Devil May Care
Just as 007 has been played by different actors over the years, so his stories have been written by different authors. Sebastian Faulks is the latest to write as Ian Fleming. Jason Walker reviews Faulks' first undercover mission, Devil May Care
By Jason Walker
View Time Out's retrospective of Bond novel covers
James Bond ceased to be solely a literary character some time ago. His creator Ian Fleming passed away in 1964 and the last Fleming-authored novel Octopussy and The Living Daylights was published two years later. Though shards of Bond plotlines were found in Fleming's possessions after his death, the game had effectively been given over to the Broccoli family, who oversaw a slew of films based on the novelist's work.
Bond, of course, stands taller as a movie hero, but it is in the books where the character truly comes to life. Cinematically, Bond is a cipher, a rapidly evolving ghost who can encompass the characteristics of actors from Sean Connery (who embodies the "cruel mouth" that Fleming attributed to his Bond) through George Lazenby, then Roger Moore (suave, camp and debonair - perhaps in many ways he was emblematic of the English public school system that Bond would have gone through) right up Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan (who most fully embodied Bond, debonair and morally dubious) and now Daniel Craig, who has the raw savagery of early Bond.
In the literary sense, Bond was dirtier, far less reticent to deliver death and sex in equal hard and fast measure. So now to this latest work, Devil May Care, in which commissioned author Sebastian Faulks takes up the reins. It is not too early to proclaim that Faulks channels Fleming. The details are the first thing we notice - Bond is on enforced leave, the kind that usually presages early retirement. He is understandably reluctant to return to London and just that possibility. While recuperating in France he meets a beautiful young woman (married, supposedly) vying for a quick fling in her hotel room. However, it emerges that she is not what she seems, and her attempted seduction of Bond fails, not least because of his own suspicions about her character.
Bond returns to London, only to find that far from being farmed out to a cubicle, he is considered more than ready to return to the field. He returns to France where his secret hotel room is again visited by the mysterious young woman, whose real name is Scarlett Papava. Papava's sister Poppy has fallen into the clutches of a Dr Julius Gormer, who emerges as a sociopath with tendencies towards world domination that include being a terrible cheat at tennis. To prove perhaps that he has the writing chops and nous to tilt at Fleming's keen eye for detail and politesse, Faulks writes a scene describing a tennis match between Bond and Gormer lasting almost 12 pages. He nails it superbly, building a suitable amount of tension into the prose which foreshadows later encounters with this master villain, whose hatred of England and all things English knows no bounds.
Excellently, he has a likewise dangerous Vietnamese offsider with proclivities so violent it is perhaps merciful that Faulks restrains himself in that wonderfully understated way, yet transmits the horror of what Gormer is capable of. By the time Bond's investigations into these characters is halfway done, he finds himself in post-White Revolution Iran, dealing with a cast that do not embody comic buffoonery but real menace.
It is a tribute to Faulks' ability to write in character that he nails all those wonderful details that Fleming excelled in - the cut of a shirt, the brand of car, the wine by estate, and of course, the martini. Papava is a more fully rounded heroine than perhaps Fleming would have written but she is wonderfully drawn, with her beauty and wit matched by an ambiguity that suits the story. It's not a pastiche (something Faulks is more than capable of) and it's not a deliberate set piece. It's written with an ear for Cold War codes and the brinkmanship that nearly brought the world to its knees in the 1960s.
In short, if they don't get around to shooting this in full period scale, down to the Elstree studio sets favoured by Cubby Broccoli in the 1960s, then that would the gravest injustice done to the Bond franchise. I hope Faulks writes another one.
View Time Out's retrospective of Bond novel covers
Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming Penguin $32.95