Sorry I've taken time over this. I've started work again and it seems to be getting in the way. For Special Services will get its review posted this week.
John Gardner’s second James Bond novel features, for me, his most Fleming-esque title, which is derived from a true story. During an official war time visit to New York, Fleming outlined to William Donovan the structure and function of a national secret service. Donovan used this as a template for the fledgling C.I.A. For his efforts, Fleming was presented with a .38 Colt revolver inscribed with the moniker ‘For Special Services.’
Having found probably his best title, Gardner also paints his most traditional Bond adventure, one which bears more than a passing resemblance to Fleming’s novels, as well as offering a few deferential nods to the movie franchise. For Special Services was also a number one best seller, but here the similarities between Fleming and Gardner seem to drift apart.
The story starts exceptionally well with a tense plane hijack, thwarted in suitably vicious style by 007. The reintroduction of SPECTRE seems entirely appropriate and the early sections evoke the opening of Thunderball, as the executive committee congregates at a clapboard house on the Louisiana Bayou. The Leader, who is mysteriously also called Blofeld, executes a hapless minion in a suitably macabre fashion: a giant python kills and then consumes him in “an obscene dance of death.”
From here, Gardner wings his merry way through a story of fake Hogarth prints, elaborate Texan ranches, car chases, drugged ice cream, particle beam satellites and a one breasted villainess. There are a few tense touches, including a free falling elevator, a bedroom infested by harvester ants, an escape on a monorail and a worthwhile battle at NORAD H.Q. in the Cheyenne Mountains. He even spends time dissecting Bond’s emotions as he reflects on “the greatest lust for another man’s blood he had ever experienced.” FSS also contains a fair amount of wit among the moments of sporadic action, but it’s let down by a succession of bland characters, a trio of them the major bad guys.
Gardner’s biggest error however is with his leading lady, Cedar. This sleeper agent ticks all the boxes; she’s young and sexy and Bond recognises her as a professional from the start; she shows “a tranquillity which belied a fast working mind, accurate and deadly.” Yet, as the story progresses, Cedar becomes little more than a foil for a running gag about a cradle snatching secret agent. Cedar, of course, is the daughter of Bond’s best friend, Felix Leiter. We sense Bond will never take this heroine to bed, even if his best friend seems to permit it.
As FSS misses a central love story, Gardner provides another even less successful romance between Bond and Nena Bismaquer. Bond knows becoming involved with Nena is madness, but isn’t inclined to fight her off in the same way he avoids Cedar’s advances. Eventually, the married and neglected Nena wins him over with “her smile... which seemed to go like a lance to his heart.” Nena is as deliberate and obvious as Cedar; “You are in my power,” she cryptically tells Bond, “I need a good man... There’s evil here... more evil than you could dream of.”
The most evil creation at the bizarre Rancho Bismaquer is Walter Luxor, whose name conjures up the pharaohs. He’s described like Caron, boatman of the River Styx, with “a face which looked like a skull over which transparent skin had been tightly stretched” and a smile that resembles “a grim joke of death.” Bond likens his handshake to “clasping the palm of a corpse.” This is a fine villainous portrait, but Gardner then equips him with a “high pitched squeak” of a voice and this negates the aura of evil. It seems unlikely that Luxor would shout furiously at the henchman Mike Mazzard and even less likely he’d do it within earshot of Cedar.
There is an air of the ridiculous to the trio of villains in FSS and it isn’t helped by the main protagonist being rather inadequate. Marcus Bismaquer reads like a larger version of Anton Murik. He’s bold, larger than life, splendidly rich and infuriatingly inept socially, but he doesn’t really contribute anything towards the main plot. To that end, it is Luxor who is always the most threatening. The monstrous deaf mute Criton isn’t utilised at all and the final climax, a desperate shoot out at the Bayou, is under whelming.
