Review: Zero Minus Ten, by Raymond Benson

With the choice of Raymond Benson as John Gardner's successor the overseers of the James Bond continuation novels shifted course. Rather than a prominent literary figure who had had a rare chance to work with Fleming (not so easy a thing to find in the '90s), or an old hand at spy fiction who could be counted on to approach the work with a detachment and sense of irony that gave him a relatively free hand in updating and innovating (if with not always pleasing result), they picked a writer who, if undeniably a fan (a Vice-President of the American James Bond 007 Fan Club, in fact), had previously been known for work on games rather than novels.

Again one can see in this a recognition of changing times, as other media changed what people expected from their fiction. As Benson himself was to acknowledge in an interview, he did not write like Fleming, and did not try--Fleming's obliquely literary approach unsalable in a market demanding easier-to-read fiction. One might add that between the endurance of the Bond films' ability to generate hits at the box office (freshly reconfirmed with 1995's GoldenEye), the remoteness of that day and that market in which Fleming met with such success, the softening market for spy fiction generally and the Bond novels particularly, this series that had originated as novels was now being produced for a market coming to James Bond with cinematically-defined expectations. The result was that one could picture the continuation novels being received less as sequels to the now-unmarketable originals, but rather "tie-ins" to the films now at the heart of the franchise.

So did it go with Benson. By comparison with Amis, who defined his Bond adventure in opposition to the gadget-packed movies of the '60s, and Gardner, who may have been willing to go cinematic here and there but did not make a default mode of it, Benson's books were from the first intended to appeal to an audience accustomed to the movies, and the movies of the late '90s at that, as Zero Minus Ten demonstrates, down to its cast of characters. Not only does M happen to be a woman, as had become the case at the end of Gardner's last, but at least in her clipped speech and overt disdain for some of the better-known aspects of Bond's character "as a feminist," strongly calls to mind the conception GoldenEye presented. Reading the scene of Bond's visit to Q Branch--the banter between a flippant Bond and an irascible Major Boothroyd who regards him as irresponsible with the equipment he provides--I found it impossible not to hear the voices of Pierce Brosnan and Desmond Llewellyn speaking the dialogue on the page as I read it. (Benson's Q actually says "Now pay attention 007.") The tendency to give the reader the Bond of the films rather than of Fleming's books is similarly evident in the writing itself. Even more than Gardner he goes for straightforward storytelling, while taking a minimum of interest in the minutiae of Bond's daily life, or Bond's propensity to ruminate. He was also more inclined than Gardner to write the Bond girls in cinematic fashion (with Sunny Pei coming across as the "Bond girliest" Bond girl the novels had presented in a long time).

Still, Benson is a Bond fan whose affection for the series extends beyond the movies to the books, and if his writing often feels like a Pierce Brosnan-era Bond movie on paper, there is plenty of Fleming as well in this first go. There is something of Fleming's Live and Let Die in the mixing of Bond up with foreign gangsters in a great foreign metropolis and getting caught up with their women; and something of "Risico" too in the task Bond agrees to perform on behalf of one of them against his enemies. There is also something of Casino Royale, and other Bond novels, in two bits left out of the pre-reboot films that were all that existed in Benson's day, namely an extended account of Bond's playing a game with the enemy (mahjongg), and Bond's enduring a bout of torture (in this case a caning, a practice which had then been recently drawn to wide public attention in the English-speaking world by the arrest of Michael Fay in Singapore). It might be added that while the pace is brisk and the action plentiful, the adventure is relatively grounded, rarely going over the top in the manner of Bond's screen adventures (or the way Benson's novels would soon be doing). The acknowledgment of what came before is also present in Bond's physical appearance. The minute flecks of gray Gardner noted in Licence Renewed are now grayness at the temples--fudging the chronology (in 1997 Fleming's Bond would have been seventy-nine years old), but not altogether denying that Bond is getting older.1

As all of this suggests Benson's first book can seem a concoction of familiar ingredients, some of which I, for one, found more welcome than others. (As no fan of the long accounts of games and long torture scenes, I could have done without the long mahjongg game and the caning--and generally thought things worked best here when Benson was in his more cinematic mode.) However, it does have some more original elements. The most obvious is the extent to which the plot is tied to a contemporary event--the real-life handover of Hong Kong back to China (something Gardner only tried once, in quite a different way, in The Man From Barbarossa).2 While this seems rather obviously an attempt to make the old series' new book appear topical it is connected with something more substantial, namely the book's treatment of the politics of Empire. It was the Opium Wars that established British dominion over Hong Kong--a fact given some attention here. The return of the Crown Colony to China is, in fact, treated as the righting of a wrong, in spite of Bond's distaste for the current form of the mainland government, while the villain is a British colonial furious over the event--the bad guy, a man angry over the end of Empire--and Bond's task to stop him. Subsequently in Australia Bond has occasion to remember the mistreatment of the Aborigines, who end up saving his life. It is a remarkable inversion of the attitude to the Empire with which Fleming began, when anger and bitterness over the Empire's decline, unashamed exploitation of the rest of what remained (as with African diamonds in Diamonds Are Forever), and defensiveness about Britain still having "what it takes" in spite of these losses, are the prevailing notes.

