Review: SeaFire, by John Gardner

Compared with its particularly odd predecessor SeaFire can seem a return to form for the series, Bond once again up against a billionaire of dubious origin and dubious business practices who will shortly be revealed as an utter madman in an adventure which will have considerably more opportunity for jet-setting, chases, gunplay as we zip from London to Seville, from Munich to Puerto Rico, with a range of toys extending to an old World War II U-boat coming into play. (We even see--very rare for a Gardner Bond novel--Felix Leiter show up in an evocation of the old days.)

Yet there is also some fairly dramatic rupture to go along with the continuity. It was predictable that Bond's cooperating with Fredericka von Grusse in Never Send Flowers would eventually lead to her becoming more than just "his friend Flicka." What was less predictable was that she would get booted from her old job, and that M would give her a new one with Bond's own service, while cohabiting with Bond in a relationship that continues with them partners on and off the job. (Indeed, Gardner tells us that Bond himself was "astounded" at M's "out of character" acceptance of this foreign woman within his unit, and at least as much so, her "living in sin" with the agent on whom he so relied but whose antics he had so often deplored.)

At all this Gardner's Bond wondered if M was not "desperately trying to keep in step with the times," but it seems a safer bet that this is the series, not M, keeping in step with the times, not least in its depicting Bond in what the author seems at pains to persuade us is Bond's "entirely novel experience" with Flicka, unlike what he had before even with Tracy--"a deeper commitment," a "more mature understanding" which "had little to do with sex" and more with "[t]wo people blending together as one," with all this having its effect on Bond's "mode of life" more broadly. (The spendthrift gambler and mass adulterer Fleming described in Moonraker hardly seems even a memory anymore, with Bond to be found in the evenings not at the gambling table at some latterday Crockford's, but rather sitting on the couch in his apartment with Flicka watching some old movie--about which Gardner is so emphatic as to contradict himself, telling us that Bond was never much of a film or theatergoer before, in spite of Gardner having made him a veritable encyclopedia of theater trivia in the past books, including the adventure with Flicka immediately preceding this one.)

Similarly "mature," one supposes, is Bond becoming ever more the bureaucrat, with the old super-operative in the field now put in charge of a sort of resurrection of the old "Double O" section, the "Two Zeroes"--just one small part of a reorganization of the Service that has more than a little to do with the expectation of the post-Cold War as seeing secret agents more concerned with organized crime and small-fry terrorist groups than the old geopolitics. Indeed, Gardner, who is quite aware of what a comedown all that can seem for the international men of mystery (which had Flicka being sent to courses on "such relatively dull subjects as Accountancy"), nonetheless displays some relish for working out the associated minutiae, detailing it in the expository passages, and incorporating it into the adventure, with Bond not simply coming in to the office to get a quick word from M and then going off and doing his thing, but working out the next move, which is not just his own next move, in conference with other senior staff of the Security State (all to surprisingly little griping from Bond, compared to what anyone who remembers Fleming might expect).

The resulting concoction is not without its good points. The adventure is decently paced, avoiding dull stretches in spite of the concessions to a fuller portrait of Bond the Bureaucrat, and if much of the action is mostly standard stuff, it works, with Gardner showing some flair in the finale. Still, after all of the times when Gardner, despite acknowledging Bond's lone wolf nature, put him in a group anyway, I have to admit it still jarred. And the mechanics of the plot suffer by comparison with Gardner's prior work. Max Tarn and his scheme, if in respects timely in those years of German "reunification" and a resurgent far right, was a bit on the derivative side--another would-be Hitler, and a less successful creation as such than Icebreaker's Von Gloda, while also carrying with him some of the less than compelling elements of '80s terrorism-entrepreneurs like Win, Lose or Die's Baradj and the ecological wackiness of Licence Renewed's Murik. (Indeed, astonishing as it may sound, Murik's plan was, if clearly the more reckless and destructive, less totally incoherent, given that it came down to pure and simple blackmail, however lunatic the purpose or vile the means. By contrast Tarn's plan had him staging an oil spill at sea just so he could demonstrate a new technology for cleaning up spills, which did not actually exist, that would confirm his stature as some sort of political messiah, enabling him to become the new Fuhrer of reunified Germany--or something like that.)

I also have to admit that I found Bond's relationship with Flicka a bigger problem. I have to admit to not being a fan of the kind of smugly wisecracking crime-fighting duo for which Gardner was clearly going with them, while given how it ends up--all too predictably--it was not clear what the point of writing such a duo was here, really. Was it so important to show Bond in a "mature" relationship, however briefly, in the name of assuring the readers who care about such things that he is no longer the old 007? If so then it seems the sort of thing calling into question the point of anyone's continuing to write James Bond novels at all. But of course it was not the last such effort, Gardner confirming the other impression he gave of laying the groundwork for further adventures (surely he didn't expect us to learn all that stuff about MicroGlobe One and such for a mere one book?) by producing one more Bond novel--Cold Fall.

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