Review: Win, Lose or Die, by John Gardner

New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1989, pp. 319.

In Win, Lose or Die, the British carrier Invincible is set as the site of a secret conference between the British, American and Soviet leaders during the Landsea 89 military exercise. However, British intelligence discovers a threat to the conference from a formerly obscure group named the Brotherhood of Anarchy and Secret Terrorism (BAST). M responds by assigning 007 to protect the conference personally, a job that requires Bond to return to shipboard service in the Royal Navy.

As might be expected from such a premise, Win is another unusual Bond novel, after the pattern of John Gardner's earlier Role of Honor (1984), in Bond's taking a long undercover assignment (year-length in this case) for which he has to master a highly technical task (piloting Harriers).

Additionally, the job requires the normally solitary Bond to formally head up a very large personal security detail--and a combined Anglo-American-Soviet operation at that. There is, too, the fact that where even in Role Bond got to live it up in Monaco, for much of this story Bond trades his tailored suits and tuxedos for a Royal Navy uniform; his metropolitan restaurants, nightclubs and casinos for a base canteen and shipboard accommodations; and our usually lone, high-living operative is subject to military discipline and the structure of an armed forces environment. Indeed, Gardner depicts Bond's training to fly the Harrier at length, and then sets the full second half of the book aboard the Invincible.

Making things odder still is the prominent appearance of real-life political figures—instead of generic British, American and Soviet leaders, or characters clearly alluding to those occupying the relevant offices, Margaret Thatcher, George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev are not only described, but named, and rather than remaining part of the background, actually interact with Bond during two scenes. Besides the novelty of using such figures, this also dates the book's events in a fairly precise fashion.

Just as the Bond films were emulating American action films in these years, so was this book an obvious response to the box office success of Top Gun in 1986, and the booming of the military techno-thriller genre during the mid- and late-1980s in the hands of writers like Tom Clancy. Essentially what Gardner did was to take Bond and stick him in a techno-thriller centering on the British navy.

The blend ends up being problematic on both counts, as military techno-thriller, and Bond novel. To be sure, Gardner's handling of the relevant story mechanics is on the whole competent. The flying sequences in particular balance technical detail and action, and retain their coherence through the inevitable thicket of jargon and frenzied aircraft handling. However, the loose, episodic structure normal for techno-thrillers of this kind is awkward. Their diffuse plots tend to give more or less equal time to the multiple viewpoint characters they track through the unfolding of a crisis--the real subject of the book--the narrative checking in with them only as they become privy to something interesting.1 Win keeps the usual focus on Bond, though, so that instead of the usual of tightness given by rapid cutting back and forth among various story threads, the reader is much more conscious of reading a year-long chronicle of the events leading up to the climactic attack; of the hurrying over the dull stretches to get to more interesting bits not easily tied together into a whole. Additionally, where techno-thrillers typically strive for the illusion of realism, Win is packed with even more than the usual number of over-the-top plot twists associated with this kind of story--as in its Italian episode, which can seem like a bit of the self-parody toward which Gardner so often inclined in and out of this series.

At the same time, the book leaves much to be desired as a Bond novel. If the sense of the book's looseness undermines its effectiveness as a techno-thriller, it is even worse for the book's effectiveness as a Bond thriller. The villain Bassam Baradj and his BAST organization appear just grandiosely scaled-up repetition of the previous Gardner novel's titular Scorpius, like him a man of obscure background who made a fortune selling arms to terrorists, cultivated a fanatical following, and behind the pretense of realizing a chiliastic plan, is just after the money--specifically looking to pull off a big score after which he intends to retire in comfort. The scaling up of the idea from suicide bombings to taking over an aircraft carrier merely makes the idea look sillier.

This is the more so because of the villains' plans for getting their money for the release of Bush, Thatcher and Gorbachev. Where SPECTRE was very specific about the manner in which it wanted its ransom money delivered in Thunderball, here the way in which the sum is supposed to be paid is never made quite clear, and Bond in fact points this out to the villain, who has no answer to offer to the charge--with the result that the extravagant numbers Baradj's people throw around seem like more self-parody (and that of a kind no more subtle than Dr. Evil's).

It does not help that the final confrontation between Bond and Baradj is so anti-climactic. (Baradj doesn't even get to make the customary Big Speech.)

