Book Review: Death is Forever, by John Gardner

In the opening pages of Death is Forever we learn that Cabal, a hugely successful Anglo-American spy ring run in East Germany during the Cold War, completely ceased to operate within the week of German reunification—without any orders to do so from its British and American controllers. Two years later the British Secret Service and the CIA send the case officers who had run Cabal--Briton Fred Puxley (code name, "Vanya") and American Elizabeth Caerns (code name, "Eagle")--back to Germany to find out why. After arriving in country both those officers are killed within a week of each other, and under unusual circumstances, suggesting murder by Cold War-era methods long out of date--Vanya apparently "flyswatted" by a driver in Frankfurt, while Eagle was killed by a cyanide gun. This eliminates any doubt of enemy action and makes getting to the bottom of the whole matter the more urgent, so the two agencies send another pair of operatives to continue what Puxley and Caerns began. The CIA sends Elizabeth Zara ("Easy") St. John to become the new Eagle, and the British send James Bond to be the new Vanya. On the ground they soon discover that some party, out to get them, has also been picking off the network's members, all on the way toward realizing bigger plans . . .

In placing a German spy ring at the center of the plot, Death is Forever recalls the earlier No Deals, Mr. Bond (1987), but with its classically Cold War Central European setting, and emphasis on "tradecraft" (dead drops, safe houses, secret signaling methods, the mechanics of tailing and evading tails, etc.), which actually go along with a downplaying of Flemingesque extravagances (a murder attempt using Fiddlestick spiders apart), this makes this post-Cold War story feel even more Cold War than Gardner's actual Cold War adventures.

The result is that while this is in a sense the first truly post-Cold War Bond novel, it is also the most backward looking entry in the series to date, starting with the outmoded killing methods used against Cabal's case officers. The shadows of Markus Wolf, Bogdan Stashinsky, Lavrenti Beria and Joseph Stalin loom large over the events, every one of these names repeatedly cropping up in the story, while Bond himself makes an explicit comparison between the post-Cold War and the post-World War II era in which the Cold War was born, thinking of the way "the various secret agencies had their work cut out sniffing around for Nazis hiding in the woodpile of freedom."

The backward glance is evident, too, in the more than usually pronounced metafictional aspect of the novels. At one point Easy is described as "dressed right out of a '60s spy movie." Preparing to ride the Ost-West Express, Bond remarks "Night train to Paris. Sounds like a 1930s movie title," which is not the only evocation of the latter. Later, Gardner writes that this is Bond's first trip "on a continental railway train for years," one which brought back to him "the noises, sights and smells" of "criss-cross[ing] Europe on the great network of express trains while on operations at the height of the Cold War." Still, if it is the heavy evocation of Cold War culture in the broad that is most conspicuous, there are numerous, specific references to earlier Bond books--the epigram from Diamonds Are Forever, which clearly inspired the title, actually the first words after the title page. Later Bond casually mentions that his looks had once been compared to Hoagy Carmichael's (as Fleming had done way back in Casino Royale, and Gardner had only done in his exceptionally determined effort to evoke Fleming in For Special Services), and even has occasion to give detailed instruction about the preparation of his martini to a server, and be complimented by the server for having done so (again, just as in Casino Royale).

Perhaps unsurprisingly the book's choice of villains, and their scheme, likewise reflect the past more than the present--a collection of Stalinist die-hards who think that assassinating the leaders of the European Union's member countries as they ride aboard a train through the newly opened Chunnel will produce a power vacuum the Communists can somehow fill, achieving final victory for their ideology. The idea would have been silly in 1982, let alone 1992 (just where were the Communists who were actually supposed to be doing the vacuum-filling?), so much so that I have wondered if this too was not a bit of parody, though I saw no sign of comedic intent this time. Rather it seems to me that amid the collapsing market for spy fiction Gardner, like many others, had his doubts about the future of the fictional spy in the post-Cold War era, and Bond with him.

Interestingly this all happened as Gardner displayed a more nuanced attitude toward Soviet history than I expected to see in the Bond novel. Rather than just the orthodox Anti-Communism Fleming, and Bond, displayed, we see Gardner write of Stalin as "the true evil, which had . . . overtaken the ideology of Marx and Lenin," and "warped and bent the system into a new dogma of terror," "twist[ing] Communism" into what it eventually became--implying, in contrast with that standard right-wing view, that Marxism, Communism and the rest of the package cannot be reduced to Stalinism-according-to-Robert Conquest. (Indeed, Gardner the former theater critic writes of the famed Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht as "the late, great Bertolt Brecht.")

Perhaps Gardner had a leftish streak all along which could in this more relaxed moment be more easily displayed (such a streak would certainly have been yet another reason for him to have a hard time taking 007 seriously)--but especially given that up to this point he had been quite content to offer up as his Soviet baddies conventional Cold War caricatures of the kind with which Fleming would not have had a problem, it could simply be that he found it easy to be charitable toward the old enemy as it passed from the scene, and even came to be missed, if only as the old enemy, and only for lack of a focus for one's hates.

At the same time there was a sense of losing, along with old enemies, old friends, at least to go by how Bond's CIA colleague Easy is written. Where earlier novels tended to present the skillful but cash-strapped British working with the callow but cash-flush Americans, the latter were no longer so flush as they once were, while still being as inexperienced as ever. Easy, whose career back at Langley had her working behind a desk, is utterly unprepared for the field--but after this becomes worrisomely apparent to all concerned (not much past the first tenth of the book), what drives her to tears is her fear of being fired amid a time of service cuts and economic recession. If in an earlier era Fleming's Bond had been disappointed in the political reliability of the Americans as partners (in You Only Live Twice their ceasing to share information is a key plot point), at that point the Americans no longer have so much to bring to the table even when they were willing. Indeed, given how Bond ends up partnering with European allies in the old network and European governments' security forces in saving the leadership of the European Union (in what can seem a symbolically freighted climax occurring in the very "Channel Tunnel" physically linking Britain to Europe), it can seem that the European Union is imagined here as Britain's next natural partner (perhaps with a German "Leiter" rather than an American one connecting Britain's greatest spy with the financial and technical resources only others' expertise, and continent-wide industry, can supply). As Bond will in the next two novels see himself become very close indeed to a continental counterpart, professionally and personally, it does not seem that one can wholly rule that out--and if so Gardner would appear to be breaking with the conventional expectations of a Bond novel again in his rejection of that disdain for Europe so euphemistically referred to as "Euroskepticism." (Such an impression would seem to be affirmed by the heavy evocations of the memory of the world wars throughout the book, and especially its last portion--the very disasters that a European Union was supposed to relegate to the past, a feat which its proponents are quick to credit it with having accomplished.)

Still, whatever one makes of the creaking anachronism, the shakiness of the premise, or the perhaps more-than-meets-the-eye politics (a look ahead to the future after the glance back at the past?), I have to say that as Gardner's forays into spy vs. spy territory go this is easily his most successful--in the pacing, the intricacy of the plot, the melding of story and action (certainly more so than was the case with the most comparable prior book, No Deals, Mr. Bond). Indeed, it may be about as satisfying as any of his contributions to the series on that level, and as fitting a "close to an era" as could reasonably be hoped for, Gardner's subsequent Bond novels a very different thing on the level of conception and action, starting with the very next book, Never Send Flowers.

For the full listing of the James Bond continuation novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog), click here.