Here Gardner reveals a plot twist, clearing up many of the idiosyncrasies of his characters, but it’s a desperate contrivance and the reader is left wondering exactly how Bond feels about it all. Gardner doesn’t tell us and we are left to guess at his emotions regarding Nena and SPECTRE. It is an unsatisfactory end to a fairly exciting novel, as FSS reads very well.
Gardner has constructed a good story, using Goldfinger’s attack on Fort Knox as a basis for SPECTRE’s assault on Cheyenne Mountain, and Bond’s role in the plan is well thought out. However after the early shenanigans, the middle section of the novel flags badly, bogged down with byplay between Bond, Cedar and the uninteresting supporting characters. Gardner spices it up with a horrific encounter between Cedar and the ants, “a constantly moving sea of creatures,” and a sexually charged contretemps between Bond and Nena.
He saves his best until last. Bond anticipates “a deep velvet blue night, with stars like diamonds” but is instead forced to escape under “a steam bath of hot air, with the sky at war... great sheets of lightning sizzled and cracked as though heaven had taken a pre-emptive strike.” The storm mirrors the death of a guard against an electric fence which “danced with a flash of blue fire... jerking and kicking [the body] as the massive voltage poured through him.” Pre-emptive indeed! When Bond is captured, his world turns “darker and darker, until he seemed to hurtle into space... and all knowledge was blotted out.”
Gardner rarely writes as well as this in FSS. Most of his descriptions tend to be longwinded. He simply isn’t very concise and it slows down the telling of a fairly suspenseful story. That he resolves the adventure in only four chapters suggests he concentrated far too much on building up to the climax and not enough on the eventual denouement. None the less FSS is an admirable follow up to Licence Renewed and provides a solid reintroduction of SPECTRE. Its disappointing Gardner’s haphazard approach to his characters mars an otherwise splendid story.
Icebreaker, John Gardner’s third continuation novel, starts at a cracking pace. The sinister fascist terrorist group the National Socialist Action Army (NSAA for short) assassinates a Soviet trade delegation in Tripoli and, a year later, James Bond is thrown to the wolves in an attempt to bring down its leader Count Konrad von Gloda.
The premise of the novel, that an aging Nazi is attempting to resurrect the glories of the Third Reich, has been touched on by authors before, but while James Bond has confronted terrorists, they’ve never had such an ideological slant. Gardner doesn’t quite make the most of this angle and the motive of his central villain remains somewhat obscure. We have to take the strength of his organisation at face value. Equally his perplexing plot, with cross and double cross, duplicity and secrecy does not bear close examination. The real success of the book is the frantic action and high drama, neither pausing for breath. It’s for that reason that Icebreaker is far and away Gardner’s most accomplished Bond novel to date.
Set predominantly in Finland and the snowy wastes of the Arctic Circle, Bond is used by M (and it transpires almost everyone else) as bait to lure Count von Gloda out of hiding. Von Gloda has “star quality... charisma... glittering grey eyes [and] an arrogant tilt of the head.” He recognises Bond as a worthy opponent and offers him a “look of near tangible menace.” At times he becomes enraged by Bond’s insolence. He interprets everything in black and white and is a man “who imagines the world is his destiny.” Von Gloda is a strong character, controlling the chess pieces of his espionage game from inside a hidden fortress, the Ice Palace.
The other pieces of the jigsaw are a quartet of spies, each of them an unreliable narrator. The aptly named Paula Vacker is a beautiful Finn, who shares a romantic past with Bond. This allows Gardner to dispense with a seduction scene. Instead our introduction to her is swift, concise and believable. We also learn something of Bond’s attitude’s towards women; during their courtship he steered clear of Paula until certain she is single, he tried (and failed) to impress her and became ruffled when the patron of a restaurant took a passing interest in her. Paula is occasionally vivacious, but not very enticing.
More tantalising is Rivke Ingber, an agent of Mossad. She is a delectable foil for Bond given to contradictory behaviour and changeable moods: “the possibility of friendship was offered and then withdrawn.” She’s armed with an “almost conscious sensuality” and a hypnotic “musical voice” that alters from “steel hard then back once more to softness.” Several times Bond considers she is an “ultra professional... a deadly young lady... copied from the Venus de Milo.” Bond’s encounters with her have an undercurrent of stealth and deliberate confusion. He correctly likens her to “a maze of secrets.”
