Review: Licence Renewed, by John Gardner

John Gardner's Licence Renewed was the first new Bond novel in thirteen years, apart from Christopher Wood's novelizations of the film versions of his two screenplays (The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker). In considering the book it seems well to start with the fact that, in contrast with Amis' intent to perform a "ventriloquist act" in Colonel Sun, Gardner did not aspire to deliver "more Fleming"--and arguably could not have as a serious commercial proposition in the 1980s. While Fleming still had his fans, his heyday was far more remote, and audiences generally far more likely to know Bond from the film series that in the interceding years had continued to fill theaters.

Naturally the task of writing Bond for the '80s was a tricky one, and that may explain the unconventionality of the choice of author. In Gardner Fleming's estate went with a writer who had not just long experience, but could be counted on to approach 007 as other than a doctrinaire fan of the series, and perhaps especially, of Fleming's approach to it. Quite the contrary, they got someone who would approach the figure in a detached, appraising, even ironic, manner (as the Bond films, of course, were doing in those years, when Roger Moore was the star and the film producers went so far as to commission Anthony Burgess and John Landis' notorious scripts).

Where all this is concerned Gardner did not disappoint. He was not inclined to the imitation of Fleming's prose, or his narrative quirks. Gardner not only makes no apparent attempt to "sound" like Fleming, but in contrast with Fleming, and Amis in his "ventriloquist act," eschews "Show don't tell" in favor of straightforward, easy-to-read prose, which is never as smooth as in the best of his own work, or as memorable in regard to the dash he displays in it, but competent enough. In line with this straightforwardness he also eschews Fleming's penchant for lengthy descriptions of upper-class games between Bond and the villain in which the villain will cheat but Bond win anyway.

Gardner also refrained from presenting, as Fleming did, Bond's constant rumination about the "man of war" going to seed between missions in the wake of his work's more brutal episodes, gloom about that brutality, and of course, his profound distaste for the post-war world. In fairness, I suspect that when Fleming wrote this stuff it was not really Fleming being in Bond's head but rather Fleming in his own head, and then writing that up as if it were the stuff in Bond's head--making it tough to imitate. Amis overdid it in his ventriloquist act (when not sticking the stuff in his own head into Bond's), but Gardner elects not to try--wisely, and not solely because of the task of bringing it off, but also because of what it would mean even if he did replicate it convincingly. The old Etonian was in a funk just thinking about the '50s, and if his social class was having its revenge in Thatcher's day in many ways, the post-imperial, post-civil rights revolution, post-counterculture condition of the country was plenty of cause for gloom on his part. The result is that when Gardner tells us Bond's they are apt to be a matter of his trying to figure out some problem he has come up against in the course of his work.

The ever-fewer true Fleming devotees apart, the Bond novels may be more pleasing to most without the originals' sometimes oblique and confusing storytelling, the thirty page card games, the lengthy treatment of Bond's insecurity about whether the man-of-war was going soft and slack and sloppy for being away from war for too long, and the old man gripes about "everything going to hell in a handbasket." Still, in the end it means that not only does Gardner's writing not have the Fleming "feel," but that much has been elided from the presentation--without replacement. The result is a Bond who is not just less distinctively Fleming's Bond, but a less fully realized figure than before by any standard, as the adventures become more generic stuff that simply happens to bear the James Bond brand and a few associated trappings. As Amis was to remark of Gardner's handling of the character when reviewing one of his books, "M Calls him 007. Nobody else does, though"--and if Amis had in mind the disbanding of the double-o section and the government's revoking licenses to kill and all, Amis did not seem to refer to only that. When Amis remarked the "lack of the slightest human interest" in Gardner's Bond books, he followed this up with the observation that "to do anything like that the writer must be genuinely interested in his material," all too alert to the reality that where Fleming was deeply invested in the figure, as only a writer identifying with his protagonist could be (while Amis may be said to have put something of himself into the figure too), Gardner retained his distance, which did indeed seem a prerequisite for trying to make Bond seem contemporary. Gardner's aloofness from Bond's thoughts helps in skirting the extreme inconsistency of the creation with what came before. Fleming made clear in Moonraker that Bond was thirty-three then (1955), which would have left him pushing sixty at the time of this novel--an obviously problematic fact, especially in that era before septuagenarian action heroes became all the rage. (The sole acknowledgment of the passage of the years is actually just "minute flecks of gray . . . in the dark hair," while not much more is said of the actual stuff of the days before the gray appeared, not a single mention of SPECTRE or Blofeld appearing in the entire text, for instance.)

The distance also helps in his attempting to portray a less self-indulgent Bond, drinking "drastically" less, smoking low-tar cigarettes, and rather than carrying on affairs with three different married women, having just one presumably not otherwise attached "girlfriend of long standing," his weekend with whom he has to call off when an assignment comes up. Bond has an after-hours meeting with Q Branch second-in-command Ann Reilly (aka Q'ute), but just where the reader might have thought it would end in intimacy, it turns out Reilly was quite deliberately pulling Bond's leg, after which she subjects him to a feminist lecture about "outdated" male fantasy, and all he gets is coffee and conversation. (The James Bond Fleming created would not have taken either the tease, or the lecture, gracefully, and Gardner's approach allows him to elide what the James Bond we know would really have been thinking in that situation--and not for the last time.) In the course of the subsequent adventure Bond does meet two "girls," but that does not work out quite the way the reader might expect either. Mary-Jane Mishkin's attempted seduction is less than to Bond's taste, while Lavender Peacock, in spite of being "twenty-seven next year," can seem more like an extremely sheltered seventeen, so much so that Bond's relations with her generally appear more paternal than amorous. (One can easily miss the hint--only a hint--that their trip to the French Riviera when the battle is over with entailed anything more. And indeed, after my first read of the book I forgot all about it until I revisited it for the sake of this discussion.) One might add that any suggestion of interest in gambling on Bond's part is limited to the mention of the titles of books in his personal library--and actually mentioned more prominently as part of the background of the dissolute ex-Royal Army mercenary he pretends to be when trying to get close to the villain.

