numbers. At first a suspicious character with an almost comical relation to his ironical subordinate, Caston grows in the reader's esteem throughout the book and ultimately becomes the most human figure in a world of double and triple dealing. His tolerance of his own dysfunctional family is ironically a symbol of his humanity.
The surprises and reversals that come in rapid fire fashion at the book's close must be experienced without foreshadowing for their effects. Suffice to say here that even the most seemingly valuable experiences are not to be trusted. Even the most prescient humans can be fooled by compounding "evidence" and the blindness caused by human relationships.
Ludlum, then, creates a likeable Ambler, whose feelings are brought out by a love interest (Laurel) with a twist. Ludlum keeps the reader's interest through a continuing assassination operation against the enlightened Chinese leader Liu Ang, whom a rogue conspiracy would like to misrepesent.
Ludlum weaves Chinese proverb and imagery into the story so that the spear/shield conundrum becomes almost universally applicable, not just to warfare and deception but to human feelings, decency and truth: "Recall the man, of ancient times, who set up shop in a village selling both a spear he said would penetrate anything and a shield he claimed nothing could penetrate."
Portraying character is one of Ludlum's strengths as a writer. Portrayal of the small cabal of decision makers among the Chinese is credible and consistent. Portrayal of the self-made billionaire Paul Fenton is true to form--the man is a despicable type, a caricature. Portrayal of "Osiris" the blind linguist operative is an inspiration and a warning. Minor characters like Whitfield (the personality transformer) are credible and, fortunately, given limited scope. The assassins who provide foils for Ambler do just that--and make him even more human than he would have ordinarily been.
Ludlum is also very good at providing memorable scenes and sequences. He expects that a single reading will be sufficient, so he designs his scenes with wire-frame economy, and he constructs his chapters so that the book can be picked up and put down as a reader's busy schedule dictates.
What the book leaves as an open question is the morality of continuing the kind of exploitation of human psychology that is a central feature of this book. We all know that the black world is "out there"; we all sincerely hope that the special nature of necessary black operations is coupled with the kind of dispassionate balancing force we experience in this book.
Largely because of the Jason Bourne books and films, now reinforced with The Ambler Warning, we are becoming increasingly aware of a black world we cannot ever know ourselves without becoming tainted by it. Through Ludlum, we are aware of the human cost of entering that black world. And we have only just begun to understand just how vast that anodyne to our white world can be.
One thing further--the Ambler warning is a warning to the reader. Watch for the signs of the trap as you read this book. You will be surprised in the event even though you are presented with all the facts beforehand.
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