Kolya Mosolov, a KGB officer, is equally duplicitous. His “features were like the sea” and he switches sides as easily as he switches languages. We know he speaks several, but Gardner makes him sound American most of the time. Kolya meets a suitably vicious end.
The final spy, the CIA’s Brad Tirpitz, is the least interesting character and almost irrelevant to the plot. His double, or possibly triple, cross displays Gardner’s lack of succinct plotting and alongside Rivke’s bizarre double-life as a Jew is the most unsatisfying element of the story.
The web Gardner has weaved unravels badly at the end. He spends two whole chapters untying his knots (one of the episodes is even entitled “loose ends”) and Bond himself states “I find it hard to swallow.” It does seem odd that M sends his top agent to work without the full facts and even odder that the NSAA has been penetrated by several foreign agents who all wait for 007 to arrive before announcing their real interests. It’s odder still that von Gloda appears in broad daylight and no-one, not even Bond, makes a move on him.
Bond seems to be losing his touch. He ignores Kolya’s cryptic warning that Rivke will “reappear when she’s ready” and ultimately falls for the villainess in much the same way as he was seduced by Nena in the previous For Special Services. As his friends betray him, Bond pictures them with “feet of melting wax” and has flashes of “damoclean” foresight, of “silent ghosts passing into dead ground.”
Yet the untidy resolution hardly matters here. Icebreaker is full of excellent action sequences which absorb the reader from the off. There is a nasty fight in Helsinki, a roadside battle with three snowploughs, a night time raid on an arms depot, an air strike on the Ice Palace, a gunfight at Vantaa airport and a chase through the snow covered tundra on skidoos; Gardner’s writing is alive and kicking and he fills the pages with vivid and memorable descriptions.
Taking the shapes and sounds of winter for inspiration, Gardner’s snow storms are “slanting, stinging” and the air itself appears as if frozen: “you could almost see the cold... you could cut it with a knife.” Bond passes an icicle laden tree, “its sharp tower fingering the sky... like a white cowled monk clutching a glittering dagger,” seconds before confronting two knife wielding thugs. The cries of wild Arctic wolves, “a blood chilling howl,” are compared to “a jet whine... like a wail carried on the wind.” There is a sense of bleakness, of endless dazzling white, interrupted by eruptions of violent colour, of the “crimson heart” of explosions and spilt blood.
Gardner’s best prose is saved for a torture scene during which Bond is dunked into a subterranean ice lake. The frozen water is like an explosion to the senses and Gardner portrays its brutal agony brilliantly. He likens immersion to being “enveloped in an invisible coat of sharp needles.” Bond resists, “his body jerking... like a puppet controlled by a convulsive master,” and experiences black outs and “streaking pain” as if “tiny animals [were] gnawing and biting into the numbed flesh” and “vipers lashed at his brain.”
Bond’s glimmer of hope is in the memory of “a summer day... of grass and hay.” Later Gardner elicits this memory again as Bond dreams of Royale-les-Eaux “as it used to be... the tricolour beds of salvia, alyssum and lobelia bloomed in a riot of colour.” Like the ice dungeon with its “single black eye” cut in the floor, it is a “cold spot... a single cold object,” the silencer of a gun, which draws Bond back to reality.
Gardner hasn’t previously been as ebullient as this and his prose lifts Icebreaker out of the ordinary. While his first two efforts were almost conspicuously reverential, Icebreaker reads like a genuine adventure novel. It’s unhindered by long references to Bond’s past, lacks Gardner’s usual pithy humour and is fast, solid and exciting. If the convoluted plot is ultimately unsatisfying, it doesn’t seem to matter as the violence and suspense keeps us frantically turning the pages.
I think you have talked me into reading Gardner's Icebreaker
"Oh look! Parachutes for the both of us! Whoops, not anymore!"
