DMC extract in Times on Sat

Napoleon Plural

There's an exclusive (they say) extract of the new Bond book in tomorrow Times in the UK. Should give us a taste of his style and whether it's pastiche or something more.

darenhat

Will this extract be posted online anywhere? I'd like to read it!

Loeffelholz

I'm really looking forward to this book. It comes out the day I have to get on a plane to return home from Los Angeles I'm hoping there will be a midnight release here...

As for how it will go over with the masses: I predict the response will be appropriately mixed, just like it is with even the most successful of the Bond films: some will love it and some will poop all over it.

darenhat

The challenge is whether or not there's a market for a new Bond novel. Benson's 'The Man with the Red Tattoo' didn't do well at all. I cannot claim if that was due to the caliber of the novel or if it's simply due to the fact that readers aren't interested in Bond. As is evidenced here, a lot of Bond cinephiles don't read the books, and like it or not, James Bond is largely considered a movie character now rather than a literary one.

If this novel doesn't do well, I doubt it will be any reflection on Faulk's ability. On the other hand, if Faulk's novel does well then he certainly deserves all of the credit.

00-Agent

darenhat wrote:

Will this extract be posted online anywhere? I'd like to read it!

Here you go:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article3963143.ece

Napoleon Plural

Well, I flicked through it this morning. After about two minutes I looked up and caught myself in the mirror opposite, my mouth was actually agape.

This is utter drivel, really appalling stuff. Pastiche? Damn right. I actually had to look at the end to check it wasn't one of those 'Peter Bradshaw imagines how Sebastian Faulks would write his latest Bond book...' Any Bond fan knows those spoof pieces in newspapers that have Bond in the nursing home, or having to deal with a woman boss or whathaveyou. Usually written in cod-Fleming style with amusingly inappropriate references to the Sex Pistols, the ramifications of some EU legislation, Tony Blair or the bete noir of the day. Chatting with May the housekeeper about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and how one of them had been busted for drugs. 'There was a leader in The Times - The Times of all places - asking for lenience in the case of these wretched pop singers.'

Oh no, that last one is actually taken from Devil May Care. Great, cos Fleming's Bond was always fulminating over Elvis or MacMillan's domestic policy, wasn't he? 8-)

What with Indy hanging out with his biker boy son, it's a bad week for cultural mish mashes.

Otherwise, the book doesn't seem well-written at all, just very contrived, while bits are just stolen from other sources - the film Live and Let Die (using drugs to infiltrate the nation's youth) or Moonraker (Bond's instant dislike to the villain), M taking up yoga (like his naturalism in Colonel Sun)...

TOOTS

Sebastian Faux?

scaramanga1

Napoleon Plural wrote:

Well, I flicked through it this morning. After about two minutes I looked up and caught myself in the mirror opposite, my mouth was actually agape.

This is utter drivel, really appalling stuff. Pastiche? Damn right. I actually had to look at the end to check it wasn't one of those 'Peter Bradshaw imagines how Sebastian Faulks would write his latest Bond book...' Any Bond fan knows those spoof pieces in newspapers that have Bond in the nursing home, or having to deal with a woman boss or whathaveyou. Usually written in cod-Fleming style with amusingly inappropriate references to the Sex Pistols, the ramifications of some EU legislation, Tony Blair or the bete noir of the day. Chatting with May the housekeeper about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and how one of them had been busted for drugs. 'There was a leader in The Times - The Times of all places - asking for lenience in the case of these wretched pop singers.'

Oh no, that last one is actually taken from Devil May Care. Great, cos Fleming's Bond was always fulminating over Elvis or MacMillan's domestic policy, wasn't he? 8-)

What with Indy hanging out with his biker boy son, it's a bad week for cultural mish mashes.

Otherwise, the book doesn't seem well-written at all, just very contrived, while bits are just stolen from other sources - the film Live and Let Die (using drugs to infiltrate the nation's youth) or Moonraker (Bond's instant dislike to the villain), M taking up yoga (like his naturalism in Colonel Sun)...

Funny you picked out the rolling Stones bit -I was shocked to see it - as my very own Fan fic The Spider and the Fly is set around that very same drugs bust:
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/fanfiction/thespiderandthefly.php

-and according to the excerpt in the Times -M tells Bond of a Russian connection!

Granted the plot is not going to be a complete rip off from my tale but considering The Spider and the Fly predates DMC -I'm a bit shocked -and what with Higson using the name Goodenough in one of his Young Bond tales -and My Modesty Blaise used that same name in The Great Chrysanthemum as a cover name -I feel like these official authors are certainly scanning available fanfiction for inspiration! Or can it just be coincidence?

