Characters are driven by story or story drives the character. Ideally, adhering to the elements of good fiction, character clashes with story and character is altered in the process. So story is a fusion of dynamics, not character or story alone.

The character of Jason Bourne, also known as David Webb, as revealed in THE BOURNE SANCTION, is a stilted caricature of the superhuman hero plunked down into a story with a function to move things along. Could the story move along without Jason Bourne? Yes. In this continuation of the Bourne saga, author Eric Van Lustbader has regulated the troubled character of Jason Bourne to a prop. It that a bad thing? No, not necessarily.

Leonid Arkadin, a professional killer with all the skills and cunning of the Jason Bourne we know and pity, is the real character of this novel. The parallels between the unfolding character of Arkadin and the historical character of Bourne is striking. A formula one might say Arkadin, driven by mission, meets girl. Girl is initially an adversary, someone from whom he must obtain information. Arkadin is smitten by girl and eventually falls in love. Sounds like Jason Bourne and Maria, Bourne's first love after attempting to recover his identity. The parallels do not end there.

While Arkadin and his romantic interest are easily the focus of THE BOURNE SANCTION, three other characters also stand out because you get a vague sense that they could be flesh and blood people.

Veronica Hart is the newly appointed director of CI. She has enemies. Then there is Soraya Moore, a CI supervisor who is charged with preventing terrorist attacks within the United States. She has adversaries. Both Hart and Moore are presented with a problem and both struggle toward solutions that, through the prism of fiction, produce desirable outcomes. The women are not major characters in THE BOURNE SANCTION, but they are believable. Unfortunately, the adventurous escapism presented by the Moore-Hart conflicts are minor twists in this nearly 700 page novel.

Perhaps the real problem with THE BOURNE SANCTION is the arch-enemy. The Black Legion is a Muslim extremist sect with its roots in World War II and is now plotting attacks against America. In the progress of the Jason Bourne story, he goes from fighting himself, to fighting the forces that created him, to fighting the Black Legion. One's initial reaction to this is to wonder at what point Bourne made the transition from being a flawed warrior to a crusading super-hero. The author gives us a couple of push-pins mapping the points of transformation, but they are woefully inadequate. College professor going through the motions, memories of deceased loved-ones slamming into awareness of the moment, and so on. By chapter 5, when Bourne meets up with Soraya Moore, we know that what we have here is a far-flung cops and robbers story. As the reader, we are left with trying to plug Jason Bourne into the role of cop, super-hero. Lot of effort.
If it were not for the Leonid Danilovich Arkadin and his acquired love interest,