The Gray Man: review

It took a few days, but I read Mark Greaney's novel The Gray Man—something I was inspired to do after having watched the film. I'll save you the suspense: I didn't like the novel very much. It was a page-turner, true, and I stayed up until 8 a.m. this morning to finish it, but it was compelling in the cheap way that a Dan Brown novel is compelling (I quit Brown after reading both Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code, which are essentially the same book with almost the same characters). There was something occasionally choppy and abrupt about the prose of The Gray Man, and Greaney got some French location names wrong despite the fact that much of the novel's action takes place in France (e.g., the Île de la Cité—the famous small island sitting in the Seine in Paris—is called Île de Cité in the book; a reference to "Boulevard Saint-Germaine" should be "Saint-Germain"). There's a Korean character in the story, a top assassin named Song Park Kim, and while I suppose 김송박 (Kim Song Bak) is a possible Korean name (I Googled it, and there were hits), it sounded as if Greaney had lumped together a bunch of surnames, something that JK Rowling was guilty of when she created a character named Cho Chang (I've seen arguments that "Cho Chang" is, in fact, a plausible Chinese name if you spell it slightly differently, but from a Korean perspective, this again sounds like a Westerner heedlessly throwing surnames together). The book also contained almost as many implausibilities as the movie did; I'm still not sure how the protagonist managed to storm the château at the very end. Lastly, there was some cringe-inducingly corny prose, for example: Court Gentry was a killer of men. These were men. How did Greaney write that and not explode into wet, stinking chunks of shame immediately afterward? Jesus. And don't get me started on naming your protagonist Courtland Gentry.

The plot of the novel turned out to be very different from that of the movie. I saw the movie first, which is why I'm phrasing the matter this way. (The novel came out in 2009; the movie came out last year.) The movie contained a lot of characters not found in the book, and vice versa. There were so few points of resemblance, in fact, that I have to wonder how Mark Greaney can be so polite about the screen adaptation. I watched him in an interview, talking about how he was cool that his story had been Hollywoodized, but having now read the novel, in which the shadowy power is completely different from the one in the movie, I can say that, were I the author of the story, I'd be furious at how the studio butchered my baby. 

I'm tempted to list all the differences, but I'll restrict myself to just a few: the Gray Man's old handler, Donald Fitzroy, is a slim American in the movie (played by Billy Bob Thornton) but a fat Brit in the novel. Fitzroy has a niece named Claire in the movie; Claire has a pacemaker that is crucial to the plot because it allows her location to be tracked. In the book, Claire has no heart problems; she's also Fitzroy's granddaughter, and she has a twin sister who barely registers in the plot. Claire is a tween in the movie, but she's only eight in the book. In the movie, the main villain is Lloyd Hansen, an assassin who both coordinates operations and does his own wet work. He's played with hilarious athleticism by Chris Evans. In the book, Lloyd—no surname given—is an unmemorable figure (Court can't recall him) who is impulsive and incompetent; he gets outsmarted by the Gray Man time and again as Court makes his way westward across Europe to Normandy, France, plowing through a gauntlet of international kill teams who want the $20 million bounty that comes with killing Court. There are so many more differences in plot details that I could write my own novel just pointing those differences out, but I'll finish by noting that the biggest Hollywoodization was without a doubt the amping-up of all the female roles. Claire is older, in the movie, and a bit of a smartass. Dani Miranda (Ana de Armas) and Suzanne Brewer (Jessica Henwick) are additions made purely for the movie, with Dani in particular shouldering the role of the ass-kicking female.

Anyway, as Greaney himself says in one interview, the joy of having a movie that's so different from its source material is that moviegoers will—as I did—feel motivated to buy the book to read the original story. In the novel, Court suffers way more injuries and is practically dead on his feet by the time he's ready to storm the château. He's only able to stay on mission thanks to a young French veterinarian who supplies him with strong amphetamines.

At the most basic level, the book's and movie's plots are vaguely similar. In the book, Court starts off in the Middle East, not Thailand, but in both the book and the movie, he gets betrayed while in the air with his "rescue" team, and Fitzroy—under duress—is his betrayer. Court does get trapped in a well and blasts his way out, and he does make his way to the compound where Fitzroy and Claire are being held. It's a tossup, though, as to which scenario—the book's or the movie's—is more implausible as to how Court executes his rescue.

While I was curious enough to want to read the book version of this story, I have no desire to pursue the rest of Greaney's series. Some months ago, I went through the nine-book adventures of Ryan Drake by novelist Will Jordan (known online as The Critical Drinker), and that was an enjoyable series even if it had its own flaws. As for the Gray Man... I think I'm done after one book. Just like with Dan Brown, the prose leaves a bad taste in the mouth. It's the linguistic equivalent of cotton candy, and more evidence of the fact that Hollywood's taste in books is pretty hit-or-miss.