"You see Mr Bond. You can't kill my dreams. But my dreams can kill you!"
"Time to face destiny."
-Gaustav Graves in Die Another Day-
Role of Honour is a massive failure on almost every level.
John Gardner’s earliest 007 adventures mixed spurious violence with involving, clever plots; he drew us a fine central portrait of James Bond; and he wrote with a style worthy of fair critical consideration. While never rising to the standards of Ian Fleming, the three previous novels at least attested to the Bond legacy and with the most recent, Icebreaker, Gardner at last seemed to be finding his own platform. I had high hopes for Role of Honour when I first read it in 1985; I am still disappointed twenty five years on.
This book is dreadful. It starts with an ‘Italian Job’ style robbery, goes into horrendously dull detail about computer programs, war craft simulations and the EPOC nuclear arms systems (the latter could be half-true) and ends with a whimper in a hot air balloon.
James Bond hardly stretches his licence to kill in this one: there are a couple of half hearted car chases and a fairly exciting gunfight at a terrorist training camp, itself hindered by the feeling the set up is unnecessary. Still worse, Bond doesn’t even need to do any espionage. Everything is done for him by a succession of ‘deep cover’ agents, most of whom are not who they claim to be. One of the agents even turns out to be an old dalliance of Bond’s – so M’s had him under watch even when he’s off duty.
Towards the end of the story Gardner concocts a scene where the team comes together and hatches a plan to foil the bad guys. It reads like one of the scenes that end every episode of Scooby-Doo, where each character says ‘Oh I did this’ or ‘He did that’ and ‘I know what happens.’ There is something totally childlike about Role of Honour. While the story touches on adult themes of nuclear disarmament, computerized theft and terrorism, it is written in a simple, dispassionate style.
There is none of the flair Gardner displayed in Icebreaker and the action moves from scene to scene with the barest of creative style. There is no lyricism, no symbolism, no expressive similes; Role of Honour is spectacularly ordinary and there is hardly a quotable line in it. Gardner raises the bar briefly mid-novel with the brutal slow motion killing of four terrorists, the bullets “tearing through flesh, bone, arteries and sinews... leaving a cloud of fine pink and grey matter hanging in the air... a mushroom of blood and flesh,” but he seldom bothers to embellish the rest of the proceedings with such graphic sentences.
However, not content with dumbing down his prose, Gardner dumbs down all his characters. While Bond does precious little, he’s surrounded by a plethora of people who are all given childish alliterative rhyming names, like Percy Proud (this is a woman, believe it or not), Freddie Fortune (and so is this), Tigerbalm Balmer (curiously, this one is a man) and Harry Hopcraft. When he can’t make it rhyme, he provides a nick name: so Cindy Chalmer becomes Sinful Cindy, General Zwingli is called Rolling Joe and the chief architect of the piece, Dr Jay Autem Holy, is provided with a pseudonym, Jason St-John Finnes, and two monikers, Old Bald Eagle and Holy Terror. This is one of the poorest attempts of character building I’ve ever read, as if names are enough to tell us everything about a person.
In fairness Gardner tries to inject something more than the superficial into his main villains, Dr Holy and the terrorist Tamil Rahani. Holy is a computer genius who ultimately turns out to be something of an idealistic dreamer. At one point his “green eyes went bitterly cold, all sign of normal human life ebbing from them,” but as we’ve already seen him have a hissy fit, this menacing pose seems in direct contradiction to his earlier behaviour. Rahani, a businessman and the new leader of SPECTRE, is more interesting; given to military leanings, a “quiet calm” surrounds him, lending an air of “authority... an immense unflinching resolve.” Sadly that’s as interesting as these two get.
There really isn’t much more to say about this novel, except it’s mercifully short. The story is open ended, so the ghost of SPECTRE is set for another come back, I just hope Gardner can rediscover some of his own form in time.
Role of Honour is a massive failure on almost every level.
