Devil May Care Sebastian Faulks writing as ian fleming Penguin, Rs 395
Reassuringly, Faulks never veers from convention James bond lives. After Kingsley Amis, John Gardner and Raymond Benson8217;s stabs at resurrecting 007, now it is Sebastian Faulks8217; turn to channel Ian Fleming. And Devil May Care is certainly a success, because it reads simply and transparently like a Bond plot. The book8217;s opening hints at all sorts of unusual possibilities. Even as an informant is killed in Paris, his tongue yanked out with pliers, Bond is recovering from his last assignment, haunting Mediterranean cafes, staying off alcohol and telling his own reflection that he is 8220;Tired. Played out. Finished8221;. But barely a page later, he has run into the seductive Larissa Rossi, her brown eyes aglow and her 8220;full lips parted in an expression of modest excitement8221;, who invites him up to her suite. Despite Bond8217;s resignation to 8220;a life of interdepartmental meetings and examining cables at his desk8221;, he is summoned to London, and told to track 8220;potentially the most dangerous man the Service has ever encountered 8230; a man who seems intent on destroying the lives of millions and undermining the influence of the West8221;. Reassuringly, the narrative never veers from convention, and the prose only occasionally lifts above.
You’ve Read Your Free Stories For Now
Sign up and keep reading more stories that matter to you.
Umberto Eco has famously laid bare the skeletal structure of the Bond narrative, from M8217;s first assignment to Bond8217;s final convalescing with the woman he later loses 8212; but it8217;s a sequence all too familiar to anyone who has watched a couple of Bond movies. Like all seminal pop-culture achievements, James Bond references have a way of osmotically seeping in, so you can8217;t remember the first moment you heard 8220;Bond. James Bond8221; or help the way the word 8220;martini8221; calls up a faint answering echo of 8220;shaken, not stirred8221; from your subconscious. Faulks doesn8217;t mess with the franchise 8212; remarkably subduing his own 8220;literariness8221; to the straight-shooting, pacy spirit of the thing. His Bond broods on past adventures with Le Chiffre and Hugo Drax, tangles with a very villainous villain called Julius Gorner with a 8220;monkey8217;s paw8221;, in an un-pc conflation of disability and malevolence, seduces the smouldering Scarlett Papava. M, Moneypenny, his French colleague Mathis all put in appearances. What8217;s more, Faulks makes no attempt to update his material 8212; the setting is a pleasant throwback to 1967 Britain. Bond refers to The Rolling Stones as pop singers with 8220;hair down to their shoulders8221;, the crime centres on heroin-trafficking, and he visits an Iran where he can cavort with naked women in communal baths. Except for a draggy tennis match between Bond and Gorner that takes up more than 10 pages, the book races along from Paris to London, Iran to Russia, bedroom to pleasure garden to torture chamber.
As an exercise in perfect parody, Devil May Care is a commendable achievement, even if Faulks didn8217;t intend any irreverence. And why should he? Bond send-ups constitute their own industry. Bond novels and spin-offs are the ultimate palimpsests 8212; texts layered on top of each other, with remnants of erased writing still visible. For a novelist whose previous work includes a book of pastiche called Pistache, the genre must come easy. And he8217;s set a new Bond standard for the next person to try her hand at the thrilling business of 8220;writing as Fleming8221;.
