Gardner's third book, Icebreaker, seems to me to split the difference between the two approaches, with this evident, first and foremost, on the level of the mission. Yes, Bond is battling international terrorists, but he also has to contend with his old Soviet enemies, who have not got over their old grudge against him--shades of From Russia, With Love, the more significant as we are given to understand SMERSH is alive and well as Department V of the KGB. (Indeed, in this adventure Bond finds himself up against not one, but two, sets of enemies.) There are concessions to the expectations raised by the films, like Bond's arrival in Finland early on where, en route to Arctic training with the SAS, he meets a lady acquaintance for what he hopes will be a pleasurable evening but gets attacked by assassins--though the encounter proves a less casual, tacked-on thing than one might expect from those precedents, and not only in Gardner's taking pains to show the lady in question is not just a "good time." Where packing the book with action is concerned, Icebreaker also falls about midway between its two predecessors, peppered with reasonably varied and sometimes engaging bits (a snowmobile ride through a minefield, a Soviet air strike on an arms cache), making for a more satisfying "thrill ride" than For Special Services, but never quite kicking into high gear the way Licence Renewed did.
Still, an attempt to balance the old with the new is not the only way in which Gardner strove to cope with some shopworn material, the author also endeavoring to offer a twist on other, familiar elements, starting with the assignment Bond is initially given, battling Count Von Gloda's "National Socialist Action Army" (NSAA) staging terrorist strikes around the world in the hopes of creating a Fourth Reich. Where so much of the attention given to that subject, in fiction as elsewhere, focused on left-wing groups (like the Baader-Meinhof gang, or the Japanese Red Army), the NSAA is an undeniably right-wing group--with that inversion capped off by the opening incident, for where in these years Libya was conventionally regarded by Western observers as the font of international terrorism, here Libya is a victim, the NSAA staging an attack on an international conference being held in Tripoli. There is, too, a concern for "the enemy within" on the part of the Western members of the alliance, the more significant because if it was always Communists and their agents that Bond was facing across the Empire and on the soil of its allies, here it was the potential of an ultra-rightist mass movement in the heartland of the West itself for which the NSAA plans to pave the way by practicing terrorism on a far vaster scale than the familiar groups (where they had perhaps dozens of fighters, Von Gloda intends to have thousands in action around the world). Moreover, the Nazi Von Gloda is pointedly not a German, but a Finn, with Finnish involvement in the German side on World War II (a comparatively unremembered and unexplored aspect of the conflict) an important plot point, setting up as it does an Arctic adventure which will cross over into northernmost Russia. One might add that in pursuing his agenda Von Gloda has Soviet friends, and if the relationship between the two parties may not seem wholly plausible, each of them is using the other in a relationship rather better thought-out than old Drax's turning to Moscow (and which does succeed in extending the basis for the book's intrigue).
Surprising, too, is the way in which Bond is intended to go about his task, participating in a joint British, American, Israeli and Soviet team battling their mutual enemy, with the knowledge that at least one of the others on the team is a traitor. After all, Bond has always been a thoroughly individualistic figure, and Gardner actually owns as much in his narration, remarking that while Bond "from time to time . . . worked in conjunction with another member of . . . his own, or a sister service" he "was not a team man," but was "forced to act with a team" here--an experience such that when he is no longer forced to do so "Bond felt confidence leap back into his system--a loner again."
Of course, as it turns out, Bond's impression that he was on his own again is a matter of his being taken in by an illusion, part of a pattern with narrative consequences meriting some remark. This time around Bond does not so much get to the bottom of things as get pointed this way and that by the rogue's gallery of traitors with which he is surrounded, a pattern continuing through his being led into a trap, capture, torture (and released from said torture and imminent death) Casino Royale-style, though even after that point there is more betrayal ahead of him. Indeed, a surprisingly large part of the second half of the book consists of his listening to other characters explain their agendas--and when Bond finally does get to act on his own initiative, taking down the villain, one can imagine him being relieved to finally, really, break with the passivity that characterized the story up to this point (by which time it is almost over, all as his accumulated physical injuries leave Bond in need of a good, long rest).
As a thriller it works well enough, but it feels un-Bondian, with the same going for the heavy emphasis on the Arctic component of the story. A creature of luxury hotels and casinos and the like, normally Bond only occasionally pops outside the city to scout something, and to appear in the sorts of action sequences that can only happen in those other milieus, like frogman fights and ski chases before returning to his usual plush accommodations. Seeing him battle the indifferent elements for survival, rather than those elements simply being colorful backdrops to Bond's battles with human beings consciously set on destroying him, is by no means dull, but, like seeing Bond have to be part of a team, still feels rather un-Bondian. The use of the setting comes off as less memorable than in other, contemporaneous thrillers of this type. (Craig Thomas, much given to it, used it in both 1981's Sea Leopard and 1982's Firefox Down, and the portrayal was more vivid and the effect more visceral in both those cases.) The functionaries of the KGB's Department V, as simultaneously gray and brutal Cold War clichés none too memorable in themselves, have an organizational grudge against Bond rather than a personal one, and it also comes off as less interesting than SPECTRE's vendetta against him in the preceding book. And perhaps after having overdone it the last time, Gardner keeps his parodic inclinations, which so often lent some distinction to a Bond book even when they could be charged with being mere "blundering," as Amis put it, were absent here, limited to an occasional quip. (Even if playing his material "straight" for the most part, Gardner cannot resist having one of his Nazis utter that famous World War II movie cliché, "For you the war is over.") The result is, alas, a readable enough book, but one of Bond's less memorable adventures, especially considered as a Bond adventure.
For the full listing of the James Bond continuation novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog), click here.
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