I did not get the impression that this was meant to be subversive of the franchise--certainly it did not have Bond reconsidering the interests he has been defending all his adult life--but even so it had me thinking again about how much the series belongs to another time.

As it happened, while the plots of Benson's Bond novels were to raise the resentments over the imperial past time and again in his work--in Bond's adventure on Cyprus in The Facts of Death, in the reference to the longstanding disagreement between Britain and Spain over Gibraltar in DoubleShot--Benson never raised such matters so squarely again.

1. The calculation is based on Bond having been specifically identified as eight years from the double-O section's mandatory retirement age of forty-five in Moonraker, which was published in 1955 (and gave us no reason to think it was set earlier or later than the date of publication), implying that Bond was born in 1918.
2. Of course, Gardner, too, referenced that return--in his own Bond thriller, No Deals, Mr. Bond.

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

Review: Cold Fall, by John Gardner

After SeaFire there was another year without an original Bond novel (John Gardner published the novelization of the year's Bond film, GoldenEye instead), following which the next, and final, Gardner Bond novel appeared in 1996, Cold Fall (also published under the alternative title of COLD). In it those who may, in light of the prior book's close, have expected to see the book pick right up where the last novel left off got something different, Gardner going for a previously untried two-part structure, with "Book One" detailing a previously unmentioned episode of Bond's life from many years earlier before, and then in "Book Two," rejoining the "present" to pick up the thread of the narrative from SeaFire's conclusion.

The opening of Book One, and the novel, has a whiff of terrorism and techno-thriller about it, with the destruction of an airliner on the runway at Dulles International by an unknown bomber and Bond, following an uncharacteristic display of forensic acumen, sent off to join the investigative team, whose efforts quickly link back to the events of an even earlier book than SeaFire or Never Send Flowers, Nobody Lives Forever, with Sukie Tempesta reemerging--and, as Bond finds when walking right into an FBI investigation of the Tempesta family driven by the fact that Sukie and her family are not who he thought they were. In contrast with the picture of respectability Sukie painted for him in the prior book the Tempestas turn out to have actually been an aristocratic Roman answer to the Sicilian Mafia who have graduated from ordinary criminality to supervillainy through involvement with an American compound of militia and (yet another) millennial cult. (The Cold--or COLD--of the title derives from the acronym shortening the cult's full name, the "Children of the Last Days.") And Bond winds up being asked to help the investigators out by trading on his connection with Sukie to infiltrate the family.

After detailing that adventure Cold Fall cuts back to where Gardner's last book left Bond. While I took it as a given that Flicka was dead at the end of the last book she was, in fact, still fighting for her life when Cold Fall returned to that point in the timeline (even if the prognosis is very grim, with the doctor telling Bond her chances of making it at all are less than even, and survival likely to mean being a cripple for the rest of her life). Indeed, Bond is struggling with the situation just as he finds himself involved again with COLD and the Tempesta family, on the verge of making their big play for power (while M is on the verge of ceding his, the decision already made to retire the longtime chief of the organization).

As all this suggests the book is yet another mass of comparative oddities from the standpoint of the series, both structurally and in the elements of which it is composed. In cases this appears to be compensation for the prior books' light servings of action, not least in the jet ski chase and helicopter battle in Book One. In others it appears a matter of trying to present something different (not least, in having the Bond girl of a prior book revealed as actually having been a world-threatening supervillainness all along).

Some of the resulting twists have their interest. If Bond's coming to America's rescue had been a theme of the series from the first, his saving it not from Communists and other foreign menaces, or even "internal foreigners" like ethnic gangsters, but a purportedly "all-American" type like the lunatic General Brutus Clay is a noteworthy variation. When it comes to "big action" the novel serves up a good deal more of that than anything the Gardner Bond novels had offered since at least Win, Lose or Die. And as is so often the case, Gardner is not just well aware of the incongruity, but does not hesitate to make a joke of it, which for those willing to go along with the humorous approach helps. (Thus we see Bond in a restaurant in Idaho full of cowboy hat and cowboy boot-wearing servers and patrons craving a vodka martini, but "common sense" telling him "that just might be considered a girl's drink around here," and settling for a bottle of Red Dog beer instead--while still raising eyebrows by accepting the offer of a glass to go with the bottle. And that was, of course, nothing next to how wrong he proved to be about Sukie!) Moreover, there is the place of the book in the series--the way in which it seems to, with the end of Bond's involvement with Flicka, and in a way the loss of the father figure to him that M had been, round off the transition so clearly underway in Never Send Flowers.

Still, the result has definite limitations. Again, if the new theme has its interest (the threat posed by the Clays of the world) a Bond novel is a less than ideal place to explore it, and unsurprisingly their form of villainy remains thinly sketched to the end. (COLD and company are obsessed with "toughness" on drugs and crime, with isolationism, with "strong leadership," but its concerns fall short of quite cohering, with the same going for its particular ambitions for a takeover of the U.S..) Indeed, their plans for taking the country over are as sketchy as their ideology. (They plan a wave of bombings that will be blamed on "terrorists" and presumably have "the country demanding leadership," but it is far from clear just why anyone should turn to this obscure group of fanatics for that "leadership.") The action scenes, while technically well written, seemed to me less energetic than they ought to have been--an impression I had not just the first time I picked up the book (at the time of its release), but many years later when revisiting it for my research. And altogether the novelty, the twists--the unsubtle cramming of two stories into one to produce a book-length narrative--can seem more indicative of strain than of vibrancy. Indeed, considering Gardner's last novels, and this one most of all, I find myself thinking of the pure and simple fact that (by his own admission) he had spent a decade and a half working on a series he had never much liked, and had probably stuck with for longer than he should have.

