Review: The Facts of Death, by Raymond Benson

Like John Gardner in his sophomore effort, in his second novel The Facts of Death Raymond Benson shifts his approach from doing the utmost to make Bond contemporary to heavily evoking the character's past, drenching the reader in references to it to the end of connecting this adventure with the work that came before. Thus he includes in his second book not just Bill Tanner or Major Boothroyd, but James Molony, the now retired Miles Messervy, and Felix Leiter, and yet another ally from a different adventure in Stefan Tempo, while even giving Major Smythe from "Octopussy" a mention.1 Of particular interest Benson attempts to establish a single continuity between the works of Fleming, Amis and Gardner. The meeting with Messervy is at his residence Quarterdeck, previously featured in Colonel Sun, which is occasion to mention that book's episode. And if Zero Minus Ten hinted at at least a possibility of continuity in its reference to Messervy's retirement (Cold Fall ended with Bond on his way to meet the new, female M for the first time), this book removes any doubt about that, Benson mentioning, in passing, Bond's last trip to Texas--to face down the "last heir" of Blofeld--in an obvious reference to Gardner's For Special Services.

Still, it would be a mistake to exaggerate Benson's backward glance. Benson goes only so far in incorporating the material of the Gardner era, at least. There is no sign of Ann Reilly in his Q Branch, which, again, recalls the movies with Major "Now Pay Attention 007" Boothroyd the figure with whom 007 deals when visiting that section of SIS headquarters. And despite the mention of Bond's prior Texan adventure, and his meeting with Felix, there is not even a perfunctory "How are the kids?" mention of Bond's partner in that prior mission, Cedar. In fact I got the impression that this was an attempt to placate fans irritated by the apparent chucking of Gardner's amassed material the way many Star Wars fans were to later be aggrieved by Disney's designating the hundreds of novels and associated materials the franchise's Expanded Universe amassed over decades mere "Legends" rather than "Canon."

More significantly, where Gardner turned not just to a density of reference to the older works, but concocted a plot out of the elements of Moonraker and Goldfinger, here Benson pointedly writes a novel of the 1990s, taking its cue from film rather than Fleming's books where it really counts. Facts opens with a brisk account of several incidents hinting at a villainous plot that have Bond already abroad investigating the matter in his first scene, and then before that is over, caught up in a bit of over-the-top action--a much quicker start to the adventure which, as hinted here, is more swiftly paced, and more outlandish in its action-adventure elements, exactly as would be expected of one of the film series' famous "pre-credits sequences." Just the first time military hardware comes into play in the course of the story, the adventure also includes plenty of spy-fi gadgetry, above all a new Jaguar for Bond more fancifully upgraded than any preceding vehicle in print, and perhaps the movies. Bond's car now has, among other features, holographic projectors affording a host of possibilities for deceiving observers, its own drone aircraft, Chobham and reactive armor, and "heat-seeking rockets and cruise missiles." (It seemed to me that the author did not have an especially good idea of what some of these things were, that the terms sounded high-tech and fancy and he threw them around without worrying much about whether they could be discretely incorporated into a luxury car, but they do succeed in making the desired impression, while each and every one of them promptly comes into play.) Once more Bond finds himself at a gaming table with the villain of the piece (Konstantin Romanos), but rather than an intricately detailed game such as we got last time, there is a briefer, more accessible round of baccarat in which he seizes on the chance to afford a verbal provocation of his opponent (such that it recalled the film version of Thunderball rather than the print version of Casino Royale or Moonraker or Goldfinger). The adventure even has Bond trying to beat a clock at the climax, as he did so many times in the movies--while again, Benson was more casual than Gardner about involving Bond with various women through the story, typically along the cinematic lines again.

Moreover, it seemed to me that the novel's turn to the parodic also had a whiff of the cinematic Bond about it, not least Benson's making a crucial element of the enemy's plan a sperm clinic which Bond infiltrates as a prospective donor--an element that had me thinking of nothing so much as the then-recent third Naked Gun film, and which predictably brings its share of crude and sometimes self-aware humor. (Bond, after all, has to submit to a medical exam and account for the innumerable evidences of severe and often exotic injury in the course of his past adventures.) There is, too, in this period when metafiction-heavy pop postmodernism was still being passed off as something novel and "cool" a surprising density of pop cultural reference which extends far beyond the James Bond franchise. (One scene notable in this respect has Bond being menaced by a female captor tracing a knife over his face and cheek as she verbally references Reservoir Dogs, Basic Instinct, and Natural Born Killers in quick succession.)

Less parodic, but still characteristically '90s, was the geopolitical element in the story, and its mixing with Bondian supervillainy. The conflict between the Greek and Turkish ethnic communities on Cyprus, its connections with the broader conflicts between Greece and Turkey, and the ways in which Turkish politics intersect with those of its Middle Eastern neighbors (the country shares borders with Iraq and Iran), are all very real. As people looking at the headlines in those years were only too aware, so was the existence of violent religious cults, often highly idiosyncratic in nature, with Benson certainly taking this course with Romanos, a Greek Cypriot refugee who, believing himself a reincarnation of the philosopher Pythagoras taking direction from the Olympian gods themselves, leads a similarly-minded cult in the pursuit of a campaign of personal revenge, while at the same time caught up in a biotech company plot to discretely hold the world to ransom. (The result is hardly the deepest treatment of the conflicts roiling the eastern Mediterranean, but at the very least Benson would seem to rate points for originality in the villain's conception.)

Altogether the overall impression I got was of an unfilmed Pierce Brosnan-era Bond movie on paper--a fact which did not make it go over particularly well with Fleming purists. However, the adventure certainly works on those other terms it took for itself. Indeed, when these books were new, and I was coming to them as a fan of the movies disappointed in my contacts with Fleming and Gardner, I was very pleased to accept those terms, with the briskly paced, action-packed (and in respects surprisingly original) Facts perhaps Benson's most satisfying effort on that level.

1. Stefan Tempo is one of Darko Karim's sons in From Russia, With Love.

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