Brokenclaw, by John Gardner

New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1990, pp. 304.

After an uneventful year has made James Bond restless in that way all too familiar to readers of the novels, M orders his top field operative to take a vacation--to Vancouver, where Bond first sees the wealthy businessman and "philanthropist" "Brokenclaw" Lee Fu-Chu. Also all too familiar, M interrupts Bond's rest and relaxation with an order during said vacation, sending Bond down the coast to San Francisco--with Mr. Lee the reason, his business interests happening to extend to organized crime and spying for Chinese intelligence, to which he is selling a new anti-submarine detection technology, and a system for neutralizing it, jointly developed by the U.S. and Britain. Accordingly American and British intelligence are undertaking a joint operation to stop the transfer and finally bring down Brokenclaw, in which Bond's part is to go undercover with CIA agent Sue Chi-Ho as a pair of traitors enlisted by the Chinese government to inspect the goods on its behalf before they hand over the money . . .

Perhaps more than any other Gardner novel, Brokenclaw evokes the premise of a specific work of Ian Fleming's, namely Live and Let Die. Like Mr. Big, Lee is a very large, physically formidable and exceptionally articulate mixed-race gangster in control of the underworld of an ethnic enclave in a major American city who is also working with a foreign intelligence service hostile to the U.S. government. However, unlike in Live and Let Die, and more like in Gardner's earlier Icebreaker, Bond here is a comparatively passive actor, being maneuvered about by M and the villains until he sets off for a final showdown with the bad guy on his own initiative after the main threat has been quashed. And the novel's finale, like a crucial scene in that earlier Gardner novel, has Bond among tents in the wilderness, surrounded by an indigenous people living in the old ways.

Unfortunately in comparison with both those novels Brokenclaw is very awkwardly structured. The first fifth of the book is a mass of incidents linked mainly by coincidence: Bond's spotting Lee in Vancouver; Bond going on to San Francisco, noticing an FBI man tailing him, seeing the tail attacked by gangsters, etc., leading up to the American authorities taking him into custody, and then taking him to M. Finally explaining to Bond what this has all been about M's briefing, drawn out by a lengthy flashback sequence, lasts another fifth of the book, from Chapters Four to Eight (I am sure, a record for the series). The result is that Gardner is already two-fifths of the way into the novel before he sends Bond off on his mission properly speaking, and it is some time after that before the pace picks up, as Bond and Chi-Ho's part of the mission entails a very roundabout trip to meet the villain, while as if all that were not enough when they eventually meet him there is the clutter of an additional subplot about another piece of havoc Brokenclaw means to wreak in America on China's behalf. (The sale of the technology apart, he is engineering a financial crash!)

The overall impression all this creates is of a limited idea extended into a full-length novel through the stretching of its material, in part through the cramming of still more material inside it until it is ready to burst, with none of it particularly well thought-out or developed (as with the financial crash subplot, such that Bond himself points out its irrationality to Lee, and gets for his trouble a bit of hand-waving). Meanwhile the piling of one implausibility atop another combines with Gardner's tendency to take Bond down a peg really running away with him this time in his subjecting Bond to not one but two bouts of appalling torture. In the first the series' castration-themed tortures hit a new low of indignity with Brokenclaw ordered Bond stripped and "strategically" smeared with fat so as to induce his pet wolves to perform the deed in question (about which purpose Lee is blunt to the point of crudity). Adding to the indignity Bond fails to save himself, and is rescued instead by his American colleague Ed Rushia, and American special forces, when they conduct the big attack on Lee's lair, with M's chief of staff Bill Tanner along in a rare appearance in the field, and all of whom become well aware of what had been going on before they arrived, as the code names of the persons involved adding yet another bad joke to an already very tasteless mixture--while the o-kee-pah contest subjects Bond to yet more punishment. (Indeed, where in Fleming's Bond novels Felix Leiter often seemed a nonentity, his counterpart Rushia threatens to overshadow Bond this time around, not least, by saving Bond's life again at the end of the o-kee-pah contest, among many another contribution to Brokenclaw's defeat, with this, too, perhaps another expression of Gardner's take-Bond-down-a-peg impulse here.)

Of course, if the book has considerable flaws of structure and focus (and arguably, tone) it is also not without its strengths. Lee is a satisfactorily villainous presence (especially in comparison with the nonentity that Bassim Baradj was in the preceding Win, Lose or Die), with the requisite personal charisma, extravagant tastes and revolting sadism, and of course, the requisite trappings, from his high-tech, high-security lair to the psychotic henchmen ready to do his bidding (like Bone Bender Ding). And on the whole Brokenclaw manages to be a smooth, brisk read--rather more than it ought to be given the way it is put together. Still, I could not but account it one of Gardner's weaker efforts.

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