After all, if Gardner's work on the Bond series never compared with his very good best on his own projects--his Boysie Oakes novels, his Moriarty novels--he was still a skilled storyteller with a knack for action, a sense of humor, and a readiness to try something different (in itself a virtue, even though this was a place where it often did not work out), which even in this series let him wring some interest out of the shaky premises available to him (maybe more than we had any right to expect). Still, it is a reminder that novel-writing is not a thing done well for very long when taken up unenthusiastically, even by a genuinely talented and experienced author. It is a reminder, too, that by the '80s, let alone the '90s, updating the adventures of a '50s-era hero who was himself an update of adventures that in the '50s were already as old and tired as Bond was to be at century's end was an increasingly difficult task, one reason why Gardner's successors so often took different paths.

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

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.

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.

Review: No Deals, Mr. Bond, by John Gardner

The use of sex by the East Bloc to exploit Westerners with access to sensitive information during the Cold War era is notorious. One of the more famous such episodes was a KGB-Stasi operation systematically using East German "Romeos" to target "lonely secretaries" on the other side of the Berlin Wall.

Rather less is said of the West employing such tactics. The premise of No Deals, Mr. Bond, however, is that stuffy old M authorized just such an operation in retaliation for the Romeos' campaign, code named "Cream Cake"--with --the resulting mess front and center. When the personnel carrying on with the operation behind the Iron Curtain became endangered M had them evacuated, sending James Bond in a Royal Navy submarine to get them out, then resettle them in Britain, after which they begin to lead something like normal lives. However, five years later those agents start turning up dead and mutilated--murdered in what the British press sensationalizes as the work of a serial killer. M knows better, but is officially able to do nothing. Still, he knows that telling Bond what is going on he can count on his agent to "take some leave" and see to what needs doing--rounding up the Cream Cake operatives for their own protection, and for the sake of drawing out the Soviet hit team responsible for the killings, and indeed that is exactly the course that they follow. Naturally this turns out to be only part of something bigger . . .

The result is a game of genuine Cold War spy vs. spy of the kind that was actually far rarer for the Bond novels than those with just a casual knowledge of the franchise realize, though not so memorable in the result as might be hoped given the fact. Returning to the novel years after I first read it I recalled little between Bond's getting his mission, and the last act in Hong Kong. The mechanics are competent enough, but not much more than that--a few bits of violence, a couple of plot twists. The course of events does get more colorful when 007 reaches the old Crown Colony, where events are enlivened by the reemergence of the old grudge really behind it all, and the over-the-top twistedness of the villain, not least in the bad-guy-makes-a-game-of-finishing-the-hero melodramatics (bound up in this case with risibly over-the-top Western fantasy of how insanely brutal, how spendthrift with human life, Soviet standard practice can be).

Still, even General Konstantin Chernov's heavy and often theatrical presence did not suffice to make him an exception to the pattern of Gardner's Soviet villains making little impression as characters, while as a tale of Bond on his own and on the run and surrounded by treachery, it is less striking than the similarly bounty-on-Bond's-head-themed prior book, Nobody Lives Forever. (Moreover, if Tamil Rahani fell flat for me as a villain, there was at least something more in his determination to get Bond than, again, SMERSH's longstanding institutional grudge against him here.)

Indeed, what stuck out in my memory were the more marginal touches, often interesting in a time capsule-like way. There was the element of Tom Clancy techno-thriller in the opening chapter depicting Bond's evacuation of the Cream Cake operatives. (Interestingly Gardner's book beat Tom Clancy to the punch by a year, that other author in 1988 writing a submarine evacuation from behind the Iron Curtain as his introduction of his true series field operative--John Clark--in The Cardinal of the Kremlin.)

There was Bond's first visit to Blades since Moonraker, again to take a personal request from M, and the interest of the changes that had taken place there since the prior visit. If still thoroughly elite, it is somewhat more cosmopolitan than before, catering to a thoroughly internationalized guest list. (With Japanese businessmen to be seen at the gaming tables, not only the "un-English" but the un-Caucasian and un-Western no longer draw notice--in which can seem a hint of what was just getting underway then, the resurrection of London as a financial center-cum-haven for the global rich after Thatcher.)

There was the fact that M is seen countenancing an operation like Cream Cake, the old Victorian talking about it in front of us (if not without embarrassment), and the audience presumably accepting that it was not just the bad guys who did this stuff, but the good guys too. Ruthless as M could be this sort of seedy, dirty business is still not what we usually get from him, while I wonder if it was not also a slap at those who wanted more sex in the books by reminding them how sad and shabby the mix of espionage with sex has typically been in real life. (Indeed, Gardner had not been above mocking the portion of the audience that remembered the Bond novels being "dirty books" and complained that he had been less than up to snuff here--though, alas, Gardner keeps his satirical inclinations in check here, perhaps unfortunately.)

