Review: For Special Services, by John Gardner

John Gardner's Licence Renewed was not always serious, but it was often serious enough about updating the character of James Bond and his adventures, to the point of nearly effacing the series' identity. It is not unreasonable to expect that For Special Services would represent the same tendency, and indeed at a glance it looks as if that is the direction in which it is going. Thus do we have a plot revolving around the military arms race in space just a year before Ronald Reagan was to announce the Strategic Defense Initiative, and in these years when Dallas was a pop cultural phenomenon, Texan lucre setting the stage for events.

Yet one does not have to look very deeply past such trappings to see how Gardner shifted gears, striving heavily to affirm the identity of this Bond novel as a Bond novel through a heavy reliance on the material of Fleming himself. Thus we have not just the evocation of Moonraker's Hugo Drax in a flamboyant multimillionaire half-German Nazi living as a citizen of the country he is targeting, who will in spite of those Nazi affinities have truck with the Soviets and take an interest in the strategic arms race which will deal a great blow to the West; we also have the resurrection of Bond's most storied adversary, SPECTRE, with a new member of the Blofeld family at the head of the organization, once again exploiting the Cold War for power and profit, while aspiring to the exaction of personal revenge on 007 himself.

Indeed, Drax the Second and the Heiress of Blofeld are literally married as Markus and Nena Bismaquer.

Meanwhile, as in Goldfinger the villains plan a raid on a highly guarded, sensitive American government installation in the continental United States to seize a key national asset for transfer to the Soviets in an act that would tip the balance of power their way, with the plan dependent on disabling the potential opposition to the heist chemically--while what ultimately defeats the plot is one of the villains, won over to Bond's side, betraying the rest of the gang. There is something of Bond's impersonation of Sir Hilary Bray in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, too, in Bond's assuming the cover of art expert "Professor Penbrunner" when he goes to visit the home of a wealthy suspect indulging interests such as only the rich can (rare prints rather than heraldry in this case).

As if all this were not enough, For Special Services is replete with references to earlier adventures of exactly the kind the prior book eschewed. In the early, pre-mission chapter where Bond beds Ann Reilly (in itself suggestive of a shift of the series back from Ann's only pranking Bond with the prospect of sex in a more classical direction), Bond thinks repeatedly of his late wife Tracy, and then of just about all the other women he has been with in the past, running through a good many of the names right down to his "latest conquest," Lavender Peacock (just in case we forgot their relations had ever been carnal, as was only too easily the case). Shortly afterward Bond also has occasion to remember not just Tracy's killer Blofeld, and his Castle of Death, but, on meeting none other than the daughter of his comrade through five novels, Felix Leiter as Bond goes adventuring with a Leiter again. (Cedar has followed in her father's footsteps and joined the CIA.) Gardner even trots out Fleming's old comparison of Bond's looks to Hoagy Carmichael's (in spite of Carmichael's appearance having long been forgotten by almost everyone in 1982, and even the fact of his authorship of such still well-remembered and well-loved standards as "Heart and Soul").

Going beyond content to form, it appears that Gardner borrows something of Fleming's narrative approach in not trying to make us feel like he is writing an action movie--indeed, delivering a relatively action-light book where, just as in Goldfinger, even the big heist is treated briefly and hazily. (Indeed, Gardner, like Fleming, spends much more time detailing a game at length--in this case a car race on Bismaquer's private track that provides much of what little action there us.)

Still, as might be expected of Gardner given his history, this heavy freight of old Bondiana is accompanied by a heavier freight of parody. The new chief of SPECTRE is a long-lost child of the villain--which would in itself seem to mock at such melodramatic cliché (not unlike the question of the Murik lineage in Licence Renewed), but it comes across as all the more parodic given the unlikelihood of Blofeld's ever having reproduced. Ms. Blofeld's billionaire partner made his fortune in ice cream, and the scheme which will "threaten the Free World" actually hinges on the use of exactly that product. And once more, the parody is conspicuous in the book's treatment of gender and sexuality. If Bond's relationship with Ann Reilly has become physical, contrary to Bond's expectations they became "friends" first and lovers only later--the change in the order of events not insignificant. Later, paired with Cedar, he tells her, "you'll be as safe as a nun with me," and means it. Bond does get in sex with a "bad girl." But as she happens to be Nena, and Bond later sees her father's eyes in her own, well, Blofeld-is-a-woman is, on top of being played as a gender switch (this only comes out in a big reveal at the end), not the sort of encounter the series is famous for. Nor is the more complex network of relations in which involvement with her entangles him, which involves a gender switch more shocking still. (Amis' summation of the ultimate effect appears the more worth quoting precisely because the sentiment cannot be published in any publication as desirous of mainstream respectability today--specifically that the whole thing looked to him "like a renewed and more radical bid to take the piss on Bond," and "gross.")

One of my earliest contacts with Gardner, or Bond in print form, for that matter, I must admit that For Special Services was not what I expected from a James Bond book, and not altogether pleasing in its surprises. (In fact, I have to say I was disappointed with the thing, and on revisiting it think there is little to it but its oddities.) And as I can see going over the reviews by professional critics and amateurs on web sites like Amazon alike it is clear that I was not entirely alone in that reaction. Still, I could not help noting that at least to go by its presence there this was the most commercially successful of the Gardner novels, managing an impressive fifteen weeks on the New York Times hardcover list, during which time it rose as high as the sixth rank.

Did the audience approve "the renewed and more radical bid to take the piss?" Or did the readers, picking up one of the first of the new Bond novels because it was a new Bond novel, and perhaps because they had enjoyed some of what Licence Renewed offered, not get the degree to which it was a parody, and perhaps simply feel that "This isn't James Bond"--and not pay much attention when the next book came out, initiating a downward trend in the series' fortunes?

Whichever the case, the series persisted in some of what this particular book did. Like For Special Services the four next Bond novels had Bond battling SPECTRE, or the KGB, and three of them specifically involved those organizations' prosecution of their grudges against Bond for his thwarting their plans or injuring them in some other way going back to their battles in the Fleming-era works. This certainly went for the next book in the sequence, Icebreaker.

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