In its more health-conscious, less promiscuous, generally less vice-ridden 007 the book was much more of the '80s--but, again, much less of the "tough, fast, basically dirty" Bond we all know. Moreover, while it is the case that, as these details demonstrate, Gardner does take some care in this novel to present something of the little details of Bond's habits and tastes and preferences, they make less impression than Fleming's notorious heaviness on the minutiae of such matters, the more inasmuch as the references we do hear of them, like the matter of the cigarettes, are there to let us know that he has changed--again, mainly because contemporary attitudes demand it rather than because Gardner has laid any psychological groundwork for it. (Take, for example, Bond's having a "girlfriend of long standing." As we have been previously given to understand, Bond was strongly inclined to physical, emotionally delimited relationships in a way that was not mere habit but reflected quite deeply seated aspects of his character--hence the taste for married women. What changed in the meantime? Gardner says nothing of that.)

Likewise reflecting the emphasis on contemporaneity is the action-adventure side of the narrative, which is equally of 1981, with Gardner linking Bond to a more contemporary version of British action heroics in Gardner having Bond regularly undertaking training with the Special Air Service (an old unit, but which had only recently come to wide public attention due to its televised and widely watched assault on the Iranian embassy that year), a detail Gardner was to repeatedly reference in subsequent books, sometimes in quite significant ways. He links him to more contemporary villainy, too, Bond now fighting international terrorism of the sort so much in the headlines then, and specifically a conspiracy of such terrorists targeting nuclear power installations--in a plot executed by Carlos the Jackal stand-in, "Franco." Of course, nuclear power plots were "the thing" then, with The China Syndrome (1979) hitting theaters mere days before the Three Mile Island incident, with all that spelled for public concern with the subject. (Indeed, the book mentions the film at least four times, with Bond remarking his having seen it, by way of helping explain that its scenario of reactor cores growing so hot they melt through the Earth's crust and pass through the planet and come out the other side creating untold disaster is exactly the danger with which Murik is threatening the world.) Carlos the Jackal, too, was popular subject matter. (The year before Licence Renewed Ludlum had the top-selling novel of the year and the biggest success of his career with The Bourne Identity, where his hero Jason Bourne also did battle with Carlos the Jackal himself. The same year Licence came out Sylvester Stallone did battle with another obvious Carlos stand-in, "Wulfgar," in Nighthawks.) Likewise the concern with Bond's new car getting good mileage or being able to use natural gas "if the fuel situation became even more critical," and the fact that in buying that new car Bond did not "buy British" (while patriotic readers are expected to take some solace in the thought that their manufacturing industry had not yet gone totally down the tubes, Bond's Swedish Saab 900 getting its extras courtesy of "British know-how")scream "1981," rather than "James Bond."

Indeed, if Amis tried too hard to make us feel that his James Bond novel really was a James Bond novel just like Fleming used to make 'em, Gardner seems to be going all out to drag Bond into the '80s. Moreover, what classically Bondian material Gardner makes use of, he tends to use parodically, with this going for the villain's plot as much as bits like Ann Reilly's stunt back at her place. Murik regards the world's current generation of nuclear reactors as China Syndrome-type threats, his own quacky design for a new reactor (complete with the patent medicine-like name of Murik's Ultra-Safe Nuclear Reactor) as a solution to the problem, and means to blackmail the world into giving him the money to build it and thus save the world by . . . threatening a half dozen of the very meltdowns he is warning against in five different countries, and devastating much of the globe in the process. Meanwhile the abundance of old-fashioned Gothic touches--Murik's residence in a castle where a beautiful young woman is held prisoner, the usurpation of a girl's fortune and title by an unscrupulous and murderous guardian, the questions about the true origins of the master of this domain--which are just as out of place as anything else here, contribute to the impression that we are not to take all this too seriously. It may also not be irrelevant that Bond's mission this time around begins with this once world-traveling hero going to faraway . . . Scotland (MI 6 is on MI 5's turf, MI 6 having largely lost its turf at this point in Britain's imperial decline), and only following his capture does Bond find himself abroad.

The result is that it seems the more remarkable that Gardner handles what he derives from the films straightforwardly--the whole Q Branch aspect, and in particular the special modifications to Bond's new car, and two of the book's action sequences (a car chase modeled on the one in Goldfinger, a foot chase recalling the Junkanoo sequence in Thunderball), and handles them quite well. (When he wants to Gardner can write a very solid action scene, which may have been another of his qualifications for the job.) Indeed, if the book could by turns seem generic, parodic--or in the last case, derivative--I have to say that I found the pacing and the action robust, culminating in an eminently suitable airborne climax that was actually to anticipate that of a later Bond film (2002's Die Another Day). I also grant that if the bad guy this time could seem laughable in his incoherence, he certainly had presence, and stuck in the imagination afterward. Altogether this made for an entertaining action thriller about a gadget-packing secret agent, but it was less distinguished as a Bond novel specifically, and I do not seem to have been alone in having thought so given the sharp change of the series' course with Gardner's next James Bond novel, For Special Services.

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