Review: Scorpius, by John Gardner

From For Special Services to No Deals, Mr. Bond, the John Gardner James Bond novels had 007 continuing his old battle with SPECTRE and SMERSH's successors in the KGB. Afterward he seems to have taken the same path of least resistance, the same one that the Bond films for nearly two decades had been following by this point--seizing on whatever happened to be fashionable in pop culture at the moment.

This time around the novel (like the Bond film then in production, Licence to Kill) has a whiff of '80s Hollywood action-adventure about it. We have Bond, who had increasingly acted like a local policeman than globetrotting secret agent in these adventures, now more like such a policeman than ever--the tale beginning back in London where a body turns up, and not that of an agent but a rich young girl from the sort of Establishment family whose problems could plausibly become a matter of concern for the Service. We have the much-publicized drug problem of the day, and a cult of religious fanatics, and again a connection with international terrorism. (Bond's enemy this time is "The Meek Ones," who, run by a man who may well be a fabulously wealthy arms dealer behind his new persona as "Father Valentine," uses its rehabilitation services for drug addicts to recruit bodies for yet another rent-a-terrorist service, in this case specializing in suicide bombings.) We have Bond pounding a good deal of London pavement, looking into dodgy credit cards, while in an adventure that sees him in London for the first two-thirds, closely tied to the office and to an unusually present M, who could seem like the perpetually harassed and angry police captain of so much cop show cliché, until Bond goes rogue with a special forces veteran determined to save his daughter from the villains. And amidst it all we have Bond dealing with young girls, and coming across as father figure rather than ladies' man (the way he has increasingly seemed to be since his time with Lavender Peacock).

Of course, Gardner endeavors to make more of it than the police story-gone-over-the-top-in-Don-Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer fashion it looks like, in this case through the well-known method of making up for the enemy's smallness by enlarging the bureaucratic hassles at the heroes' backs, such that as all this is happening M is coping with a triennial audit of the Service that will determine its operating budget, and the Service's frictions with the American intelligence operation in-country. Meanwhile, there is a General Election in the background. All of these factor into the adventure in various ways, not least in elevating the stakes (with the Service's future, the relations with "the Cousins," the determination of the country's next government bound up with the fight with the Meek Ones). Still, given the ways in which they factor in--the only ways in which they could factor in given the needs of the Bond franchise--they can make only so much difference. (We are, for example, given to understand that someone wants to swing the General Election and is using the Meek Ones' services to do it, but we are never told who or why--in contrast with the course a non-Bond thriller would have more easily followed of envisioning an authoritarian party looking to grab power by creating a sense of crisis over public safety.)

In the end all this leaves Scorpius an essentially domestic, grounded, low-stakes Bond adventure, the third in a row and more so than its predecessors. However, if Scorpius does in important respects continue in an established path it would in itself be repeated in later Gardner books, while it seems worth remarking that Gardner did some tweaking of the series' two principal characters from book to book, namely Bond and M. Discussing the beliefs of the Meek Ones Bond displays a very slight, general knowledge of comparative religion, induces M to look (gawk?) "with patent disbelief" at 007, something he apparently did "when his agent revealed interests or information outside the normal business of their trade," apart from the well-known ones of "food, wine, women and fast cars."

Both the display of knowledge and the surprise at it strike me as less characteristic of Fleming's vision of Bond than the films' transformation of the character into an omnicompetent superman who speaks every language and handles any machine with ease. (The "first in Oriental languages at Cambridge" Bond casually mentions in the film You Only Live Twice would have been news to Fleming, who pointedly wrote of Bond as absolutely ignorant of Japanese language and culture in the book from which that movie took its title--and so little else.) It strikes me, too, that where this area of human life is concerned it is not wholly accidental that it came into the series while being written by a former priest--just as that former priest's later taking up theater criticism as a career seems the reason why Bond (in spite of Gardner himself later describing Bond as "never . . . much of a theater or moviegoer") became someone who could detect an impostor based on his memory of minor details of long-ago stage performances, or recognize a line from a classic musical and complete it--and, where they had never been much of a presence in Fleming, the visual arts, from the paintings in M's office to plot points in the story like Bond's infiltration of Markus Bismaquer's compound became a noteworthy element of the tales.

It is not the only break from the characters' past tendencies we see here, M himself surprising us--by, at the close of the novel, involving himself in Bond's love life. If the stodgy old Victorian had not been quite perfect in keeping his thoughts to himself before here he suggests Trilby Shrivenham, a recently recovered drug addict and member (and in her having given them her considerable resources, financier!) of the cult Bond battled in the book as a "Good girl for you, James," without it being a joke. Fleming's M may well have preferred to see Bond married rather than womanizing, but he would have not opened his mouth to actually suggest Bond's doing so--and objected to many a possible partner on far slighter grounds than that. Both Bond's propensity for the theater, and M's nudging Bond toward marriage, were to make significant appearances in Gardner's later Bond novels, especially Never Send Flowers, but we would see something of the change much sooner than that, with a softer M revealed as a doting grandfather who, during Christmas at Quarterdeck, "turn[s] into the reformed Scrooge," and wonders to himself if his thinking of Bond so much is not, after all, because he is "the son the old man had always wanted"; while 007 displays quite the memory for the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance when combating high-tech pirates in the next book, Win, Lose or Die.

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