And there was the choice of setting for the final act of the story, Hong Kong, making for perhaps the most memorable travelogue to be found in any of the Gardner Bond novels, with his accounts of Bond's airliner making the famously harrowing descent to the runway at Kai Tak, the ultramodernity of Hong Kong's Connaught Road, and the lingering presences of the old city with which it was such a contrast, all against the backdrop of the looming return to China with its freight of end-of-Empire symbolism. (Virtually Britain's last remaining piece of "the East," this was now going too, and to "the Communists" at that, but looking at "the street hawkers . . . now selling green caps emblazoned with the red star" of the incoming government along with their other "tourist junk" Bond's attitude is merely ironic, something it most certainly would not have been were Fleming, or Amis, writing it.)

Given that this book was the last to see Bond battling his original enemy SMERSH in the old way it seems natural to wonder if Gardner meant for it to be that. I do not know that he ever said anything about that, but I can say that nothing in the story rules out another battle, even with General Chernov, who clearly lives, perhaps to fight another day. And looking back at the book from later it is worth acknowledging that like most writers of espionage thrillers Gardner held onto the Soviet Union as a source of villainy to and even after its formal dissolution. (Gardner's 1991 The Man From Barbarossa envisioned an attempt by Soviet hardliners to reverse the tide of reform, and even after the Soviet Union was gone, 1992's Death is Forever saw Communist die-hards hoping to win the game for "their side" in the end.) Still, when No Deals came out the world was already well into Mikhail Gorbachev's tenure, and its policies of "glasnost" and "perestroika," and while it was far from clear the geopolitical-ideological contest between East and West would be transformed as thoroughly and quickly as it was, one may imagine that Gardner suspected it was time to try out other subject matter--picking a very different enemy for Bond's next battle in 1988's Scorpius.

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

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.

Review: For Special Services, by John Gardner

John Gardner's Licence Renewed was not always serious, but it was often serious enough about updating the character of James Bond and his adventures, to the point of nearly effacing the series' identity. It is not unreasonable to expect that For Special Services would represent the same tendency, and indeed at a glance it looks as if that is the direction in which it is going. Thus do we have a plot revolving around the military arms race in space just a year before Ronald Reagan was to announce the Strategic Defense Initiative, and in these years when Dallas was a pop cultural phenomenon, Texan lucre setting the stage for events.

Yet one does not have to look very deeply past such trappings to see how Gardner shifted gears, striving heavily to affirm the identity of this Bond novel as a Bond novel through a heavy reliance on the material of Fleming himself. Thus we have not just the evocation of Moonraker's Hugo Drax in a flamboyant multimillionaire half-German Nazi living as a citizen of the country he is targeting, who will in spite of those Nazi affinities have truck with the Soviets and take an interest in the strategic arms race which will deal a great blow to the West; we also have the resurrection of Bond's most storied adversary, SPECTRE, with a new member of the Blofeld family at the head of the organization, once again exploiting the Cold War for power and profit, while aspiring to the exaction of personal revenge on 007 himself.

Indeed, Drax the Second and the Heiress of Blofeld are literally married as Markus and Nena Bismaquer.

Meanwhile, as in Goldfinger the villains plan a raid on a highly guarded, sensitive American government installation in the continental United States to seize a key national asset for transfer to the Soviets in an act that would tip the balance of power their way, with the plan dependent on disabling the potential opposition to the heist chemically--while what ultimately defeats the plot is one of the villains, won over to Bond's side, betraying the rest of the gang. There is something of Bond's impersonation of Sir Hilary Bray in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, too, in Bond's assuming the cover of art expert "Professor Penbrunner" when he goes to visit the home of a wealthy suspect indulging interests such as only the rich can (rare prints rather than heraldry in this case).

As if all this were not enough, For Special Services is replete with references to earlier adventures of exactly the kind the prior book eschewed. In the early, pre-mission chapter where Bond beds Ann Reilly (in itself suggestive of a shift of the series back from Ann's only pranking Bond with the prospect of sex in a more classical direction), Bond thinks repeatedly of his late wife Tracy, and then of just about all the other women he has been with in the past, running through a good many of the names right down to his "latest conquest," Lavender Peacock (just in case we forgot their relations had ever been carnal, as was only too easily the case). Shortly afterward Bond also has occasion to remember not just Tracy's killer Blofeld, and his Castle of Death, but, on meeting none other than the daughter of his comrade through five novels, Felix Leiter as Bond goes adventuring with a Leiter again. (Cedar has followed in her father's footsteps and joined the CIA.) Gardner even trots out Fleming's old comparison of Bond's looks to Hoagy Carmichael's (in spite of Carmichael's appearance having long been forgotten by almost everyone in 1982, and even the fact of his authorship of such still well-remembered and well-loved standards as "Heart and Soul").

Going beyond content to form, it appears that Gardner borrows something of Fleming's narrative approach in not trying to make us feel like he is writing an action movie--indeed, delivering a relatively action-light book where, just as in Goldfinger, even the big heist is treated briefly and hazily. (Indeed, Gardner, like Fleming, spends much more time detailing a game at length--in this case a car race on Bismaquer's private track that provides much of what little action there us.)

