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James
Bond is back in print, and the new novel, Devil May Care,
reads just like the old ones.
That's
both good and bad.
British
author Sebastian Faulks is the scribe behind this latest literary
relaunch of the world's most famous spy. Other authors who've
penned Bond adventures, most notably John Gardner and Raymond
Benson, have carried Bond into modern times while pretending
that he really isn't aging.
Faulks,
"writing as Ian Fleming," Bond's creator, takes a different
approach. He picks up 007's adventures right where Fleming
left off. At the end of Fleming's last Bond novel, The
Man with the Golden Gun, Bond was on extended leave in
Jamaica, contemplating whether or not he would return to the
British Secret Service.
Devil
May Care answers that question: Bond returns, obviously,
or there wouldn't be much of a novel. But to carry on Fleming's
character thread, Faulks has Bond occasionally second-guessing
himself about his fitness for duty.
To pay
even that much attention to characterization in a Bond novel
is a bit of a surprise. For Fleming, Bond always worked best
as a sophisticated tough-guy archetype with a set of stock
behaviors: the vodka martini shaken, not stirred; the Walther
PPK pistol; the fast car; the daily shower turned all the
way to hot then all the way to cold.
The Bond
movies perpetuated 007's use of gadgets, though Bond seldom
relies on them in the books, and Devil May Care continues
that tradition. Faulks is also very Fleming-like in the way
he describes, with pace-killing detail, the particulars of
every meal Bond eats and every new set of clothes someone
puts on. Fleming lived the high life vicariously through his
spy and passed on the details of that life to his readers;
Faulks does the same thing. The problem is that such drawn-out
descriptions of each meal do nothing to advance the plot and
do everything to bog down the story.
It also
takes an interminable amount of time for Bond to get anywhere
in the novel. Even driving across town takes pages. In the
first third of the novel, Bond's travels include Rome, Monte
Carlo, London, Paris, and then finally to Tehran, where the
action kicks into gear—about a hundred pages into the
novel. Prior to that, Bond moves around a lot without much
happening. He meets with his boss, M; has an encounter with
a mysterious beautiful woman; and has a brush with the novel's
villain—all of which are cliché episodes for any Bond
story.
The villain
is a megalomaniac with lots of money, a secret lair, a sinister
henchman, and a plan to bring England to its knees. That sounds
like almost any Bond villain, of course—although this
one has a deformed hand that looks like a monkey's paw. The
villain's master plan involves not only a nuclear terrorist
attack designed to turn the Cold War hot but a secondary plan
that involves a flood of cheap drugs intended to turn England's
youth into enslaved junkies. Faulks tries to make the threat
something Bond would've faced in the 1960s while also making
it relevant to today's world—a result that feels a little
forced.
Other
parts of the novel feel forced as well. There are plot contrivances
and coincidences so unbelievable you'd only find them in a
Victorian novel like Jane Eyre. But if you can believe
in a madman with a monkey's paw for a hand, you can believe
anything.
Despite
its flaws, Devil May Care is still a James Bond novel,
and it still turns into a page turner as almost any James
Bond story does. Bond himself can carry almost any story he's
in, despite an author's best attempts to slow him down. Fans
will find the new adventure satisfying enough, and the back-to-basics
approach provides a fresh angle to the book in much the same
way the recent relaunch of the movie franchise freshened things
for the onscreen Bond.
Devil
May Care, written to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary
of Ian Fleming's birth, will provide light summer reading
for nearly anyone looking for a good adventure story, while
Bond fans can delight in one more fresh tale—just like
the good old days.
(August,
2008)
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