Because of the lackluster reviews, I wasn't chomping at the bit to read DMC. Back in the spring, I found a hardback edition at a secondhand store for 50 cents. I figured there's gotta be at least 50 cents worth of entertainment in it...and there was - but only barely! Anyway, I finally got around to reading and finished it last night. I won't rehash what so many have already outlined here, but will echo their sentiments that the novel falls way short of anything Fleming put together. I'm a bit dismayed with the 'Faulks writing as Fleming' byline since the feeling I got from reading it was more like 'Faulks attempting to make Fleming look like a clumsy and muddled excuse for an author'. The obligatory nods to Fleming's Bond (May the 'Scottish treasure', the Bentley, The Morlands, etc.) were all ham-fisted into the novel. The characters seemed to exist only as caricatures of previous Fleming incarnations...like superado, I continually kept mistaking Chagrin for Oddjob. I never quite understood what Felix Leiter was doing there at the end, but I guess SB had to cram him in there somehow to celebrate the occasion. The 60's setting never rang true for me. Other than some geo-political references, the time-period seemed inconsequential to the plot. In retrospect, I think it was probably done more as an effort to keep the novel from being considered a follow-up to the last Benson entries.
I certainly would like to see some new Bond novels hit the shelf, but I don't think Faulks is our man. Just so I don't seem overly negative, the novel did have some fun elements to it. Faulks is skilled with dialogue...and I enjoyed the tennis scene, even if it was a knock-off of Goldfinger's golf match. The 'ekranoplan' or whatever they called it was a fun concept, albeit a bit underused.
Anyway...there's my two cents on my fifty cent purchase.
In the U.K at The Works bookshop found a Hardback book of Devil May Care printed by Doubleday which seems to be both American and British printing.
The cover is red with big black wording and a Bond figure across the spine.
It was only £2.99 (about $5). It seems to be a recovered reprint.
I have the paperback with Fleming essay in the back so this is cheap for a hardback, with an bit of an illustrated cover.
This was the worst book I've read in years; thankfully, I bought a used copy for $2 at the local library and still think I paid too much. Having the right period elements and the trivial inclusion of Mathis doesn't excuse a weak plot, poorly written villains, and a Bond who seems to have disassociative identity disorder given the author's unconcealed disdain for Fleming's/007's attitudes. Scarlet Papava gives Denise Richards a run for her money on worst Bond girl ever. I have nothing against Faulks - I liked Charlotte Gray - but this was a depressing shot at extorting fan money for a cheap product.
Flattery will get you nowhere, but don't stop trying.
I haven't read any other of Faulks' work: I'm sure he's brilliant. I do, however, have something against him. He took my favorite character and reduced him to a sniveling, spineless, up tight, mid-life-crisis-having poofta! What the hell? 'Writing as Ian Fleming' my ass! The first pages of Devil May Care were promising: the rainy description of Paris sucked me right in. 20 pages later though, I'm thinking "Wait, what am I reading here?".
Last night I was reading the New York and Berlin chapters of Thrilling Cities, which left me wanting more. Faulks just kept me thinking "I hope this gets good soon."
All you folks were smart getting this one on the cheap. I pre-orderd and paid full-tilt-boogie for this stinker.
You know what? I'll do the same thing for Carte Blanche. I never learn.
I picked up a copy from the library, have read 100 pages already (though as ChrisNo1 points out, that's only 60 pages in Fleming years thanks to the typeface). I enjoy it, like the locations of Paris, Rome and Marseilles, maybe enjoy the first 100 pages more than many Bond continuation books including Colonel Son (I disliked the kidnap of M) and any Gardner stuff. Not Wood's, though, they were better.
Gorner might be out of an Indiana Jones film but that's no bad thing. The tennis match in the Bois de Bologne gripped.
Snags however. The arrival of Scarlet just isn't very convincing or fleshed out. The book is a page turner but the names of various brands and locations seem thrown in for effect. It's ersatz Fleming really, you feel Faulks is winging it slightly and his heart isn't in it. There's a lack of conviction about the sex writing, or rather Bond's attraction, that's common to most of the other novelists bar Amis and Woods, who had a 'healthy' appreciation, one senses, for pornography. Okay, okay, but Fleming really was a dirty so and so and could communicate the lust necessary for Bond's world. The others are just time-servers when it comes to sex, it's there but that's all.