Lazenby880

darenhat wrote:

If this novel doesn't do well, I doubt it will be any reflection on Faulk's ability. On the other hand, if Faulk's novel does well then he certainly deserves all of the credit.

Isn't that a bit of having one's cake and eating it too? If it does poorly, Mr Faulks deserves none of the responsibility. Yet if it does well, Mr Faulks deserves *all* of the credit! I rather think the immense publicity push to which we have been subjected over here in the UK (as well as the Faulks name) might have something to do with its success!

I have to confess that I am fairly disappointed with this excerpt. It is an excerpt, to be fair, and probably not representative of the novel overall. Nevertheless, it is possible to make some comment. It *does* read as a pastiche. Mr Faulks is a very talented writer. Birdsong is a very good novel, and he can convey atmosphere wonderfully. And while I was somewhat sceptical of the whole 'writing as Ian Fleming' thing, I did expect there to be a literary style, a verve to the writing and an elegance which is evident in Faulks's other work. What I have read of Devil May Care, unfortunately, does not live up to these expectations. It is too knowing, too obvious, with the Stones/Beatles bit reading like the author is shouting 'Look, here, we're in the 1960s, innit!'.

Where is the subtlety, the erudition? It reads like an aping of Fleming. One of Amis's greatest strengths in Colonel Sun is his fidelity to the character of James Bond with the placing of him in a fairly non-Bond context. It is hard to quantify, but there is something faithful about Colonel Sun yet different. Consider the explosive opening. Bond isn't simply briefed by M, Bond is part of the villain's machinations at the outset. The girl is very much a Bond girl, M is very much M. And yet there is something different, daring and new about Colonel Sun.

I fear that Devil May Care will end up being simply a not-that-great re-hash of Fleming's structure. Perhaps the name and reputation of the author created sky-high expectations, however those expectations were based, it must be said, on the strength of his earlier novels. This extract almost reads as if it were written by someone different. It is not as serious, and seems to lack Faulks's astute eye for period settings. I very much hope that the full novel will be much better. We'll find out in a few days. At the moment though, it is like waiting for Casino Royale, and getting a glimpse Die Another Day.

Lazenby880

TOOTS wrote:

Sebastian Faux?

Indeed!

Napoleon Plural

The thing is, most of us are of the generation that loves the Stones and the Beatles, but Fleming's Bond is just incompatible with all that, as Fleming and Noel Coward were mates, they just hated all that stuff and the class 'up yours' inference of it. So Bond here is suddenly an old fogey, a Kingsley Amis type railing against youth. When we want to identify with Bond, really. It sort of highlights Lazenby's decision (the real one, not Lazenby880) to quit from Bond after one film as it was all so square. Faulks really should have skirted around this, hard to do if it's set in 1968 but still.

Christopher Wood remains the best Flemingesque writer imo, for his two novelisations. They're just effortless, he nails it.

scaramanga1

Napoleon Plural wrote:

The thing is, most of us are of the generation that loves the Stones and the Beatles, but Fleming's Bond is just incompatible with all that, as Fleming and Noel Coward were mates, they just hated all that stuff and the class 'up yours' inference of it. So Bond here is suddenly an old fogey, a Kingsley Amis type railing against youth. When we want to identify with Bond, really. It sort of highlights Lazenby's decision (the real one, not Lazenby880) to quit from Bond after one film as it was all so square. Faulks really should have skirted around this, hard to do if it's set in 1968 but still.

Christopher Wood remains the best Flemingesque writer imo, for his two novelisations. They're just effortless, he nails it.

I agree pretty much with what you are saying there -and hence my experiment of combining 007 with the hip and young in The Spider and The Fly - Even though he forayed into that world which was quite alien too him -he was still a little divorced from it. No doubt Faulks' tale will come to the same conclusion -but Admiral Miles Messervy doing Yoga -Please! That is pretty damn ridiculous.

spynovelfan

I think it is almost certainly coincidence. I haven't read your fan fiction, and mean no offence by this at all, but the fact that Faulks' referencing of the Stones bust/Rees-Mogg article is an idea that I would have expected from a piece of fan fiction set in 1967. It sounds like you've made it more of a central theme, and good on you - as an aside, it's terribly forced, really the first thing one would consider doing and would then discard as being too obvious. Ditto the Chichester reference - that is the sort of thing Fleming did sometimes, but it wasn't good when he did it either, and he still did it better than this. The excerpt reads like a very good imitation of a very weak Fleming passage.

