Author: Steven Gould
Publisher: Tor
Rating: WORTHY!
I reviewed Reflex the first sequel to Jumper here.
I reviewed Impulse the second sequel to Jumper here.
I have to yet again note that Jumper is another of those novels which has a gazillion-and-a-half namesakes! And in Britain, 'jumper' is the word for sweater - now you have no excuse for not knowing! In passing, I also have to wonder what was going through Jeff Laferney's mind when he wrote this one! Maybe I'll read it sometime and see if I can figure it out....
I started reading Jumper some time ago, long before I began blogging, but I don’t remember if I finished it. I think I did but it was so long ago that it feels almost like I'm reading a new novel anyway! The novel begins rather differently from the subsequent movie, and I have to say that I prefer the way the movie portrays David's initiation into the wonderful world of 'side-stepping' space, but the movie seems to show a much younger David at that point in his life. In the novel, he's almost 18 when it all begins.
Far more is made in the novel of David's abuse at the hands of his father, and the scene on the frozen river never happened in the novel. David first jumps away to escape being beaten by his father's belt-buckle because he was late mowing the lawn. Next he jumps to avoid being raped at the hands of a truck driver with whom he got a ride when he fled his father. From that point, for a while, the movie parallels the novel and David ends up in NYC in a seedy hotel, and he robs the bank. He starts grooming and dressing better, but then we depart the movie (or the movie, more accurately, departs the novel) as David meets an intriguing woman by the name of Millie (who is some three years older than he) at an opera, and they begin seeing one another. In the movie, Millie is a schoolmate of David's. In the original, she's a stranger and has far more going for her than does the movie version.
The relationship develops of course, and depressingly for David, Millie insists at one point that their relationship can go nowhere unless they're completely honest with each other. She will dump the jumper, she warns, if she catches him lying and this comes back to bite him. David never takes Millie to Roma, and never gets jailed, his mother never frees him, and there are no Paladins in the novel at all, and no Griffin. David does get to meet his mother quite early on. She's living in California, having moved not because she's the Paladin mother of a jumper, but because her husband beats her and she was so down and terrified that she couldn't even rescue David. When he does finally contact her, finding by accident a link to her, she's overcome by grief and guilt, but they spend a weekend together and talk of getting together soon after she comes back from a business trip to Europe. The next thing David knows is that his mother has been blown up by terrorists who hijacked the plane she was on.
From this point on, he becomes obsessed with vengeance, and starts trying to track down the terrorist who headed the hijacking, saving hundreds of hostages in some other terrorist attacks in the process. As I mentioned, I had read this before, but forgotten I had done so and I was a bit hesitant to have to read this to get to the new one, but I knew I had to read this to get the most out of the middle book, so I bit the bullet and began it. Then came the déjà vu and I thought I'd maybe started it and never finished it, so I felt even more reluctant to go over territory I'd already traveled, but the novel drew me in and was a fun read. Even the terrorist bit which, when I recalled it after reading through the first part of the novel, seemed to me to be more forbidding than I wanted to deal with, turned out to be a good read, so I'm happy I read this - again!
David and Millie work, perhaps better in this than in the third of the trilogy, although we experience less of both of them in that one than in this, of course. The story is told intelligently and humorously, Gould obviously having put a lot of work into the writing, and a lot of thought into what exactly it would mean if a person actually discovered they could teleport. I really enjoyed this and consider it to be a worthy read.