Fleming had a Bryonesque appreciation for natural beauty, a Wordworthian take on nature. He was also a snob, so his descriptions always were going somewhere, they had an attitude or angle to get around the reader's feeling of 'Here's a description for the sake of it' kind of thing. His take on Boulevard Haussmann in Thunderball, for instance. Actually, Faulks does have a bit of snobbery in his description of the Paris tennis club, but you feel he's apologetic about it. In a way, the British snobbery is all about feeling superior when the world is no longer dominated by the British Empire.
Oh, I didn't like Bond's dismissal of the 'credulous' faces gazing up at the Pope - is this meant to be Bond's view, Fleming's or Faulk's view? I'm not a Catholic myself, but it did seem a bit snobby. Oh, and the whole Bond in his Bentley going down Abbey Road where the Beatles are hanging out smoking dope man, it's too Austin Powers. Finally, the book is similar so far to a Fleming turkey that got made in the mid-60s starring Terence Howard and Omar Shariff about opium smuggling, introduced by Grace Kelly. All a bit, 'Hey, kids! Beward of the evils of drugs' type of thing.
Well, I finished it in a few days so it's a page-turner, albeit of a kind where you don't need to stop and savour the writing exactly. I liked it more than I thought, the first 100 pages were good enough, and it read better than the excerpts in a magazine released at the time, which was all Bond in his Bentley on the King's Road watching the hippies, a man out of his time, plus his housekeeper May ladling it on with her 'wee laddee' Scottish accent.
Scarlet is, that said, a bland lead straight out of John Gardner's books, she does have some erotic interest and her 'walk of shame', where she is made to parade naked over a glass runway, has some of the old Fleming sadism, though you get the feeling Faulks doesn't know if Bond or the reader should be turned on or not. There's another reason why Scarlet is so bland, a couple of plot reveals, but it doesn't excuse it and of course it make Bond look a right wally. It just makes the book look silly
because Bond is risking himself to look for her twin Poppy and Scarlet carries on the dangerous charade of her twin even in times of danger
. Oh it's crap really.
You can't fault Faulk's scope and ambition as the plot takes in Rome, Paris, Tehran, the outskirts of Tehran, Stalingrad, Moscow and Helsinki. And I enjoyed his product placement snob recommendations, even though they don't really work when it's set in the 1960s because that's the past now, we're not going to follow them, we want what's now. But I did get some info, some research that I don't from the other novels, a sense Faulks has done his background research in wines and champagne and so on.
But you do sense Faulks has bitten off more than he can chew and then finds that he doesn't have the appetite for it and in any case doesn't care for the taste. It's like, past page 100 he's thinking ok, I've proved I can write as Fleming, now what? Do I really have to finish this? And the reader feels the same. 'Writing as Ian Fleming' I took to mean in his style, but in fact I came to see that Faulks was looking to distance himself from Fleming's colonial attitudes. So Fleming not Faulks sneers that Bond sees the Middle East as 'the thieving nations' (this was Fleming's view, though it's unlikely he would have put it across so baldly in a Bond novel). And gradually Faulks the Guardian reader comes into play, we get a diatribe by Gorner against the Brits and their /our dodgy colonial history that Faulks seems to have sympathy with, we get bashed over the head with it. There's even one extraordinary moment when Gorner, in his villain's speech, talks how he could have bought up a newspaper like The Times, then hired an editor who would agree to poison the British way of life, buying up TV channels and spreading pornography into the mainstream... but it would take too long. Okay, a dig at Rupert Murdoch by Faulks, but it does lay his cards on the table.
Overall I'd have gone with a bleaker novel with a sense of mourning and loss, this time for a lost way of life, and maybe an affectionate association with a hippy flower child who just isn't that in itself, to give Bond some empathy. Sunsets and wistfulness for the end of an era and a recognition that time must move on anyway. You get little of this in Devil May Care. References to past assignments just make the whole thing less plausible.
I've no idea why it's called Devil May Care, it's just a generic title.
Comments
I certainly would like to see some new Bond novels hit the shelf, but I don't think Faulks is our man. Just so I don't seem overly negative, the novel did have some fun elements to it. Faulks is skilled with dialogue...and I enjoyed the tennis scene, even if it was a knock-off of Goldfinger's golf match. The 'ekranoplan' or whatever they called it was a fun concept, albeit a bit underused.
Anyway...there's my two cents on my fifty cent purchase.
The cover is red with big black wording and a Bond figure across the spine.
