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Okay, so novels by Robert Ludlum are in the category of “guilty pleasure” for me. Like tanking down a bottle of Coppola Rosso or gobbling up one too many Lindor dark chocolate truffles at Christmastide. I pick Ludlum up once or twice a year when my brain is overtaxed and I yearn for some Adventure-ish escape, preferably in some exotic place and with a Conspiracy Theory attached.
The Prometheus Deception satisfied all the above requirements, though in the end I thought there were some plot holes and dangling story threads. The double-twist was predictable and the female characters, in true Ludlum style, remained underdeveloped. Still, though hardly in the category of the whip-cracking Bourne trilogy, it was a fun read about an ex-spy from a super-secret black ops agency who is recruited by the CIA to investigate the group he used to work for, and which may actually have been set up by a Russian double-agent for nefarious purposes. Mayhem, of course, ensues, and a plot is uncovered to Take Over the World by means of a vast surveillance network invented by a Bill Gates-ish entrepreneur, complete with a bezillion-dollar Puget Sound-side spread near Seattle.
In the end what impressed me about about <em>The Prometheus Deception</em> was not the storytelling—middling by Ludlum standards—but its prescience. Even though it was written before the author’s pre-9/11 death and the subsequent Patriot Act (not to mention the conveniently-timed burgeoning of Web 2.0 and a digitally-enhanced culture of surveillance, complete with security cams on every streetcorner and semi-public venue), Ludlum foresaw what sorts of mischief could be got up to when Unknown Groups of Powerful Baddies get hold of the network.
But then Ludlum always seemed to know way more than was good for him, didn’t he, or for us? I certainly came away from this book, as with so many of Ludlum’s books, even more gobsmack-paranoid about our assorted international Alphabet Soup “intelligence” organizations than I already was.
Yes, paranoid. But entertained.
