The Continuation Bond Novel Writer's Dilemmas: Bond Movie on Paper, or More Fleming? Write Like the Original, or Only Pretend to Do So?

Those who have gone on flogging the James Bond series in print as in film have made much of being true to the original. "Not the last time, but this time," they promise--and it is all as implausible as it is insincere.

Where the matter of the impossibility of making a Bond novel today read like a Bond novel then is concerned, Fleming's attitudes regarding gender and race (in that order, and only these, it would seem) get most of the criticism here, but the differences go far beyond that. The films distilled the stuff of his middle books in particular (Dr. No, Goldfinger, Thunderball) into a very specific formula (freakish villains, gadgets, high-tech complexes blowing up at the end, etc.)--resulting in a tone and a briskness, a density with and emphasis on action and sex and luxury and glamour, not just so intricately structured that fans might complain about any deviation, but far at odds with Fleming's more varied and in many ways odder Bond adventures (compare the film version of You Only Live Twice with the book), and more generally, the darker, slower, more grounded, more character-oriented approach of Fleming that makes quite a shock for the film fan coming to them for the first time.

Still, even if one had never seen a Bond film, knew nothing of them (unlikely for one coming to the books now, but there you have it), they would still likely be struck by Fleming's ostentatiously Literary prose style, with its technique of the "aimless glance" that in showing translated to slowness by not just cinematic but print standards, placed additional demands on the reader's concentration, and from the standpoint of today's action-adventure reader as well as viewer, buried them in the minutiae of things not all that interesting while hastily passing over what they would consider the "good parts." It is all the greater, too, because of just how indifferent Fleming could be to being interesting or accessible to an audience much like himself, which did not know the ins and outs of golf and bridge, which did not share or want to share his anxieties about whether he was going slack in time of peace, or the direction of post-war Britain was going--the heavy freight of upper-class conservative middle aged-ness, the senior British civil servant-ness of the books (which, of course, were what made those social attitudes hard to miss).

Unsurprisingly, while Amis offered up more Fleming, mocking Fleming's critics and the films (and M, whom he'd never much liked) in the process, only Faulks in his idiosyncratic Devil May Care made any real attempt to capture the flavor of Fleming's prose (and even for him, none of that aimless glance stuff!), while the rest were more inclined to write in their own voices rather than pretend to put on a ventriloquist act, while usually spending  a good deal less time on minutely described upper-class games or in Bond's head. There was also an increasing tendency toward the stuff of the films with regard to pace and action, with Gardner and Benson tilting one way and then another, and more often toward the movies rather than the Fleming novels (exemplified by Never Dream of Dying), and even Faulks inclining this way in his 2008 book, though his attempt to write as Fleming did got in the way. (We had, for instance, a scene with Vulcan bombers chasing a nuclear-armed ekranoplan that could have been an atompunk techno-thriller reader's delight--but true to the approach he was taking in his book, Faulks treated it in Fleming's more typical, aimless glance manner, and did the same with what could have been Bond's epic journey home across Soviet territory.) Jeffrey Deaver chucked Fleming altogether when seeming to start from scratch with a thoroughly modern 007 born in 1979, and while his successors William Boyd and Anthony Horowitz headed back to the era of the originals (Boyd pushing forward only slightly into 1969, and Horowitz returning to the '50s), with Horowitz actually incorporating Fleming's own material (stories for the unproduced TV show, not novelistic material) in narratives closely tied to specific Fleming novels (a story set mere weeks after Goldfinger, a prequel to Casino Royale), they are only too obviously written for a twenty-first century readership.