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Devil May Care: A James Bond Novel
by Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming
****
Sebastian Faulks demurred, when first asked by the Fleming family to write a new James Bond novel. "I do inner lives, not underwater explosions," he protested. At the time, his most recent novel had been Human Traces, "a 650-page exploration of human consciousness through psychiatry and evolution".
As those of us who have grappled with that gigantic turkey know, Faulks's belief in his higher calling is misplaced. His real talent as a novelist lies in more popular story-telling, even if he doesn't quite want to admit it to himself. If a new Bond there had to be, he was the right man for the job.
Devil May Care has been put together about as well as any addition to the Bond oeuvre possibly could be, at this stage of the game. Faulks has not attempted to modernise Bond one whit. Instead, he has carefully added a stylistically appropriate lean-to on to the existing structure. Fleming died of heart failure in 1964. Faulks has imagined that, recovering from the lassitude of his last years, he lived on to 1967 and wrote this one more book about his daydream hero, summing up all the strengths of the series. For once, the claim on the cover, " Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming" is more than just publisher's effrontery, it's a genuine strategy.
Of course, Faulks plays to his own strengths too. Devil May Care opens with a murder in France, and keeps coming back to this scene of his greatest hits, so the pages are dotted with italicised words: hotel de passe, bouillabaisse, porte-cochere, poule de luxe. But mostly the book's a proficient compendium of everything Bond.
There's a new sexy, double-crossing Bond girl, Scarlett Papava, whose legs are long "with a supple shapeliness and elegance: not the result of exercise or dieting, Bond thought, but of breeding, youth and expensive hosiery". She has a beautiful mouth and her upper lip stiffens "in reflexive arousal" at key moments. And she's a crack shot too.
There's a malevolent mastermind, Julius Gorner, sporting a top deformity, one hand that's a monkey's paw and always kept gloved. He has an obsessive hatred of all things British and has not one but two schemes of destruction for us, not only to flood the nation with heroin but also to provoke nuclear armageddon. How these two wheezes complement one another never becomes quite clear, but never mind. Gorner has his own grotesque equivalent of Oddjob too, a communist Vietnamese psychopath and torturer rejoicing in the soubriquet of Chagrin. Chagrin's specialities include ripping out tongues with a pair of pliers and gleefully banging chopsticks into the ears of his victims. As an experiment, Russian military doctors have removed the part of his brain that makes him feel pity and pain, but he now has to wear a Foreign Legion kepi to cover his unhealed skull flap.
There's a protracted sporting contest early on between Bond and Gorner, for high stakes, involving cheating, not cards or golf, but tennis - so protracted indeed that it may just be a game Faulks himself favours? There's a car chase in Bond's specially adapted Bentley Continental; an underwater episode, after all; much relished, pre-Ryanair jetting; and some futuristic (for the time) hardware, in the form of a giant ground-skimming " ekranoplane".
Miss Moneypenny still pants for James. Her skin "flushed with girlish excitement". He gamesomely threatens her with a good spanking. "So you won't be able to sit down for a week." Bond still smokes, eats and drinks as he always did, hoping just for an omelette when he can't have caviar, downing Johnnie Walker Black Label, Martinis, champagne, Chateau Batailley, Chivas Regal, Stolichnaya, an Americano.
So it's all there, without stint, delivered in convincing fashion too, in plain prose. Just occasionally Faulks has allowed himself a little nod and a wink to the reader. Requesting eggs for breakfast on the day Gorner plans his demise, Bond says he wants black pepper on them: "Cracked, not ground." But Devil May Care is no send-up. Repro it may be, but good workmanship all the same. Faulks has evidently enjoyed himself; so will his readers.
