Review: The Man From Barbarossa, by John Gardner

When James Bond first appears in The Man From Barbarossa one gets the impression that Gardner is tilting back away from contemporaneity in the direction of evocations of Fleming--with Bond's long recovery from an exceptionally damaging prior mission (it is implied, the notably punishing adventure in Brokenclaw) leaving him only now getting back to duty, while showing his weariness and age in his distaste for modern life. Bond, we learn, does not much like the Service's computerization of its old files. Still, Gardner, even while continuing in his increasing softening of M's character (the "nautical flavour" is gone from his office now, his paintings of historic naval battles replaced with "uncharacteristically insipid watercolours"), reminds us that even now the old man could still out-cranky Bond any day of the week with his gratuitous "Back in my day" crack about the teaching of history in the schools.

Still, what predominates in the book is its novelty. The title of John Gardner's The Man From Barbarossa evokes one of the greatest crimes in history--the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the opening act of a deliberate, continental-scale series of genocides which murdered tens of millions, and would have killed far more had its architects had their way. And the "Prelude" to the novel goes straight to one of its most notorious episodes, recounting the massacre at Babi Yar, today recalled as the first massacre in what became the Holocaust. Shortly afterward, a previously unknown organization called "The Scales of Justice" claims to have captured one of the principal culprits in the Babi Yar massacre, an elderly man of long residence in the United States whom his accusers claim is a war criminal who has been living under an assumed identity--and whom they mean to put on trial before the world. Not long afterward the reader learns that this is all happening against the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War, which later figures significantly in the plot.

Picking up this book for the first time very early in my acquaintance with Gardner (and for that matter, very early in my acquaintance with Bond in print form) I was doubtful that the use of such subject matter as Babi Yar or the Gulf War in this manner was really appropriate to a Bond novel. The books were packed with Nazis from the start--but the particular Nazi brand of real-life supervillainy was never treated so baldly. Meanwhile, it is worth remembering that Fleming never sent Bond to any of the "savage wars of peace" Britain was fighting in the years when he was writing, 007 never battling the Mau Mau in Kenya or performing a secret mission in Jakarta, for example. And Gardner would seem to have followed his example there, generally avoiding stories depicting Bond having adventures in such contemporaneous real-world conflicts as the 1982 Falklands War, or the Cold War proxy conflicts then being waged across the Third World.1 This was all too weighty, too gritty, for the kind of entertainment the novels were intended to serve up--such that the incorporation of the Gulf War was almost as much as the treatment of Nazi criminality a break with prior tradition (the passing of which should give us pause about how comfortable society as a whole became with ripped-from-the-headlines killing being a "good night at the movies"--and the killing itself).

This appears all the more the case because of the course the story takes, reworking familiar plot structures. Once again we have a mysterious organization renting its services to terrorists in the manner of the revived SPECTRE (and the Meek Ones, and BAST). Once again we have Bond sent to work with the Israelis and Soviets for the sake of stopping a mutual enemy in such terrorists, in which Bond travels to the Soviet Union itself--indeed, particular portions of the Soviet Union we saw him in before during Gardner's time on the series--as a "stalking horse," drawing out the real enemy.

Unsurprisingly it does not quite work, unhelped by Gardner's reuse of the relatively talky approach of Brokenclaw in this subsequent Bond adventure. The intrigue, flawed and limited from the start, is further diminished by the fact that what appeared at the center of things is not just a ruse, but one where the details were quite meaningless as anything but a distraction. Meanwhile a subplot surrounding a Cambridge Five-caliber British defector to the Soviet Union amounts to little. What lies behind the ruse and the distraction does not help either, a pack of Soviet hardliners looking to deal the West nuclear blows they believe will give a declining Soviet Union the breathing space in which to recover its position. As before with Gardner the shallowly treated Soviet functionaries fall short of the really colorful Bondian villainy that made the reader go along with their incoherent schemes. This is all the more the case as the image of nuke-happy Soviets out to inflict damage on the West without thought of the risk to themselves, silly enough in 1955, and 1964, was still less credible in 1991, when so much was in flux, and yet another reminder of the problems of trying to cram a relatively weighty and complex political theme into the framework of a Bond novel, with its slight room for such (a problem that has gone on bedeviling continuation novels ever since). And the perfunctory serving of not terribly original action (once more, Bond has to beat the clock to avert a nuclear attack), just like those Soviet hardliners' attempts to turn back the clock on the Cold War, is too little, too late, to get the job done. All the same, Gardner did manage to squeeze one more tale out of Communist villainy in his next book, Death is Forever, where the premise was, if anything, sillier, but enlivened by rather more robust thriller mechanics.

1. Gardner does mention Bond's involvement in the then-very recent Falklands War in Icebreaker, but this is a passing reference, without details, and certainly of no importance to the plot of that book.

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