Devil May Care

There is one thing — and only one thing — that I like very much about the latest attempt to jump-start secret agent James Bond in book form, and that is the time in which Sebastian Faulks’ novel is set. The action takes place not long after the events related in THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN. It’s still the mid-1960s and the Cold War is at its most frigid.

There are a lot of things I just like, but one of them is not the title: DEVIL MAY CARE. DEVIL MAY CARE? Sounds like the title of a Regency romance circa Georgette Heyer. DEVIL MAY CARE wouldn’t work even as a chapter title from classic Ian Fleming. To whom does it refer? When was the last time you heard someone describe Bond as being “devil may care”?

It can’t be meant to suggest the novel’s villain, Dr. Julius Gorner, who intends to blow up some Soviet targets and make it look as if the British are responsible so Russia will wipe London off the map. It’s definitely not his henchman, the secondary bad guy Chagrin. This is a man who ripped the tongues out of priests’ heads because they read Bible stories to children, and who shoved chopsticks into the eardrums of the kids because they listened.

DEVIL MAY CARE. Jeez. And you thought QUANTUM OF SOLACE was bad.

Bond is taking some leave time. Supposedly he and M are, separately, trying to decide whether or not it’s time for 007 to retire to a desk job, when Bond is approached by a long-legged beauty named Scarlett Papav and solicited to rescue her twin sister Poppy. The twin has been working for Gorner, a big gulp of stale air in the international opium trade. Scarlett tells Bond that Poppy wants to escape Gorner’s clutches, and for good reason: He’s got one of the most grotesque clutches you can imagine.

When M approves the operation against Gorner, he describes the man this way: “There’s a condition known as main de singe, or monkey’s hand, which is when the thumb makes a straight line with the fingers and is termed ’unopposable.’ The development of the opposable thumb was an important mutation for Homo sapiens from his ancestors. But what Gorner has is something more. The whole hand is completely that of an ape. With hair up to the wrist and beyond.”

Yes, like Dr. No’s total lack of hands, Blofeld’s defacing scar and Scaramanga’s third nipple, this physical flaw is used to suggest a mental defect. It worked for Fleming — hell, it worked for Chester Gould and Dick Tracy — and it works for Faulks.

One of the book’s weaknesses is that too much of what worked for Fleming is shamelessly incorporated into this new adventure. It frequently reads as if it were a 007 “greatest hits” collection. Bond and Gorner face off over a game — not cards or golf, but tennis. Of course, Gorner cheats. There is an escape from danger on a train, and when Bond needs an alias Moneypenny calls him David Somerset, à la FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE. There’s even a mechanical monstrosity that the simple peasants don’t understand and so refer to as a Caspian Sea Monster, like the dragon in DR. NO.

As if these borrowings weren’t enough, Faulks even steals from a movie that was heavily inspired by the Bond series. After a series of beatings, Scarlett tries to comfort 007 by kissing his boo-boos in a scene lifted directly from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.

Even some of Fleming’s worst habits are carried over, including the snobbery to which he seemed to be oblivious. In a Middle Eastern hotel, this unpleasant element of English character is made manifest. “Breakfast was brought to Bond’s room at eight the next morning, although he had placed no order. It consisted of tea without milk, a rectangle of sheep’s cheese with herbs and a slab of flat-bread that looked like the bathmat in the next room. He told the waiter to take it away and try again.”

So, if Fleming had lived a little longer and DEVIL MAY CARE had been written in 1965, I suspect many of us would have been disappointed at its retro qualities. It reads more as if it should be one of the earliest books in the series instead of one of the later ones.

But the thing is, so many years have passed and so much crap has been written by other Fleming wannabes, I finally got past the too-obvious James Bond Homage and accepted the book for just what it wanted to be: nostalgic and fun. And honestly, the last few chapters flew by and the villains were dispatched in suitably grotesque ways. Nothing will ever equal Dr. No getting buried alive in bat guano — book, not movie — but Faulks has come up with something almost as far out for Dr. Gorner.

Hey, is “Gorner” Cockney for “goner”?

DEVIL MAY CARE. I liked it and will read the next one. But I still hate that title. —Doug Bentin

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