You Know My Name
jetsetwilly
Liverpool, UKPosts: 1,048MI6 Agent
One should always keep an open mind. If you receive a new book as a birthday gift, you should read it without prejudice, so you can bring a reasoned opinion to the table.
Sometimes, however, your eye alights on a single sentence, and suddenly it casts a shadow over every single other word in the whole book.
You Know My Name: The World of James Bond 007 In Film and Print by Christopher DeRose contains the following sentence:
The novel? Raymond Benson's Doubleshot.
I. Kid. You. Not.
Frankly, after that, it was difficult for me to resist the urge to throw the book out the train window. I only stopped because it was a gift from The Wife, and I didn't want to hurt his feelings, and besides, I'd already managed to get halfway through: I couldn't wait to see what else the author had to say.
There hasn't been a decent book on the whole world of Bond since The James Bond Bedside Companion - Raymond Benson's undisputably greatest gift to the world of Bond fandom - though there have been a number of tries over the years. James Bond: The Man and His World a couple of years ago managed to sew up the Fleming novels pretty comprehensibly, but it barely touches the films, and ignores the continuations completely. Other books like Martinis, Girls and Guns have tried, but nothing's been as good as Benson's, now twenty year old masterwork.
So having another try seems perfectly valid. DeRose's book falls down on a number of fronts. The cover's great, but once you're inside, you realise you're in that nightmare world of small press publishing. The typeface and typesetting are... interesting; sometimes paragraphs just stop randomly in the middle, and start a new line. Worse, there are proof reading errors which should really have been spotted - I reread the section on the Double O's a couple of times before I realised that 004 in The Living Daylights was killed in a training exercise, not, as the book has it, a training "excrete". That, sadly, is in the first couple of pages. A good editor wouldn't have gone amiss, either; here's the final summation of the Gardner era, after a bafflingly positive review of Cold (Fall):
The book mainly consists of a couple of pages for each book or film - the first page a plot synopsis, the second the actual review. Now obviously, every one is entitled to their own opinion. That's a great feature of AJB, opposing thoughts rubbing up against one another to create entertainment. But sometimes I read DeRose's book, and I began to doubt if he'd actually read the book or seen the film in question.
Example: he says that the plotting in Diamonds are Forever (novel) is stronger than in Fleming's previous works. DAF is a flabby mess of a novel, a wildly thrashing tail that simply propels Bond around America in the pursuit of a lacklustre pair of villains; it's nothing in comparism with LALD or CR. He believes Quantum of Solace is the best short story Fleming ever wrote. And worst of all, he treats Benson's novels with a reverence they really, really don't deserve.
The coverage of Benson actually allowed me to get a handle on DeRose. I realised that he sees the Bond series as a continuous, long thread - like a tv show - where actions in one book have ramifications in another, and are referenced in a third. In short, he's a continuity buff, which is all well and good if you like that sort of thing.
Myself, I don't care about Bond continuity. Obviously, if Fleming had written that Bond was a six foot tall man in CR, and by GF he was a three foot woman, I'd have reason to object. But I'm willing to accept that Fleming was making it up as he went along, and that he had no idea he'd write so many books. Charlie Higson aside, the 1933 Bentley is very difficult to get past, and if you then continue to believe that Gardner's man of the 90s is somehow exactly the same person as Fleming's and complain that he hasn't aged properly, I think you need to step away from the book now. Fortunately he didn't notice the colour of M's "do not disturb" light.
Benson's books are full of these pointless, obsessive references to previous adventures (as is Cold Fall actually, probably explaining DeRose's fondness for what is a booktrocity on an unprecedented scale). That's why he likes them; he probably got incredibly excited when the Governor from QoS turns up in a Benson novel as 007's old friend, instead of letting out a yell of hatred and anger, as I did.
As we had such misaligned views on the novels, I ended up just seeking out the most ridiculous opinions, or his most glaring inconsistencies (he rightly berates Gardner for dragging up the old neo-Nazi plot for SeaFire, but completely overlooks the fact that he'd already used this exact same plotline for Icebreaker - DeRose's favourite Gardner novel), or the worst typographical errors, or the plain simple mistakes (embarrassingly, DeRose thinks that the one-eyed man in Venice in CR is a "very much alive" Le Chiffre, and the last two paragraphs of his plot summary refer to him as such). A reference to M asking Bond if he was suffering from "accidie" in TLD also made me suspicious; this line was in the script, but does not feature in the film, and I have only read it in one other reference work - it again made me look at the whole of You Know My Name in a different light, and to question how much had been written instead of copied and pasted.
In short, I didn't like it. You might. Maybe you're not as cynical or as quick to judge as me. Maybe you think this is the new Bedside Companion. I think that a new version of that book is begging to be written, and this doesn't come anywhere near to the quality of that tattered copy on my bookshelf.
NOTE: maybe you should buy this book, because checking out the publisher's website (http://www.menshourbooks.com///mens.php) there are some fantastic looking titles that should be encouraged. In particular, the one about the horrors of a USA run by lesbians and one man's fight back looks AMAZING. Amazon wish list here I come!
Sometimes, however, your eye alights on a single sentence, and suddenly it casts a shadow over every single other word in the whole book.
You Know My Name: The World of James Bond 007 In Film and Print by Christopher DeRose contains the following sentence:
...this is easily a contender for one of the best Bond novels in the entire canon, enough so in fact, to stand amongst Fleming's masterpieces like You Only Live Twice or From Russia With Love.