Still, as might be expected of Gardner given his history, this heavy freight of old Bondiana is accompanied by a heavier freight of parody. The new chief of SPECTRE is a long-lost child of the villain--which would in itself seem to mock at such melodramatic cliché (not unlike the question of the Murik lineage in Licence Renewed), but it comes across as all the more parodic given the unlikelihood of Blofeld's ever having reproduced. Ms. Blofeld's billionaire partner made his fortune in ice cream, and the scheme which will "threaten the Free World" actually hinges on the use of exactly that product. And once more, the parody is conspicuous in the book's treatment of gender and sexuality. If Bond's relationship with Ann Reilly has become physical, contrary to Bond's expectations they became "friends" first and lovers only later--the change in the order of events not insignificant. Later, paired with Cedar, he tells her, "you'll be as safe as a nun with me," and means it. Bond does get in sex with a "bad girl." But as she happens to be Nena, and Bond later sees her father's eyes in her own, well, Blofeld-is-a-woman is, on top of being played as a gender switch (this only comes out in a big reveal at the end), not the sort of encounter the series is famous for. Nor is the more complex network of relations in which involvement with her entangles him, which involves a gender switch more shocking still. (Amis' summation of the ultimate effect appears the more worth quoting precisely because the sentiment cannot be published in any publication as desirous of mainstream respectability today--specifically that the whole thing looked to him "like a renewed and more radical bid to take the piss on Bond," and "gross.")

One of my earliest contacts with Gardner, or Bond in print form, for that matter, I must admit that For Special Services was not what I expected from a James Bond book, and not altogether pleasing in its surprises. (In fact, I have to say I was disappointed with the thing, and on revisiting it think there is little to it but its oddities.) And as I can see going over the reviews by professional critics and amateurs on web sites like Amazon alike it is clear that I was not entirely alone in that reaction. Still, I could not help noting that at least to go by its presence there this was the most commercially successful of the Gardner novels, managing an impressive fifteen weeks on the New York Times hardcover list, during which time it rose as high as the sixth rank.

Did the audience approve "the renewed and more radical bid to take the piss?" Or did the readers, picking up one of the first of the new Bond novels because it was a new Bond novel, and perhaps because they had enjoyed some of what Licence Renewed offered, not get the degree to which it was a parody, and perhaps simply feel that "This isn't James Bond"--and not pay much attention when the next book came out, initiating a downward trend in the series' fortunes?

Whichever the case, the series persisted in some of what this particular book did. Like For Special Services the four next Bond novels had Bond battling SPECTRE, or the KGB, and three of them specifically involved those organizations' prosecution of their grudges against Bond for his thwarting their plans or injuring them in some other way going back to their battles in the Fleming-era works. This certainly went for the next book in the sequence, Icebreaker.

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

Review: Icebreaker, by John Gardner

Where the action-adventure element of the revived James Bond series was concerned John Gardner went one way in Licence Renewed--trying to make Bond as contemporary a figure as possible, fighting very '80s villains in the adventures '80s audiences presumably demanded by throwing together "the China syndrome" and Carlos the Jackal, while delivering nonstop action through the book's second half. Then in For Special Services he went the opposite way--drenching the reader in Bond's past to identify him with it as thoroughly as possible, having him battle the heiress to Blofeld (and her Hugo Drax stand-in husband) with the help of the heiress to Leiter in an adventure that mixed the original Moonraker and Goldfinger.

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.

Review: Colonel Sun, by Kingsley Amis

In taking up the task of writing the first continuation James Bond novel Kingsley Amis had a good many advantages over later writers enlisted to produce new entries in the series. There was the fact that Amis book appeared a very short while after Fleming's last appeared, and the franchise not far from the height of its popularity, leaving him with a simpler choice of courses than his successors, with delivering more of what Fleming did more easily appearing a viable task than a hollow pretension. Where this was concerned it was in itself relevant that Amis was a fan of that series, something not all those who have continued Bond's adventures have been, arguably to the cost of their work. (Cough cough, John Gardner.) Personal feeling aside, Amis was particularly well-equipped for the especially tricky task of continuing another writer's work as an individual accomplished as both a writer of literature, and a scholar and critic of literature, able to not just write a compelling story, but consider intellectually what other writers did. Indeed, Amis had already demonstrated the latter skill in relation to the Bond series specifically, just a few years earlier penning a noted study, The James Bond Dossier (1961), and afterward had an exceptional opportunity to enrich his knowledge of the subject in actually getting to know and work with Fleming, which experience included proofing the galleys for his last complete novel The Man With the Golden Gun (1965). One might add that, again compared with his successors, he was less remote from Fleming and what he represented at that point in time (as an Englishman born just fourteen years after Fleming, and increasingly sharing his conservative, less-than-thrilled-with-the-post-war-world outlook).