John Gardner’s earliest 007 adventures mixed spurious violence with involving, clever plots; he drew us a fine central portrait of James Bond; and he wrote with a style worthy of fair critical consideration. While never rising to the standards of Ian Fleming, the three previous novels at least attested to the Bond legacy and with the most recent, Icebreaker, Gardner at last seemed to be finding his own platform. I had high hopes for Role of Honour when I first read it in 1985; I am still disappointed twenty five years on.
This book is dreadful. It starts with an ‘Italian Job’ style robbery, goes into horrendously dull detail about computer programs, war craft simulations and the EPOC nuclear arms systems (the latter could be half-true) and ends with a whimper in a hot air balloon.
James Bond hardly stretches his licence to kill in this one: there are a couple of half hearted car chases and a fairly exciting gunfight at a terrorist training camp, itself hindered by the feeling the set up is unnecessary. Still worse, Bond doesn’t even need to do any espionage. Everything is done for him by a succession of ‘deep cover’ agents, most of whom are not who they claim to be. One of the agents even turns out to be an old dalliance of Bond’s – so M’s had him under watch even when he’s off duty.
Towards the end of the story Gardner concocts a scene where the team comes together and hatches a plan to foil the bad guys. It reads like one of the scenes that end every episode of Scooby-Doo, where each character says ‘Oh I did this’ or ‘He did that’ and ‘I know what happens.’ There is something totally childlike about Role of Honour. While the story touches on adult themes of nuclear disarmament, computerized theft and terrorism, it is written in a simple, dispassionate style.
There is none of the flair Gardner displayed in Icebreaker and the action moves from scene to scene with the barest of creative style. There is no lyricism, no symbolism, no expressive similes; Role of Honour is spectacularly ordinary and there is hardly a quotable line in it. Gardner raises the bar briefly mid-novel with the brutal slow motion killing of four terrorists, the bullets “tearing through flesh, bone, arteries and sinews... leaving a cloud of fine pink and grey matter hanging in the air... a mushroom of blood and flesh,” but he seldom bothers to embellish the rest of the proceedings with such graphic sentences.
However, not content with dumbing down his prose, Gardner dumbs down all his characters. While Bond does precious little, he’s surrounded by a plethora of people who are all given childish alliterative rhyming names, like Percy Proud (this is a woman, believe it or not), Freddie Fortune (and so is this), Tigerbalm Balmer (curiously, this one is a man) and Harry Hopcraft. When he can’t make it rhyme, he provides a nick name: so Cindy Chalmer becomes Sinful Cindy, General Zwingli is called Rolling Joe and the chief architect of the piece, Dr Jay Autem Holy, is provided with a pseudonym, Jason St-John Finnes, and two monikers, Old Bald Eagle and Holy Terror. This is one of the poorest attempts of character building I’ve ever read, as if names are enough to tell us everything about a person.
In fairness Gardner tries to inject something more than the superficial into his main villains, Dr Holy and the terrorist Tamil Rahani. Holy is a computer genius who ultimately turns out to be something of an idealistic dreamer. At one point his “green eyes went bitterly cold, all sign of normal human life ebbing from them,” but as we’ve already seen him have a hissy fit, this menacing pose seems in direct contradiction to his earlier behaviour. Rahani, a businessman and the new leader of SPECTRE, is more interesting; given to military leanings, a “quiet calm” surrounds him, lending an air of “authority... an immense unflinching resolve.” Sadly that’s as interesting as these two get.
There really isn’t much more to say about this novel, except it’s mercifully short. The story is open ended, so the ghost of SPECTRE is set for another come back, I just hope Gardner can rediscover some of his own form in time.
1 from 10
ROH represents a major drop in quality but I think 1/10 is a bit harsh...and it leaves you nowhere to go with later books
Role of Honour is a massive failure on almost every level.
1 from 10
I quite like Role Of Honour...not Gardner's best....but up there with them - for me anyway. Sure...it has its faults....but not as many as some of the others.