And personally speaking, the high-living Bond never seems quite right to me when he is leading a more spartan existence; the individualistic Bond never quite right when he has to properly be part of a team (rather than just the special operative working with a team). It seems that he did not entirely feel right about these things himself, to go by the blimpishness he displays. After his return to more conventional naval duties, Bond walks about Woodstock looking with contempt at working class young people and thinking that

he would, if pushed, like to see the countless young people crowding those very bars banished to some kind of National Service--preferably in the armed forces. That, he considered, would take violence off the streets of country towns, and make men out of the louts who littered pavements and got drunk at the sniff of a barmaid’s apron.

Of course, such sentiments are not totally unprecedented on Bond's part. Still, never did the charge of "Octogenarian!" that Bond once had occasion to fling at Tanaka seem more applicable to Bond himself. One can take that as yet another joke Gardner has at Bond's expense, and so again, as with many of Gardner's books, it seems to me that the question of whether one is prepared to laugh at Bond is a major determinant of whether one can get into this particular edition of his adventures.

1. It is worth remembering that in Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October, only a third of the text actually depicted Jack Ryan and his activities. Excepting Patriot Games (more conventional spy story than techno-thriller), the narratives of the later novels tended to be even more diffuse.

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

Just Out . . .

My new book, James Bond's Evolution: From Casino Royale to Spectre.

Where my recent The Forgotten James Bond focuses on overlooked aspects of the James Bond series, Evolution traces, in linear fashion, the development of the franchise from its origin with Fleming to the books and films of the present.

You can preview it on Google, here, and also check it out on Amazon.

Death is Forever, by John Gardner

In the opening pages of Death is Forever we learn that Cabal, a hugely successful Anglo-American spy ring run in East Germany during the Cold War, completely ceased to operate within the week of German reunification—without any orders to do so from its British and American controllers. Two years later the British Secret Service and the CIA send the case officers who had run Cabal--Briton Fred Puxley (code name, "Vanya") and American Elizabeth Caerns (code name, "Eagle")--back to Germany to find out why. After arriving in country both those officers are killed within a week of each other, and under unusual circumstances, suggesting murder by Cold War-era methods long out of date--Vanya apparently "flyswatted" by a driver in Frankfurt, while Eagle was killed by a cyanide gun. This eliminates any doubt of enemy action and makes getting to the bottom of the whole matter the more urgent, so the two agencies send another pair of operatives to continue what Puxley and Caerns began. The CIA sends Elizabeth Zara ("Easy") St. John to become the new Eagle, and the British send James Bond to be the new Vanya. On the ground they soon discover that some party, out to get them, has also been picking off the network's members, all on the way toward realizing bigger plans . . .

In placing a German spy ring at the center of the plot, Death is Forever recalls the earlier No Deals, Mr. Bond (1987), but with its classically Cold War Central European setting, and emphasis on "tradecraft" (dead drops, safe houses, secret signaling methods, the mechanics of tailing and evading tails, etc.), which actually go along with a downplaying of Flemingesque extravagances (a murder attempt using Fiddlestick spiders apart), this makes this post-Cold War story feel even more Cold War than Gardner's actual Cold War adventures.

The result is that while this is in a sense the first truly post-Cold War Bond novel, it is also the most backward looking entry in the series to date, starting with the outmoded killing methods used against Cabal's case officers. The shadows of Markus Wolf, Bogdan Stashinsky, Lavrenti Beria and Joseph Stalin loom large over the events, every one of these names repeatedly cropping up in the story, while Bond himself makes an explicit comparison between the post-Cold War and the post-World War II era in which the Cold War was born, thinking of the way "the various secret agencies had their work cut out sniffing around for Nazis hiding in the woodpile of freedom."

The backward glance is evident, too, in the more than usually pronounced metafictional aspect of the novels. At one point Easy is described as "dressed right out of a '60s spy movie." Preparing to ride the Ost-West Express, Bond remarks "Night train to Paris. Sounds like a 1930s movie title," which is not the only evocation of the latter. Later, Gardner writes that this is Bond's first trip "on a continental railway train for years," one which brought back to him "the noises, sights and smells" of "criss-cross[ing] Europe on the great network of express trains while on operations at the height of the Cold War." Still, if it is the heavy evocation of Cold War culture in the broad that is most conspicuous, there are numerous, specific references to earlier Bond books--the epigram from Diamonds Are Forever, which clearly inspired the title, actually the first words after the title page. Later Bond casually mentions that his looks had once been compared to Hoagy Carmichael's (as Fleming had done way back in Casino Royale, and Gardner had only done in his exceptionally determined effort to evoke Fleming in For Special Services), and even has occasion to give detailed instruction about the preparation of his martini to a server, and be complimented by the server for having done so (again, just as in Casino Royale).