There's a Geoffrey Jenkins novel that was published in the Seventies where he has a Bond stand-in character, a British Royal Naval Commander, meet an M stand-in character. It's a fairly obvious nod to the debriefing scenes in Fleming. But he doesn't just have Bond turn up, flirt with a secretary, go in and have an unformed and illogical conversation with the M figure about a dire villain who, for no given reason, has suddenly come on the MI6 stand-in's radar and Bond has to rush off to... meet him. No: he used his thriller-writer's imagination, and came up with something rather Flemingish, but different. The Bond character learns his mother is about to die in Cape Town and flies there at once. But then he's greeted by security, whisked off in a helicopter and taken into an odd underground bunker in the middle of nowhere, which looks like something out of a sci-fi film. Inside, of course, is the M figure, who made up the story about the mother. We discover the Bond character resigned a year or so earlier; now he's been shanghaied back in.

Imagine if Faulks had done that! Instead, he's just rewritten the standard set-up Fleming used, which was always the weakest one. He's got a villain with a moneky's paw for a hand, which takes us firmly into parody of the Austin Powers variety and makesit hard to come back from, and we're soon to discover, I suspect, that just as diamond-smugglning gal Tiffany Case had a name that ironically punned on her profession, a beautiful woman involved in the heroin trade will be called something like Poppy Flowers.

I do hope the rest of it is a lot better than this!

Napoleon Plural

That's good stuff spynovelfan, welcome to the forum! However, in today's Sunday Times (UK) Faulks says he does ditch the out-there Bond girl names.

spynovelfan

Well, we know there's a girl called Poppy and that the plot is about heroin. Before reading the extract, I thought that was quite cool. Having read it, I'm worried. The approach is a lot more sledgehammer that I was expecting. It's the Sixties. May 1967, actually. Hippies everywhere. Guy with a monkey paw. I'm now worried he might have felt something like Penelope 'Poppy' Flower was terribly clever and Fleming-ish.

We'll see soon enough, though. Hope I'm wrong!

Lazenby880

spynovelfan wrote:

The approach is a lot more sledgehammer that I was expecting.

Quite. It is about as subtle as a daisycutter. Reading it again I am actually quite shocked at how poor ir is. I haven't read much of Faulks's work, only Birdsong and bits of other ones. I was under the impression that he handled period settings far better than this. Perhaps someone more familiar with Faulks's work can correct me, but this seems a fairly gagantuan drop in quality.

scaramanga1

Lazenby880 wrote:

spynovelfan wrote:

The approach is a lot more sledgehammer that I was expecting.

Quite. It is about as subtle as a daisycutter. Reading it again I am actually quite shocked at how poor ir is. I haven't read much of Faulks's work, only Birdsong and bits of other ones. I was under the impression that he handled period settings far better than this. Perhaps someone more familiar with Faulks's work can correct me, but this seems a fairly gagantuan drop in quality.

I must admit I was surprised having thoroughly enjoyed on Green Dolphin Street. but maybe we are getting ahead of ourselves. I mean the monkey's hand isn't a "real" Monkey's hand but actually a deformed one. so even though we may think it uneccessary for the villain to have a deformity - Faulks has basically followed the route we are all familiar with -Fleming's villains are not "normal" people. Faulks has chosen 1967 -so yes The summer of Love might actually be credible -Still I wouldn't have minded if it had been 1966 and then it could have had the world cup as part of the backdrop. Faulks is also taking Bond to what are essentially locations not really used by Fleming -but is apparently using these locales to provide exotic locations for the reader -this time its The Middle East in a period we are not familiar with. Yes the story is pastiche -but lets face it -that was his given brief - i think the full length novel will be Flemingesque enough -but sadly it will use a bit of both Fleming the master story teller and the Fleming -whose just going through the motions.
Still I'll be there on Wednesday getting my copy.

spynovelfan

scaramanga1 wrote:

Yes the story is pastiche -but lets face it -that was his given brief

I take all your points but this one, Scaramanga. I don't think pastiche was his brief. Faulks has said in several interviews that he didn't want to stay into pastiche, using that very word. Even in the introduction to the extract he says:

'I like parodying other writers and I thought I could “do” Fleming easily enough; but where a pastiche has 125 per cent of the author’s characteristics, in a homage or tribute I thought I should pull up short and incorporate perhaps only 75 per cent of the original manner. That would work.'

And I hope he has done that. This passage, however, reads to me like about 110 percent of the author's characteristics - not a straight Bond novel (I'm sorry but I can't take the monkey paw thing seriously however it is explained - and it is not explained!), but not quite full-blown parody either. Amis said he thought long and hard about whether to take on the project of writing a Bond novel because he didn't want to simply serve up a 'mere rechauffage' of previous ingredients. I don't think a third of that book works - but he did serve up more.

But let's see what Mr Faulks has done. I'm jumping the gun, I know.