If this scores 1 out of 10 - I can't wait to see the scores given to Seafire & ColdFall)
Towards the end of Nobody Lives Forever, James Bond attempts to reach the SPECTRE stronghold by embarking on a dangerous moonlight swim through shark infested waters. While this certainly has a touch of déjà vu about it (think LALD), John Gardner’s handling of the scene lacks most of the suspense, drama and sheer poetical gusto of Ian Fleming. Hence the oncoming climax stutters and starts and eventually falls a bit flat, much like the rest of this episodic and rather violent story.
Nobody Lives Forever delivers more promises than Role of Honour, but is hamstrung by similar tendencies from its author. It lacks in-depth characterization, has little or no vivid detail and suffers from a less than engaging narrative. In this one, SPECTRE has put a price on Bond’s head and he embarks on a wild chase through Central Europe, avoiding assorted gangsters at every turn. Gardner complicates the plot with numerous cross and double cross and several unbelievable revelations; it has more holes in it than a sieve.
The story begins with Bond starting what turns into a nightmare of a holiday, but he really ought to know better and is already thinking his boss has set him up for a fall: “There was a sharp, steely look in his eyes that made Bond wonder whether something was being hidden from him.” 007’s definitely not the man he once was and his foibles haunt him throughout. We see the chink in his armour and so do the bad guys; “You’re an old fashioned gentleman...” says one, “You’d give your life to save a defenceless woman... the people you care for the most.” Bond knows it is true.
This is a rare moment of insight, but it is delivered in a rather obtuse fashion. Gardner doesn’t spend a lot of time describing anything here. He kicks off at breakneck speed and we’ve hardly paused for breath before Bond has saved a beautiful woman from a couple of hoodlums, avoided a bomb on the motorway and been implicated in the death of a Mafia hit man. This rapid fire storytelling has inherent problems which are evident as early as chapters one and two: everything happens so fast there is no time to build the tension, portray the main characters and untwist the plot.
I don’t care much for the people in this novel. There are two beautiful women, both of whom display a more than capable attitude to death and violence. They remain “buoyant, even elated, as though killing men was like swatting flies” and Bond is shocked and slightly resentful of their ambivalence. Neither Sukie nor Nannie is memorable. Their odd behaviour opens questions which are unsatisfactorily resolved very late in the novel.
It isn’t only the girls who prove to be not what they appear, for almost everyone Bond encounters is out to kill him. They perfect very elaborate schemes to do so, including lots of gun play and a rather nasty confrontation with a vampire bat. One of the better scrapes involves Paul Cordova, a dwarf assassin, who is killed by Lake Maggiore. Another features a corrupt and very creepy Austrian policeman known as Der Haken. He meets a suitably grisly demise impaled on a butcher’s hook. Both sequences lack any subtlety, but remain horrifically memorable.
Much better is the hoodwinking of Dr Kirchtum, a reluctant KGB operative who has been offered funding for his Salzburg clinic in exchange for favours, “the odd visitor to be kept under sedation... sometimes a body, occasionally some surgery.” Unlike most of the protagonists, Kirchtum has a desperate, genuine air to him. It was the only twist I didn’t see coming and even Bond remarks the doctor's acting is worth an Oscar. Generally though everyone is very black and white and grey in Nobody Lives Forever; it lacks technicolor portraits.
Even when Bond comes face to face with SPECTRE’s kingpin on the aptly named Shark Island, the scene lacks high level suspense and intrigue because Gardner has reduced Bond’s nemesis to a rotting, reticent husk. Tamil Rahani is suffering from terminal cancer; Bond remembers him as being “dark skinned, muscular, radiating dynamism... a ruthless powerful leader” but now he’s “reduced to a human doll... the shrunken face with skin the colour of parchment.” Rahani hardly says a word and his portrait is as thin as his skin.
The novel climaxes in a fierce gun battle accompanied by copious explosions. It’s rather well depicted, has plenty of bite and contains several quite fearful images; disappointingly it is also very swift.