Still, according to his biographer Zachary Leader Kingsley Amis did not hope for too much when taking up the James Bond series. He certainly aspired to deliver "more Fleming," but in doing so regarded himself as a "ventriloquist" producing a "respectable second-rate copy" of Fleming's work. And while the resulting book, Colonel Sun (which Amis published in 1968 under the pseudonym Robert Markham), has been judged favorably by critics over the years, with fans commonly acclaiming it as the best produced by all those who followed Fleming, it may be unsurprising that--whether Amis was setting his sights too low, or simply knew the limits of any such effort all too well--the work has its undeniable weaknesses.

Certainly looking at the book it does seem closer in feel to a Fleming Bond novel than anything produced since. Like Fleming, Amis tells Bond's story by way of the showing-rather-than-telling "aimless glance" to which Fleming was so prone, and even imbues his prose with something of the rhythm of Fleming's language, which is a not inconsiderable achievement. And as befits the author of a major guide to the series, he makes clear that he knows the character's traits well. Yet, like a man putting on a ventriloquist act, his performance at times gets rather broad, Amis going to great lengths to emphasize Bond's personal quirks, as if anxious to reassure himself and us that this is indeed a Bond novel and not some generic spy story by some other dude which just happens to be using the name James Bond to tell his own story (or, heaven forfend, offering up a print equivalent of one of those godawful gadget-packed Bond films).

In the process, imitation turned into parody.

Thus the novel starts with Bond losing on the golf course and then twenty minutes later at the bar asking his friend (M's chief of staff) Bill Tanner "Do you think I'm going soft?" starting between them the kind of dialogue about the subject of Bond's inter-mission decline that had always previously been an inner monologue for the previously more taciturn Bond. Moreover, while the Bond of the novels often evinced a distaste for the leveled-down, Americanized post-war world, here it seems that anything and everything is constantly triggering a stream of such invective from Bond. Driving to M's residence, Bond sees mock Tudor houses with television aerials--and condemns the vanishing of Merrie England. The sight of a British European Airways jetliner passing overhead makes him think with distaste of British tourists "bearing their fish-and-chip culture" overseas when on holiday down in Iberia. Not long after when he is in Greece the lack of "Americanization" he sees around him, rather than keeping him from thinking of the issue at all, actually has him (inside his head) go off on a tangent about how it will just be a matter of time before this place too becomes all "super-highways, hot dog stands and neon."

Later Bond's alliance with a Greek Communist predictably provides scope for the series' most blustering anti-Communist rhetoric yet--which, as anyone familiar with Fleming can attest, is really saying something--and seems to bespeak that even more than the ventriloquist going over the top what we are really getting is Amis' own venting. The fact that Bond's ally Ariadne Alexandrou is presented as a naive young college graduate with a head full of leftist ideas who gets subjected to comments like "I beg you, Ariadne, forget your Leninist Institute and start to think!" by her father's friend Litsas (and subjected to much, much worse from other characters) seems to have more to do with Amis' own preoccupations (as a college professor bemoaning the cohort he saw in the lecture hall during the '60s) than anything that was ever on Fleming's mind. One can say the same for Amis' other satirical targets. British Cabinet Minister Sir Ronald Rideout, a conniving, self-seeking politician quick to fling about accusations, and only slightly less quick to cover his arse (apparently, his only two skills), appears only to be made fun of. And coming off far, far worse than that is the stupid, dangerous and stupidly dangerous Soviet General Igor Arenski--introduced in a chapter unsubtly titled "General Incompetence." (Fleming certainly detested the Soviets, and was not subtle about showing it, but he never let it get quite this silly.)

Amis' "venting," one might add, often extended to parts of the James Bond franchise with which he was less than pleased. Amis made it quite clear in his Dossier that he didn't much care for M ("peevish, priggish old monster" he called him). And when the chance came along he seized on it to write a James Bond story in which M, ailing at the start of the book, unable to prevent his own kidnapping, is helpless and useless.

Equally, Amis seems to have seized on the chance to lash out at critics of the series with whom he disagreed. In the Dossier he made his case that the charges of sadism often directed against the Bond novels were overblown--and now writing the series himself seems to have taken the attitude "You think that was sadistic? I'll show you sadistic." When Le Chiffre tortured Bond with a carpet-beater in Casino Royale Le Chiffre, depraved as he was, was still a desperate man fighting for his life. This time the villain, the titular Colonel Sun, speaks lengthily about the theories of the Marquis de Sade about torture as an exalting experience, and despite his having been told by his superiors to extract as much information from Bond as he can, his sole interest is in testing de Sade's theories--his perversity the whole of his motivation. There is, too, the abuse Ariadne is subjected to by Sun's helpers--the like of which never previously befell any of the Bond girls during the adventure (and which in light of Amis' broader attitude toward the character, and the ideology she nominally shares with her captors, seems the more an expression of Amis' mean-spiritedness toward her and what she represents).

While playing up the brutality Amis also plays down the gimmickry that by then had become so prevalent in the films--with any doubt about the intent, again, clarified by still more of his letting us know how he really feels. While the film version of You Only Live Twice had a similar plot--China attempts to bait and bleed East and West--he titular Colonel Sun tries to do the job with only a trench mortar and a handful of helpers, rather than a space program run from inside a volcano crater. Bond's equipment is even more limited--a pair of shoes with special heels, one with a transmitter to let the Service keep tabs on him, the other with a lock-pick and hacksaw blades he can use to free himself if captured and restrained. Bond is dubious about both from the start, and at tale's end, hearing Litsas joke that Bond's suit "is full of little radios and concealed cameras and things," Bond reflects to himself that he "had been right about their irrelevance, their uselessness when the crunch came."