It was only £2.99 (about $5). It seems to be a recovered reprint.
I have the paperback with Fleming essay in the back so this is cheap for a hardback, with an bit of an illustrated cover.
Bleuville.
Last night I was reading the New York and Berlin chapters of Thrilling Cities, which left me wanting more. Faulks just kept me thinking "I hope this gets good soon."
All you folks were smart getting this one on the cheap. I pre-orderd and paid full-tilt-boogie for this stinker.
You know what? I'll do the same thing for Carte Blanche. I never learn.
Gorner might be out of an Indiana Jones film but that's no bad thing. The tennis match in the Bois de Bologne gripped.
Snags however. The arrival of Scarlet just isn't very convincing or fleshed out. The book is a page turner but the names of various brands and locations seem thrown in for effect. It's ersatz Fleming really, you feel Faulks is winging it slightly and his heart isn't in it. There's a lack of conviction about the sex writing, or rather Bond's attraction, that's common to most of the other novelists bar Amis and Woods, who had a 'healthy' appreciation, one senses, for pornography. Okay, okay, but Fleming really was a dirty so and so and could communicate the lust necessary for Bond's world. The others are just time-servers when it comes to sex, it's there but that's all.
Fleming had a Bryonesque appreciation for natural beauty, a Wordworthian take on nature. He was also a snob, so his descriptions always were going somewhere, they had an attitude or angle to get around the reader's feeling of 'Here's a description for the sake of it' kind of thing. His take on Boulevard Haussmann in Thunderball, for instance. Actually, Faulks does have a bit of snobbery in his description of the Paris tennis club, but you feel he's apologetic about it. In a way, the British snobbery is all about feeling superior when the world is no longer dominated by the British Empire.
Oh, I didn't like Bond's dismissal of the 'credulous' faces gazing up at the Pope - is this meant to be Bond's view, Fleming's or Faulk's view? I'm not a Catholic myself, but it did seem a bit snobby. Oh, and the whole Bond in his Bentley going down Abbey Road where the Beatles are hanging out smoking dope man, it's too Austin Powers. Finally, the book is similar so far to a Fleming turkey that got made in the mid-60s starring Terence Howard and Omar Shariff about opium smuggling, introduced by Grace Kelly. All a bit, 'Hey, kids! Beward of the evils of drugs' type of thing.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Scarlet is, that said, a bland lead straight out of John Gardner's books, she does have some erotic interest and her 'walk of shame', where she is made to parade naked over a glass runway, has some of the old Fleming sadism, though you get the feeling Faulks doesn't know if Bond or the reader should be turned on or not. There's another reason why Scarlet is so bland, a couple of plot reveals, but it doesn't excuse it and of course it make Bond look a right wally. It just makes the book look silly
You can't fault Faulk's scope and ambition as the plot takes in Rome, Paris, Tehran, the outskirts of Tehran, Stalingrad, Moscow and Helsinki.
But you do sense Faulks has bitten off more than he can chew and then finds that he doesn't have the appetite for it and in any case doesn't care for the taste. It's like, past page 100 he's thinking ok, I've proved I can write as Fleming, now what? Do I really have to finish this? And the reader feels the same. 'Writing as Ian Fleming' I took to mean in his style, but in fact I came to see that Faulks was looking to distance himself from Fleming's colonial attitudes. So Fleming not Faulks sneers that Bond sees the Middle East as 'the thieving nations' (this was Fleming's view, though it's unlikely he would have put it across so baldly in a Bond novel). And gradually Faulks the Guardian reader comes into play, we get a diatribe by Gorner against the Brits and their /our dodgy colonial history that Faulks seems to have sympathy with, we get bashed over the head with it. There's even one extraordinary moment when Gorner, in his villain's speech, talks how he could have bought up a newspaper like The Times, then hired an editor who would agree to poison the British way of life, buying up TV channels and spreading pornography into the mainstream... but it would take too long. Okay, a dig at Rupert Murdoch by Faulks, but it does lay his cards on the table.
Overall I'd have gone with a bleaker novel with a sense of mourning and loss, this time for a lost way of life, and maybe an affectionate association with a hippy flower child who just isn't that in itself, to give Bond some empathy. Sunsets and wistfulness for the end of an era and a recognition that time must move on anyway. You get little of this in Devil May Care. References to past assignments just make the whole thing less plausible.
I've no idea why it's called Devil May Care, it's just a generic title.
Roger Moore 1927-2017