Perhaps unsurprisingly the book's choice of villains, and their scheme, likewise reflect the past more than the present--a collection of Stalinist die-hards who think that assassinating the leaders of the European Union's member countries as they ride aboard a train through the newly opened Chunnel will produce a power vacuum the Communists can somehow fill, achieving final victory for their ideology. The idea would have been silly in 1982, let alone 1992 (just where were the Communists who were actually supposed to be doing the vacuum-filling?), so much so that I have wondered if this too was not a bit of parody, though I saw no sign of comedic intent this time. Rather it seems to me that amid the collapsing market for spy fiction Gardner, like many others, had his doubts about the future of the fictional spy in the post-Cold War era, and Bond with him.

Interestingly this all happened as Gardner displayed a more nuanced attitude toward Soviet history than I expected to see in the Bond novel. Rather than just the orthodox anti-Communism Fleming, and Bond, displayed, we see Gardner write of Stalin as "the true evil, which had . . . overtaken the ideology of Marx and Lenin," and "warped and bent the system into a new dogma of terror," "twist[ing] Communism" into what it eventually became--implying, in contrast with that standard right-wing view, that Marxism, Communism and the rest of the package cannot be reduced to Stalinism-according-to-Robert Conquest. (Indeed, Gardner the former theater critic writes of the famed Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht as "the late, great Bertolt Brecht.")

Perhaps Gardner had a leftish streak all along which could in this more relaxed moment be more easily displayed (such a streak would certainly have been yet another reason for him to have a hard time taking 007 seriously)--but especially given that up to this point he had been quite content to offer up as his Soviet baddies conventional Cold War caricatures of the kind with which Fleming would not have had a problem, it could simply be that he found it easy to be charitable toward the old enemy as it passed from the scene, and even came to be missed, if only as the old enemy, and only for lack of a focus for one's hates.

At the same time there was a sense of losing, along with old enemies, old friends, at least to go by how Bond's CIA colleague Easy is written. Where earlier novels tended to present the skillful but cash-strapped British working with the callow but cash-flush Americans, the latter were no longer so flush as they once were, while still being as inexperienced as ever. Easy, whose career back at Langley had her working behind a desk, is utterly unprepared for the field--but after this becomes worrisomely apparent to all concerned (not much past the first tenth of the book), what drives her to tears is her fear of being fired amid a time of service cuts and economic recession. If in an earlier era Fleming's Bond had been disappointed in the political reliability of the Americans as partners (in You Only Live Twice their ceasing to share information is a key plot point), at that point the Americans no longer have so much to bring to the table even when they were willing. Indeed, given how Bond ends up partnering with European allies in the old network and European governments' security forces in saving the leadership of the European Union (in what can seem a symbolically freighted climax occurring in the very "Channel Tunnel" physically linking Britain to Europe), it can seem that the European Union is imagined here as Britain's next natural partner (perhaps with a German "Leiter" rather than an American one connecting Britain's greatest spy with the financial and technical resources only others' expertise, and continent-wide industry, can supply). As Bond will in the next two novels see himself become very close indeed to a continental counterpart, professionally and personally, it does not seem that one can wholly rule that out--and if so Gardner would appear to be breaking with the conventional expectations of a Bond novel again in his rejection of that disdain for Europe so euphemistically referred to as "Euroskepticism." (Such an impression would seem to be affirmed by the heavy evocations of the memory of the world wars throughout the book, and especially its last portion--the very disasters that a European Union was supposed to relegate to the past, a feat which its proponents are quick to credit it with having accomplished.)

Still, whatever one makes of the creaking anachronism, the shakiness of the premise, or the perhaps more-than-meets-the-eye politics (a look ahead to the future after the glance back at the past?), I have to say that as Gardner's forays into spy vs. spy territory go this is easily his most successful--in the pacing, the intricacy of the plot, the melding of story and action (certainly more so than was the case with the most comparable prior book, No Deals, Mr. Bond). Indeed, it may be about as satisfying as any of his contributions to the series on that level, and as fitting a "close to an era" as could reasonably be hoped for, Gardner's subsequent Bond novels a very different thing on the level of conception and action, starting with the very next book, Never Send Flowers.