Amid the ventriloquists' act, and the venting in its humorous and not-so-humorous forms, it can seem that Amis had little attention to give to the thriller element that is not exactly a minor aspect of the books. One may as well start with the sketchiness of the political premise. That the Soviet government would host a secret peace conference in the territory of a country that was not just a member of NATO, but at the time of publication under the rule of a right-wing military junta, is unlikely in the extreme, and no special explanation ever offered up for it. The conference plans are also very thinly described, the expected participants, the planned agenda, less spelled out than hinted at. And the Chinese idea for pinning blame for the attack on Britain does not make much more sense. Even if other countries would not put it past the British government to do such a thing, the fact remains that the chief of the Service would not do the job himself, especially when he was so sick that he could not even go into the office. Indeed, the very stupidity of such a frame-up would seem sufficient to give it away.

Granted, in such books the premise is often just an excuse for derring-do, but alas, that is not much more cleverly wrought, the story's placement of the inevitable obstacles in the heroes' path--in making it so that Bond and Ariadne have no recourse but to physically stop the plot themselves, by themselves--leaving much to be desired. Admittedly the chief of Britain's non-official cover agents in Athens is missing in action after his front business is firebombed. However, after that, what is to stop Bond going to the British embassy in the city and using its resources to get word home to the same Service tracking him with the transmitter in his shoe, for example?

The story's cutting Bond off from getting a warning to the Soviets is still less convincing. Ariadne's handler is killed by Sun's agents--but he is hardly the only Soviet operative in Athens, and even if the Soviet station has been compromised, it is hard to see why Ariadne's trying to deliver a message through it is not worth a shot in the desperate circumstances. (After all, if the traitor finds out about it, what would it hurt? They wouldn't find out anything they didn't already know, being aware that she is trying to stop them.)

And as if all this were not enough the last hundred pages or so of the story would not have had to happen at all were it not for the fact that "General Incompetence," overseeing the conference's security, allowed a large team of Chinese operatives to get so close to the site of the conference, then disbelieved what Ariadne told him. In the most appalling turn yet, when Bond and his comrades approach the island to attack Sun's base, one of the KGB patrol boats protecting the site attacks them. In the chaos, Sun's people capture Bond and his comrades, while Arenski's people somehow remain completely oblivious to the armed Chinese presence so close by. The result is that this, too, verges on parody, such that I suspect this part of the book, at least, was never supposed to do that. Indeed, one might suspect that General Arenski was not the only incompetent here.

All this being the case one might wonder at the oft-made claim that Amis' book is hands-down the best of the Bond continuation novels. However, this is less inexplicable than it seems. It is, again, undeniable that, more than any of the rest, Amis was clearly devoted to delivering "more Fleming," as none of the successors tried to do (Faulks' late-in-the-game one-shot only a partial exception), with the result that in the Fleming purist's book Amis wins by default. And there is the prestige of the Amis name, apt to bias the middlebrow, such that they give him the benefit of the doubt when they are not sure about what he is doing, and forgive him more easily than they would others were they to misstep in identical fashion. None of the later continuation writers would be able to count on such good will, while if Amis' intent, at least, was not parodic, the same would not go for his successors--as Amis himself was to observe publicly.

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

The Smallness of Older Superhero Films

Some time ago I remarked running across the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film on cable, and being struck by how different it was from more recent superhero movies (the more recent Turtles movies included)--not least in the smallness of the plot, and the scale of the action.

Back then you could make smaller superhero films like this one--and even have a big hit out of it. (The Turtles movie, the budget of which Box Office Mojo reports as an even then not particularly extravagant $13.5 million, was the #5 hit at the box office in 1990.*)

By contrast today even a near $100 million movie (triple the inflation-adjusted cost of that Turtles movie) is "too small" for the theaters (such that Batgirl was buried, Blue Beetle upgraded), with the fact only underlined by what happens when such movies do hit theaters (like Shazam 2).

I keep saying it myself over and over again--people need a reason to buy the $20 ticket rather than watch the movie at home a couple of months later, and big-screen spectacle is the easiest reason to offer of all, with all that means for the smaller films. But the requirement that the movie be colossal or nothing sharply limits what filmmakers can do, making us weary of the form that much faster, with the famous "fatigue" evidently catching up with the industry.

* By contrast the same year's Total Recall and Die Hard 2 were budgeted in the $60-$70 million range, The Hunt for Red October perhaps $40 million, and Best Picture contenders Ghost and Dances With Wolves $22 million. For what it is worth, $13.5 million in 1990 is equal to about $33 million today.

Zombie Franchises

These days it is fashionable to speak of the "undead," and coin phrases including the word "zombie" to refer to an entity existing in a state of less than complete viability.

I wondered recently if anyone had hit on the term "zombie franchise" to refer to franchises that still wander the pop cultural landscape even after they have ceased to be truly living--either fecund creatively, or worthwhile financially, but because of the unhinged addiction of Hollywood Suits to investing vast sums of money into movies no one ever asked for because they can attach a brand name to them.

