Faulks ‘Devil’ serviceable but sullen
“Devil May Care”
by Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming (Doubleday, 278 pages, $24.95)
If Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels had never made it to the screen, it’s very likely that today 007 would be, like The Saint, part of the vaguely remembered iconography of once-popular fiction.
The fact that our image of Bond has been formed more by the movies than by the books not only can be attributed to the wider audience movies enjoy, but to something routinely and conveniently overlooked: The Fleming novels aren’t very good.
Despite his reputation as a connoisseur of booze and women, Fleming – on paper, at least – must be the most dour hedonist who ever lived.
It took the moviemakers to recast the Bond stories, not just as gadget-laden adventures but as luxury vacations promising good food, good sex and beautiful scenery.
And it took Sean Connery to transform Bond from Fleming’s sinning, self-disgusted Puritan to an unapologetic and witty sensualist.
Novelist Sebastian Faulks (“Birdsong,” “Charlotte Gray”) – recruited by Ian Fleming Publications to produce the new Bond volume, “Devil May Care,” in celebration of Fleming’s centenary – is not the first “literary” novelist to carry on Fleming’s work.
That would be Kingsley Amis, who produced one volume, “Colonel Sun,” under the pseudonym Robert Markham; three other writers have followed.
Faulks, like many Englishmen of his generation, professes a fondness for Fleming’s novels (in his case, it may have something to do with first reading them under the covers at night because they were banned at school). And considering the origin of his commission, Faulks was likely duty-bound to follow in Fleming’s stylistic footsteps.
So, sadly, “Devil May Care,” a serviceable enough piece of superspy fiction, follows the sullen tenor of Fleming rather than the voluptuously amoral tenor of the films.
Bond’s nemesis here is Dr. Julius Gorner, a crazed pharmaceutical tycoon who wants to exercise his hatred of all things English by pumping so much heroin into the U.K. that the country becomes glutted with junkies.
True to mad-genius form (and maybe because, as evil plots go, domination by drugs sounds hopelessly outdated), he’s too impatient to wait for the results and attempts to engineer a nuclear attack on the USSR, making it appear that the British carried it out and triggering doomsday retribution.
Fleming’s villains had inventively macabre distinguishing marks (Le Chiffre, in “Casino Royale,” wept tears of blood). Faulks has done himself proud in this grotesque tradition by giving Gorner a monkey’s paw, fur and all, right up to the elbow.
But that’s about it for the sense of fun. A tennis game where the cheating Gorner tries to take Bond is too nakedly swiped from the golf match in “Goldfinger.” And the violence, when it comes, is sadistic, yet lacks the offhand wit that gave the movies’ sadism such a kick.
All of this is particularly retrograde coming two years after the faltering movie series was so spectacularly updated with “Casino Royale.” The neat trick of that picture was giving us a more “serious” Bond without losing the sensual or visceral pleasure we expect from the films.
“Devil May Care” doesn’t fail because a literary novelist is “lowering” himself to genre fiction; Faulks’ “Charlotte Gray” is as good a World War II thriller as any in recent years, and a marvelous novel.
This book doesn’t work because Fleming was an inferior writer. He was worth stealing from, not emulating.