Review: Cold Fall, by John Gardner

After SeaFire there was another year without an original Bond novel (John Gardner published the novelization of the year's Bond film, GoldenEye instead), following which the next, and final, Gardner Bond novel appeared in 1996, Cold Fall (also published under the alternative title of COLD). In it those who may, in light of the prior book's close, have expected to see the book pick right up where the last novel left off got something different, Gardner going for a previously untried two-part structure, with "Book One" detailing a previously unmentioned episode of Bond's life from many years earlier before, and then in "Book Two," rejoining the "present" to pick up the thread of the narrative from SeaFire's conclusion.

The opening of Book One, and the novel, has a whiff of terrorism and techno-thriller about it, with the destruction of an airliner on the runway at Dulles International by an unknown bomber and Bond, following an uncharacteristic display of forensic acumen, sent off to join the investigative team, whose efforts quickly link back to the events of an even earlier book than SeaFire or Never Send Flowers, Nobody Lives Forever, with Sukie Tempesta reemerging--and, as Bond finds when walking right into an FBI investigation of the Tempesta family driven by the fact that Sukie and her family are not who he thought they were. In contrast with the picture of respectability Sukie painted for him in the prior book the Tempestas turn out to have actually been an aristocratic Roman answer to the Sicilian Mafia who have graduated from ordinary criminality to supervillainy through involvement with an American compound of militia and (yet another) millennial cult. (The Cold--or COLD--of the title derives from the acronym shortening the cult's full name, the "Children of the Last Days.") And Bond winds up being asked to help the investigators out by trading on his connection with Sukie to infiltrate the family.

After detailing that adventure Cold Fall cuts back to where Gardner's last book left Bond. While I took it as a given that Flicka was dead at the end of the last book she was, in fact, still fighting for her life when Cold Fall returned to that point in the timeline (even if the prognosis is very grim, with the doctor telling Bond her chances of making it at all are less than even, and survival likely to mean being a cripple for the rest of her life). Indeed, Bond is struggling with the situation just as he finds himself involved again with COLD and the Tempesta family, on the verge of making their big play for power (while M is on the verge of ceding his, the decision already made to retire the longtime chief of the organization).

As all this suggests the book is yet another mass of comparative oddities from the standpoint of the series, both structurally and in the elements of which it is composed. In cases this appears to be compensation for the prior books' light servings of action, not least in the jet ski chase and helicopter battle in Book One. In others it appears a matter of trying to present something different (not least, in having the Bond girl of a prior book revealed as actually having been a world-threatening supervillainness all along).

Some of the resulting twists have their interest. If Bond's coming to America's rescue had been a theme of the series from the first, his saving it not from Communists and other foreign menaces, or even "internal foreigners" like ethnic gangsters, but a purportedly "all-American" type like the lunatic General Brutus Clay is a noteworthy variation. When it comes to "big action" the novel serves up a good deal more of that than anything the Gardner Bond novels had offered since at least Win, Lose or Die. And as is so often the case, Gardner is not just well aware of the incongruity, but does not hesitate to make a joke of it, which for those willing to go along with the humorous approach helps. (Thus we see Bond in a restaurant in Idaho full of cowboy hat and cowboy boot-wearing servers and patrons craving a vodka martini, but "common sense" telling him "that just might be considered a girl's drink around here," and settling for a bottle of Red Dog beer instead--while still raising eyebrows by accepting the offer of a glass to go with the bottle. And that was, of course, nothing next to how wrong he proved to be about Sukie!) Moreover, there is the place of the book in the series--the way in which it seems to, with the end of Bond's involvement with Flicka, and in a way the loss of the father figure to him that M had been, round off the transition so clearly underway in Never Send Flowers.

Still, the result has definite limitations. Again, if the new theme has its interest (the threat posed by the Clays of the world) a Bond novel is a less than ideal place to explore it, and unsurprisingly their form of villainy remains thinly sketched to the end. (COLD and company are obsessed with "toughness" on drugs and crime, with isolationism, with "strong leadership," but its concerns fall short of quite cohering, with the same going for its particular ambitions for a takeover of the U.S..) Indeed, their plans for taking the country over are as sketchy as their ideology. (They plan a wave of bombings that will be blamed on "terrorists" and presumably have "the country demanding leadership," but it is far from clear just why anyone should turn to this obscure group of fanatics for that "leadership.") The action scenes, while technically well written, seemed to me less energetic than they ought to have been--an impression I had not just the first time I picked up the book (at the time of its release), but many years later when revisiting it for my research. And altogether the novelty, the twists--the unsubtle cramming of two stories into one to produce a book-length narrative--can seem more indicative of strain than of vibrancy. Indeed, considering Gardner's last novels, and this one most of all, I find myself thinking of the pure and simple fact that (by his own admission) he had spent a decade and a half working on a series he had never much liked, and had probably stuck with for longer than he should have.

After all, if Gardner's work on the Bond series never compared with his very good best on his own projects--his Boysie Oakes novels, his Moriarty novels--he was still a skilled storyteller with a knack for action, a sense of humor, and a readiness to try something different (in itself a virtue, even though this was a place where it often did not work out), which even in this series let him wring some interest out of the shaky premises available to him (maybe more than we had any right to expect). Still, it is a reminder that novel-writing is not a thing done well for very long when taken up unenthusiastically, even by a genuinely talented and experienced author. It is a reminder, too, that by the '80s, let alone the '90s, updating the adventures of a '50s-era hero who was himself an update of adventures that in the '50s were already as old and tired as Bond was to be at century's end was an increasingly difficult task, one reason why Gardner's successors so often took different paths.