When I tried Googling it I all too predictably found that all that came up were franchises about zombies. Of course, for all that it may be that the usage exists--because we certainly need it. Just consider the Terminator saga. Terminator 5 was not especially well-received, but probably made just enough money overseas to save it from being a complete disaster.* Terminator 6 did much less well, coming in right behind X-Men: Dark Phoenix on Deadline's list of the biggest box office bombs of 2019.**

Still, it seems that "more Terminator" will be coming our way in some form, the movie franchise about a robot apocalypse of the kind driving the wannabe posthumans of Silicon Valley to distraction instead a perfect example of the zombie franchise apocalypse that has overtaken contemporary pop culture.

* 2015's Terminator: Genisys (which had a $155 million production budget) made almost 80 percent of its money overseas ($351 million of its $441 million total), and over a quarter of its global total (and a quarter more than it made in the U.S.) in China alone ($113 million), in a prime example of how important China had then become to Hollywood had become on the Chinese market, the saving grace of many of its products.
** 2019's Terminator: Dark Fate both cost more ($185 million versus $155 million) and made not much more than half as much in real terms ($261 million versus the fifth film's $441 million, four years of ticket prices later), as the 2015 film.

The Politics of Hollywood's Writers

Looking back it seems that Hollywood's writers have, by the standards of its higher-profile personnel, been particularly conspicuous in the history of radicalism in the film industry. The Hollywood Ten were, in the main, writers--and so it seems were the victims of the blacklist.

One may wonder at that. I suppose one reason is that writers are a less privileged group in Hollywood than, for instance, actors and directors, with all that means for questioning the status quo.

It may also matter that a writer, more than an actor or a director (assuming he just directs), is less able to avoid engagement with ideas, which includes socially critical ideas, with all that means for their politics not staying inside the mainstream; and whatever ideas they have are more likely to manifest in their work in an obvious way.

Of course, to go by what we see on the screen the writing that comes out of Hollywood appears deeply conformist, conventional, respectful of mainstream pieties. (In his great book on American film of the 1950s Peter Biskind quipped that in right-wing films self-made millionaires are as common as the masses in the films of the left. Guess which you saw more of when he was writing--and how things have tended since?) Still, what gets put on the screen is only what other, more powerful, individuals are willing to back--individuals who very clearly hold, and help make, those conformist, conventional, mainstream views. Any other impulses would only seem to rarely come out--with, if Succession is all some of its admirers make it out to be, suggestive of hidden depths.

Albeit, very, very well-hidden depths.

The Unappreciated Artist

It is a cliché that artists feel appreciated.

It is not cliché to point out why this is the case--namely that they feel unappreciated because they are, in fact, not appreciated.

They are told every single day in every single way that what they do is unimportant ("Get a real job"), and--especially if they are not rich and famous ("Don't quit your day job"), even more if they are only endeavoring to scratch out a living (they are just "amateurs," just "aspiring artists")--that their efforts are unworthy even by the standard of their unimportant activity. The ones who most need support are least likely to get it, and the people they meet endlessly justify that ("Nobody owes artists anything"), often using arguments so transparently self-serving ("The artist must suffer." "Comfort would only spoil you." "The true artist is only appreciated after their time") that they are an insult to the listener's intelligence, while even where they think they may have a sympathizer they find something quite different. (They will hear someone speaking about how tough artists have it--and then find this is just a set-up for a lecture on the sacredness of intellectual property rights, with artists' problems raised only as an excuse rather than out of any real concern for their plight.)

One may argue over whether society, as presently constituted, may be incapable of treating artists more kindly than it is. But there seems no room to argue about the effect that all this has on artists' well-being--such that one does well to remember this when they seem less than gracious toward a public that ignored and insulted them--and if it ever stopped doing that, did so not because it appreciated them for what they did, but only because they had become rich and famous, and appreciates that rather than anything they may have actually done, such "the bourgeois valuation of a man."

Coining a Term: Dauriat

After Dauriat in the novels of Balzac's Human Comedy (among which he was especially prominent in Lost Illusions): An individual in the culture-media business, and especially publishing, sufficiently prominent to make decisions over what is or is not brought to market who is blatant in his crassness and gleefully brutal toward newcomers he treats with complete contempt.

As anyone who has ever tried to publish anything is aware, we really, really need this word.

"Convenient Social Virtue" and Moralizing Language

As described by John Kenneth Galbraith "convenient social virtue" is what the more powerful members of society expect of its less powerful members when they presume that they will acquiesce in their own exploitation because it is "the right thing to do."

Those who so acquiesce are praised, those who do not are subject to harangue, or worse, for their moral failure.

These days, with our so-called moralists more apt to be moralizers, ever punching downward, it seems that most of the moral disapprobation we hear expressed in the mainstream is of this type. Thus is it ever with, for instance, accusations of "entitlement" and "self-pity," ever directed at those apt to be least guilty of those faults--the charges likely to really mean that these people the moralizer thought unworthy of anything because of their low station committed the crime of caring about themselves when their social superiors do not care about them at all.