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

Review: How Fiction Works, by James Wood

New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008, pp. 288.

First things first--the book's title will strike many as a misnomer. In the strictest sense, How Fiction Works is not a comprehensive, nuts-and-bolts manual to reading or writing fiction, but rather an exposition of a number of ideas about some aspects of literary technique--in particular various aspects of narration and characterization.

Some may see these as all one really needs to know about "how fiction works"--particularly if they accept as a given the conventional ideas about what "serious" writers and readers should concern themselves with. Wood most certainly does, in his analysis stressing form and character over, for example, plot, action or idea. (Indeed, there are no chapters on those things.) Additionally, where the issues he discusses are concerned, he tends toward the usual, "respectable" positions, both on what makes writing good, and who exemplifies this--the writers he cites the most canonical of the canonical.

A book that effectively spells out basics that, frankly, even the experts themselves tend to abide by unthinkingly can only be written by an expert among experts, so much at home with these matters that he can explain them in concise and straightforward fashion, and Wood proves himself up to the job. How Fiction Works explains these matters lucidly, and illustrates its explanations with illuminating examples, making it perfectly clear just what the techniques Wood describes really do for fiction--and why those writers who most fully and expertly utilize them are so revered. (Anyone unsure as to Gustave Flaubert's place in Western literature need look no further.)

Yet, an expert's being so steeped in his subject can also be a liability--and this, too, is the case here. While excelling at his explanation of the received wisdom of the field, Wood gives little thought to its limitations--to the weaknesses of the modes the critics typically exalt, let alone the possibility of valid alternatives. (Only in a defense of the value of "flat" characters does he challenge the prevailing opinion.) Still less is he inclined to consider the presumptions underlying these ideas (as in his view that omniscient narration is "obsolete"). It might be noted, too, that not only does he stress the most canonical of the canonical in his examples, but that his literary imagination at times seems painfully rarefied, John le Carré's Smiley's People as "lowbrow" as Wood dares to go (!), with even the reference to that work unfavorable, and even patronizing. ("Nice writing for sure . . . by the standards of contemporary thrillers . . . magnificent," but ultimately a "coffin of dead conventions" is all that this work of "commercial realism" offers--which will come as a shock to all those who have struggled with these novels.)

The result (as a survey of the Customer Reviews on a site like Amazon demonstrates) is that many a reader will regard Wood's concerns as limited, minor, obscure, or simply "snobbish," and for any and all of these reasons simply not relevant to how fiction actually works for them. Even those who find the book's narrower range of concerns to be of interest to them may wish it contained a more critical attitude toward its material--a thing for which they would have to go elsewhere. Still, even as one who has been appreciative of the case made for other standards (such as H.G. Wells so skillfully offered), in this book Wood excels at the task that (the title notwithstanding) he actually set himself, and in the process renders the student of literature a considerable service, one which made me wish I had encountered the work much earlier than I did.

Our Literary Friends . . .

Graham Greene once wrote,

How seldom in the literary life do we pause to pay a debt of gratitude except to the great or the fashionable, who are like those friends that we feel do us credit. Conrad, Dostoyevsky, James, yes, but we are too ready to forget . . . all who enchanted us when we were young.

The writer who had enchanted him above all others was H. Rider Haggard, the author of classics like King Solomon's Mines, and She.

I was glad he wrote that. This was not only because I've found Haggard worthwhile (like Alexandre Dumas, he's one of those nineteenth century adventure writers who remain highly readable as entertainment), but also because of his challenge to the literary snobbery of which there is always far too much about. And especially that absurd form of which in which people claim an attachment to a Great Name from some very early age--that they breathlessly ate up the complete works of Shakespeare when they were four years old, or somesuch.

Ironically, Greene himself became the kind of friend to which people pay a debt of gratitude, because he does them credit, while those writers who enchanted them when they were young go unmentioned. Ian Fleming was among them. He was much more given to identifying his aspirations and influences with Greene (or Maugham, or Ambler, or Hammett), while slighting the pulpier writers (the Sappers and others) without whom I cannot imagine James Bond having taken the shape that he did. Still, in Fleming's defense, his affection for those friends he was happy to mention was genuine, however little it may have helped get him taken seriously by the upmarket critics.