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Bourne to be mild

Why does Jonathan Freedland use a pseudonym if he declares his real name and photo on the back cover? More to the point, why did he write Pantheon? It’s clear that Freedland has no personal investment in the story. There’s no zest or excitement in his writing. The characters are lifeless words on the page. Not only that, they are thoroughly dislikable. Kurt Vonnegut advised writers to give the reader at least one character they could root for, and after reading Pantheon, I can understand why. The main character, James, is a war-injured scholar whose default response to any interaction is uncontrollable rage. This gets repetitive quickly and the character never develops. Dialogue is uninspired, alternated only with stretches of painfully bland descriptions from James’ completely contrived internal monologue.

The story’s impetus is James beating his wife. She leaves with their son for America to escape and the narrative concerns James tracking them down. Had James been less of a wooden construction, the time spent with him may not have dragged as much. Yet it would still be difficult to endure Freedland’s childish grasp of grammar, unskilled narrative pace, and dull content. Freedland says that Pantheon, besides being a ‘riveting story’, brings a secret into the open.

This secret is an affinity of numerous American scholars with eugenics: an interesting idea to explore but the plot point feels thrown in as an afterthought. It manifests close to the story’s end and Freedland seems to want to get it out of the way. Having spent the book’s entirety finding James’ family, the reunion is not a deserved reward for the reader’s perseverance.

It’s hard to find reasoning behind Freedland’s delayed  introduction of the secondary character, Taylor. He does not interact with James but Freedland’s attempt to make his narrative distinct is fruitless. Perhaps this too is an afterthought. Like much of the book, the reason must be page-filling. Is Freedland attempting to mimic the likes of James Patterson’s or Dan Brown’s blockbuster structures? If so, he fails.

This isn’t personal, and I don’t wish to damn Freedland as a person. He is an influential Guardian journalist and seems a principled man. It’s a shame neither of these make him a capable novelist. Pantheon shows Freedland possessing all the atrocities of a bad writer: he is tedious, lazy, and either believes his readers to be ignorant or does not consider them at all. Jonathan-Bourne-Sam-Freedland is not the next Harris or le Carré. He is the next roll of toilet paper in my bathroom.

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