SPOILER WARNING: Book Vs. Film is a column comparing books to the film adaptations they spawn, often discussing them on a plot-point-by-plot-point basis. This column is meant largely for people who’ve already been through one version, and want to know how the other compares. As a result, major, specific spoilers for both versions abound, often including dissection of how they end. Proceed with appropriate caution.
• Book: Jumper, Steven Gould, 1992
• Book: Reflex, Steven Gould, 2005
• Book: Jumper: Griffin’s Story, Steven Gould, 2007
• Graphic novel: Jumper: Jumpscars, Nunzio Defilippis and Christina Weir, 2008
• Film: Jumper, adapted by David S. Goyer, Jim Uhls, and Simon Kinberg; directed by Doug Liman, 2008
It would never have occurred to me to cover Jumper for a book vs. film column if the book hadn’t shown up on my desk. Even so, I almost set it aside, since it looked so much like one of those cheap, quickie film novelizations. I’d never heard of the author, Steven Gould, and I’d never heard of the book, and having seen the trailer, I had no reason to believe it was going to be anything but a slapdash action movie.
Then I checked the book’s copyright date and found out it was more than 15 years old, which surprised me, and I read the first couple of pages out of curiosity. After that, I was hooked, and I burned through all three of Gould’s Jumper-related books in a week. And now I wish there were more of them.
But after I finished reading Jumper, I braced myself and watched the Jumper movie trailer again. Sure enough, absolutely nothing in that trailer happens in the book, except for the female lead saying “Just don’t lie to me.” Action? Antagonists? Big splashy teleporting effects? Teleporting cars? Picnics on top of the Sphinx’s head? A war involving high-tech future super-widgets? What huh?
Put it this way. Here, in a nutshell, are all the significant similarities between Jumper the book and Jumper the movie: Both feature a protagonist named David Rice, who finds out, as a teenager, that he can teleport. He abandons his alcoholic father, drops out of high school, and moves to New York City, where he books himself into a shitty flophouse, uses his power to teleport into a bank vault, and teleports back out with a whole lot of money. Also, there’s a love interest named Millie who doesn’t like being lied to.
And that’s really about it.
Given that, it really isn’t necessary to address every plot point from both versions in order to discuss the vast differences between them, so this column will be less spoilery than past editions of Book Vs. Film. Besides, I’d recommend Jumper the book, and I’d rather not give away so much of the story that people don’t feel a need to read it. Instead, I mostly want to talk about the differences between the two versions’ tones and goals. Turning a quiet, methodical coming-of-age story into a brainless action-adventure film is kind of missing the point, but it’s also kind of typical of what happens when Hollywood gets its hands on a good story. Far more disturbing to me is the way Jumper the movie turns a morality tale into an anti-morality tale, and transforms a kid’s search for himself into a sociopath’s wet-dream justification for any crazy, murderous thing he wants to do.
Jumper was Steven Gould’s first novel, and it does read a lot like a debut: It’s clunky and flat in some places, especially in the early chapters, but it gradually broadens and settles in style, steadily becoming more ambitious and assured all the way through to the end. Though this could also be a part of the story arc—it’s a first-person novel, and it’s about David Rice growing up, so it makes sense that his story would become more complicated as his horizons broaden.
It starts with Davy’s first two teleporting experiences. (You can read the first chapter here.) The first comes when his father—simultaneously more monstrous and more human in the book, largely because he’s more present in general—is beating him with a belt. (“Not the buckle, dad! You promised!” “Shut UP! I didn’t hit you near hard enough the last time.”) Which is the clumsiest part of the book; it reads like a Very Special Episode Of Blossom or something. After Davy instinctively teleports away from the beating and finds himself at his local library, he runs away, possibly as much so he doesn’t have to explain things to his dad as to avoid further beatings. On the road, he accepts a ride from a trucker, who drives him out to the middle of nowhere to meet with some friends, all of whom attempt to gang-rape him. Once again, facing violence and pain, he instinctively teleports away—back to his hometown library, which, he eventually realizes, he thinks of as a sanctuary, a quiet place where he used to escape from his father.
From there, the book improves considerably. Gould is a methodical writer who seems to enjoy process quite a bit, at least judging from the three Jumper books. He doesn’t tend to skip steps: He doesn’t say “So then I robbed a bank,” or “So then I spent the next three months building myself a sanctuary in the mountains.” He takes us though each procedure bit by bit, almost as if he were laying out a how-to manual for future teleporters. Much of the rest of the book proceeds in this detail-oriented, nose-to-the-grindstone sort of way: Davy tries to live on his own in New York City, but discovers that he can’t get a job without ID, he can’t get an ID without a birth certificate, and he can’t get a birth certificate without ID. So he can’t make an honest living. So then he walks himself through the process of learning to rob a bank. He decides to build a sort of Fortress Of Solitude in a place only a teleporter could reach. He travels to places by bus or plane and memorizes locales so he’ll be able to teleport to them later. He experiments with his teleporting powers. He meets a girl named Millie at a Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd, and carefully goes through the motions of courting her without letting her in on his many secrets: that he’s a teleporter, a 17-year-old runaway, and a thief. Much of the book proceeds like this: It’s immersive and grounded, in a very mundane you-are-there kind of way.