The novel? Raymond Benson's Doubleshot.
I. Kid. You. Not.
Frankly, after that, it was difficult for me to resist the urge to throw the book out the train window. I only stopped because it was a gift from The Wife, and I didn't want to hurt his feelings, and besides, I'd already managed to get halfway through: I couldn't wait to see what else the author had to say.
There hasn't been a decent book on the whole world of Bond since The James Bond Bedside Companion - Raymond Benson's undisputably greatest gift to the world of Bond fandom - though there have been a number of tries over the years. James Bond: The Man and His World a couple of years ago managed to sew up the Fleming novels pretty comprehensibly, but it barely touches the films, and ignores the continuations completely. Other books like Martinis, Girls and Guns have tried, but nothing's been as good as Benson's, now twenty year old masterwork.
So having another try seems perfectly valid. DeRose's book falls down on a number of fronts. The cover's great, but once you're inside, you realise you're in that nightmare world of small press publishing. The typeface and typesetting are... interesting; sometimes paragraphs just stop randomly in the middle, and start a new line. Worse, there are proof reading errors which should really have been spotted - I reread the section on the Double O's a couple of times before I realised that 004 in The Living Daylights was killed in a training exercise, not, as the book has it, a training "excrete". That, sadly, is in the first couple of pages. A good editor wouldn't have gone amiss, either; here's the final summation of the Gardner era, after a bafflingly positive review of Cold (Fall):
If Gardner's run had been maybe half the span it actually was, readers may well have been treated to more novels as this, which displaces all as his best go at Bond, and was an excellent exit for an author, who while much maligned, took on a job that few would have had the courage to, for a length of time that exhibited his tenacity.
The book mainly consists of a couple of pages for each book or film - the first page a plot synopsis, the second the actual review. Now obviously, every one is entitled to their own opinion. That's a great feature of AJB, opposing thoughts rubbing up against one another to create entertainment. But sometimes I read DeRose's book, and I began to doubt if he'd actually read the book or seen the film in question.
Example: he says that the plotting in Diamonds are Forever (novel) is stronger than in Fleming's previous works. DAF is a flabby mess of a novel, a wildly thrashing tail that simply propels Bond around America in the pursuit of a lacklustre pair of villains; it's nothing in comparism with LALD or CR. He believes Quantum of Solace is the best short story Fleming ever wrote. And worst of all, he treats Benson's novels with a reverence they really, really don't deserve.
The coverage of Benson actually allowed me to get a handle on DeRose. I realised that he sees the Bond series as a continuous, long thread - like a tv show - where actions in one book have ramifications in another, and are referenced in a third. In short, he's a continuity buff, which is all well and good if you like that sort of thing.
Myself, I don't care about Bond continuity. Obviously, if Fleming had written that Bond was a six foot tall man in CR, and by GF he was a three foot woman, I'd have reason to object. But I'm willing to accept that Fleming was making it up as he went along, and that he had no idea he'd write so many books. Charlie Higson aside, the 1933 Bentley is very difficult to get past, and if you then continue to believe that Gardner's man of the 90s is somehow exactly the same person as Fleming's and complain that he hasn't aged properly, I think you need to step away from the book now. Fortunately he didn't notice the colour of M's "do not disturb" light.
Benson's books are full of these pointless, obsessive references to previous adventures (as is Cold Fall actually, probably explaining DeRose's fondness for what is a booktrocity on an unprecedented scale). That's why he likes them; he probably got incredibly excited when the Governor from QoS turns up in a Benson novel as 007's old friend, instead of letting out a yell of hatred and anger, as I did.
As we had such misaligned views on the novels, I ended up just seeking out the most ridiculous opinions, or his most glaring inconsistencies (he rightly berates Gardner for dragging up the old neo-Nazi plot for SeaFire, but completely overlooks the fact that he'd already used this exact same plotline for Icebreaker - DeRose's favourite Gardner novel), or the worst typographical errors, or the plain simple mistakes (embarrassingly, DeRose thinks that the one-eyed man in Venice in CR is a "very much alive" Le Chiffre, and the last two paragraphs of his plot summary refer to him as such). A reference to M asking Bond if he was suffering from "accidie" in TLD also made me suspicious; this line was in the script, but does not feature in the film, and I have only read it in one other reference work - it again made me look at the whole of You Know My Name in a different light, and to question how much had been written instead of copied and pasted.
In short, I didn't like it. You might. Maybe you're not as cynical or as quick to judge as me. Maybe you think this is the new Bedside Companion. I think that a new version of that book is begging to be written, and this doesn't come anywhere near to the quality of that tattered copy on my bookshelf.
NOTE: maybe you should buy this book, because checking out the publisher's website (http://www.menshourbooks.com///mens.php) there are some fantastic looking titles that should be encouraged. In particular, the one about the horrors of a USA run by lesbians and one man's fight back looks AMAZING. Amazon wish list here I come!
Comments
It's nearly time for Benson's Bedside Companion to be updated- I say nearly, because the logical time would be after Devil May Care and QoS have been released, not to mention more Young Bond. Perhaps Raymond Benson could be persuaded to do the necessary, with someone else covering his own period as Bond author? (Volunteers shouldn't be thin on the ground- how about Charlie Higson?)