Lazenby880

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article3993640.ece

And here's the second helping folks.

spynovelfan

Thanks for the link, Laz! That's restored my faith somewhat. A much smoother read. Not sure why Bond is quite so phased by a woman in his hotel room, but it's good solid stuff.

Hitch

Having skimmed over the first half of the first extract, I feel confident in predicting that Devil May Care will be either a car crash, a triumph or a triumphal car crash. Exciting, isn't it?

darenhat

I started to read the first extract and couldn't take it. It's awful! Bond chit chatting with May about the Beatles? The dialogue was atrocious to boot, as if the words were stuffed in the characters' mouths. Why does Bond have to tell May, his dependable housekeeper, how he likes his coffee? These moments do nothing to color the story IMO, but only try to convey that the author knows Bond drinks coffee and has a housekeeper named May, which makes the whole scene come off as tired and clumsy.

After the early comments that Barbara Broccoli thought it could have been a 'Fleming manuscript', I'm beginning to wonder if she's actually even read any Fleming.

If I buy this book, it won't be until I find it on the deep discount shelf.

Napoleon Plural

It was the reference to 'crocodile skinned luggage' or something that got me, very early on. And Bond 'at his flat in Chelsea'. It's dropping details in in a cliche way, Fleming would weave that stuff in far better, describe the view up the road to his Chelsea flat.

scaramanga1

spynovelfan wrote:

scaramanga1 wrote:

Yes the story is pastiche -but lets face it -that was his given brief

I take all your points but this one, Scaramanga.

I stand corrected -or do I?

here is the Cambridge dictionary definition of pastiche

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=57963&dict=CALD


He has been asked to immitate fleming's art -by writing DMC in Fleming's style -that to me is Pastiche. -However a good pastiche can be a work of art in itself if done well.

Napoleon Plural

The second one is not really so bad but doesn't quite read right. 'One of the most self-possessed women he had ever scene.' Oh really? Okay then... You're supposed to sort of give that impression Faulks, not just tell us.

I still don't feel it's really Bond as a real person, just a cardboard cut out. He has no animus.

Barbel

I've just bought my copy at Waterstone's- half-price and a set of Bond postcards thrown in. Looking forward to reading it.

darenhat

Lazenby880 wrote:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article3993640.ece

And here's the second helping folks.

The second extract is only slightly better. I struggled to get past the opening paragraphs of Bond 'burglar-proofing' his hotel room with the hair and talcum powder. As a reader, I don't need to know this. Here it serves only to show, again, that Faulks is familiar with what came before in Bond novels, which so far does not separate the author from any one else who has read Fleming. These details regurgitated so conspicuously in the story really ruin it for me.

Napoleon Plural

It's not just that, darenhat, it's just that it's taken directly from Doctor No! Hardly imaginative is it?

It's all Moonraker really, tennis match instead of cards at Blades... it's all 'a little bit of this, a little bit of that...'

Solaris

I am now up to chapter 4 in Devil May Care and my response to what I have read so far is generally good. Yes, it does have a similar problem to Die Another Day, (I know that sounds bad already but bare with me) In that it refrences to past books and events a little too much. However I am finding the story ingaging and I'm generally interested in the characters, especially Bond who is reflecting on whther he has comee to the end of his time as a double 0 agent.

If refrences to past Bond novels will annoy you then you will probably not enjoy this book. if tyou can look past these, part of me thinks Faulks might have been asked to refrence the past novels by IFP to commemerate the centenary or something, then you may well enjoy it. Its not Fleming, but it is Bond and for me it reads much better than any of the other continuation novels.

Btw, that extract with May, for me, reads better in context than it did as an extract but I still believe it was a very poor extract to choose, I would have chosen the assasination at the beginning, because that is a scene that is both Fleming and not Fleming at the same time.

Finally, the only thing that really bothered me about what I've read so far is how Bond acts around Moneypenny, he acts a lot more like he does in the early Connery films than he ever did in Fleming's novels.

If anyone else is currently reading it, post what you think so far.

PS. what do the postcards you get at waterstones look like? Because I preordered it at WHSmith for the same price, but minus the cards, (I had a voucher =D)

Barbel

I'm shocked at May calling our hero "Mr Bond"; it's "Mr James", Mr Faulks.

Loeffelholz

Have to admit...the initial extract was a bit underwhelming, with the subsequent two somewhat more reassuring. Still, I can't help but think that Mr. Faulks didn't take this exercise as seriously as I would have liked him to.

If I'd been given such a remarkable opportunity, I'd certainly have taken longer than six weeks to do it, regardless of how Fleming worked. The important bits are what end up on the page, not the daily minutiae of how it's actually produced.

That said, I'll be buying it today. I was flying back from California yesterday, and looked for it in the airports, but it hadn't got there yet. It's up next on my 'To Read' list.