It took me a while to catch onto what Gould was doing, because he generally doesn’t spell it out. Which is one of the big charms of the book: It’s been a while since I read a novel that was this conscious of the show-don’t-tell dictate. For a good part of the story, I couldn’t understand some of the choices Davy makes. For instance, he teleports home frequently for mundane things he could do elsewhere, like washing his clothes. He always avoids his father, but leaves him petulant “messages” by smashing or taking things. Long after he’s escaped his old life and settled down in New York City, he goes back to his hometown for a high-school party, where he tries to impress kids he knew back in the day. He pursues Millie obsessively, but when balked, retreats into himself with alarming childishness. And in spite of his power and his million-dollar bank-heist cache, he holes up like an animal in a den, building himself a series of lairs and getting to know few people in New York.
It didn’t occur to me until midway through the book that Gould is basically exploring the mentality of someone who’s been serially abused his whole life, someone with emotional arrested development who’s trying to get beyond what was done to him in the past, and decide what he wants to do with himself in the future. Like so many abuse victims, Davy is afraid of new things and people, and he sticks to what he knows, even returning to the site of his abuse over and over in spite of the danger; he eventually has to learn, slowly but surely, to let go and move on.
The teleportation is a fantastical, colorful element that makes the book unique, but ultimately, it’s more about emotions and people than powers. More than anything, Jumper reminded me of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time-Traveler’s Wife, another book about a man with a semi-magical ability that wound up being less about his power, and more about how it affected his relationship with his wife. (I loved that book, too.)
Jumper the book does include some action, as Davy eventually tries to track down his long-missing mom, and deals with the NSA’s ongoing pursuit of him, and eventually winds up fighting terrorism around the world. It feels a bit like two different books, mushed together: In one, Davy finds his feet as a human being, separate from the father who’s defined his entire life, and in the second, he starts becoming an adult, making his own choices, and using his abilities to change the world for the better, instead of just to escape his own demons. The first half of the book feels a little like an After School Special about child abuse, written for young adults; the second half feels more like an adult political thriller, albeit still an exceedingly methodical, process-driven one. The style goes from the short-sharp-sentence bluntness of that opening chapter, linked above, to passages like this one, in which Davy gets a political lesson from a Georgetown professor so he can better understand the people he’s fighting:
“One of the problems with American public policy on terrorism is that our government insists on blurring the line between armed insurgence against military forces and installations and attacks on uninvolved civilians. Now, obviously attacking unarmed civilians who have no involvement with a particular political issue is terrorism. But an attack on an armed military force occupying one’s homeland? That’s not terrorism. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, I’m just saying that if you call that terrorism then the U.S. is also involved in financing terrorists in Afghanistan and Central America. See what I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that the proportion of American dead from terrorism is way out of proportion to the response it generates. We did nothing to stop the Iraq-Iran war because we perceived it in our interests that damage be done to both of those countries. Personally I think that’s inexcusable, but I’m not in the position to make government policy. Certainly both leaders were crazy with a long-standing personal grudge, but their people paid a horrible price.”
“I wasn’t aware that there was a personal grudge.”
“Hell, yes. In nineteen seventy-five; when Hussein settled the dispute over the eastern bank of Shatt-al-Arab with the Shah of Iran, one of the unwritten conditions was that Hussein get Khomeini to stop his political activity.”
“How could he expect Hussein to do that?”
Perston-Smythe looked at me like I was an idiot. “Khomeini was in Iraq. When he was exiled from Iran he went to the Shiite holy city of An Najaf. Anyway, Hussein told Khomeini to stop and Khomeini refused, so Hussein bounced him out of the country to Kuwait which promptly bounced him out of the country to France. Over a fifteen-year period, seven hundred thousand Shiites were thrown out of Iraq. There’s a lot of bad feeling there. More now of course, since the war.”
I blinked. “I know you’re trying to give me the big picture, but what about these particular terrorists?”
“We’re getting there. It’s a roundabout way, but all the better for the journey. What do you know about Sunni versus Shiite beliefs?”
Okay, still kind of clunky—and a little too much like a Michael Crichton novel, with one character unquestioningly eating up the political lectures of an author stand-in who’s essentially lecturing the reader—but still a couple of levels denser and more sophisticated than that opening chapter, and a lot more focused on a big picture. Robert Cormier might have written this book, but few other young-adult writers would have made that kind of transition.
So at any rate. The book is about Davy growing up and getting his own life, one tied into the rest of the world.
The film, by contrast, is about a kid in a permanent state of arrested development, pissed off at the world, hung up on a girl he’s had a crush on since early childhood, and given the power to do whatever he wants. I feel like I covered that ground a bunch already in my review of the film, and I don’t want to overdo it. But in brief, I don’t think the film’s biggest bastardization of the book is in adding “paladins” who run around trying to kill jumpers because of some vague religious belief that only God should be everywhere at once. I don’t think it’s in changing the nature of teleportation, such that it’s a big, flashy effect that leaves behind “jump scars” which other people can jump through, and that paladins can hold open with super-machines. I think it’s largely in turning the protagonist into a selfish, creepy sociopath who goes out of his way to hurt people.
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