Nobody Lives Forever won’t win many prizes for imagination and originality, but it’s okay as far as it goes. The problem is: it doesn’t go far enough. Gardner falls far short of the standard he set with Icebreaker. He is also beginning to reference himself. The story is blatantly repetitious in terms of ideas, characters and literary content. While not as bereft of style as Role of Honour, it is badly in need of some narrative deftness, realistic personas and a different descriptive colour to monochrome.
I'm going to have to agree with some of that. Despite not having read ROH yet, from the description given, it sounds pretty awful. You said something about half-hearted car chases. That just puts me off plain and simple. For me, the car chases or what ever sort of chases, are my favorite scenes, and a half effort doesn't sound very appealing.
"Oh look! Parachutes for the both of us! Whoops, not anymore!"
"You see Mr Bond. You can't kill my dreams. But my dreams can kill you!"
"Time to face destiny."
-Gaustav Graves in Die Another Day-
Having just read the Nobody Lives Forever review, I can picture a style that is off from a Bond novel. It seems to be more of a typical action movie like Ronin or Slow Burn than a spy Bond movie.
Also, the use of SPECTRE is odd. Because in YOLT, Blofeld is using the members of Black Dragon. It sort of signals that SPECTRE was destroyed at the end of OHMSS.
"Oh look! Parachutes for the both of us! Whoops, not anymore!"
"You see Mr Bond. You can't kill my dreams. But my dreams can kill you!"
"Time to face destiny."
-Gaustav Graves in Die Another Day-
Having just read the Nobody Lives Forever review, I can picture a style that is off from a Bond novel. It seems to be more of a typical action movie like Ronin or Slow Burn than a spy Bond movie.
Also, the use of SPECTRE is odd. Because in YOLT, Blofeld is using the members of Black Dragon. It sort of signals that SPECTRE was destroyed at the end of OHMSS.
That's a good analogy re: Ronin etc.
As I understand it, Gardner deliberately chose to alter the standard Bond formula (e.g. Bond meets a girl, infiltrates the villain's lair, finds out the plot is bigger and more world threatening than first thought, kills the villain and gets the girl) because he was already bored with it. This after only 4 novels!
I also read that he was seriously ill while he wrote ROH and while not wishing to strike a man when he's been down, I think he should have had the guts to stand up to Glidrose and say "I'm too ill to write."
I'd agree with you re: SPECTRE. I don't touch on them much in the reviews because frankly their inclusion adds nothing nor takes anything from the stories. While SPECTRE's return in FSS was nicely handled, with these two Gardner could just as easily have called the organisation QUANTUM, THRUSH, YANNIS, STENCH, ___________ (fill in the blank) etc.
I also read that he was seriously ill while he wrote ROH and while not wishing to strike a man when he's been down, I think he should have had the guts to stand up to Glidrose and say "I'm too ill to write."
I'd agree with you re: SPECTRE. I don't touch on them much in the reviews because frankly their inclusion adds nothing nor takes anything from the stories. While SPECTRE's return in FSS was nicely handled, with these two Gardner could just as easily have called the organisation QUANTUM, THRUSH, YANNIS, STENCH, ___________ (fill in the blank) etc.
Well said. {[]
"Oh look! Parachutes for the both of us! Whoops, not anymore!"
"You see Mr Bond. You can't kill my dreams. But my dreams can kill you!"
"Time to face destiny."
-Gaustav Graves in Die Another Day-
Once you get past the terrible title, No Deals, Mr Bond is a rip-snorter of a novel. John Gardner follows the path he laid in his previous opus, but while Nobody Lives Forever felt underwritten, episodic and therefore slightly stilted, this time he succeeds in creating an involving and exciting story with strong characters and well constructed scenarios.
Bond has been abandoned by the Secret Service again. M orders him to trace three repatriated agents, who were part of an aborted undercover operation entitled Cream Cake, and in the process unmask a traitor. Two other agents have already died in grisly circumstances, but M can’t allow Bond to operate officially; the Cream Cake affair is a closed book. Both M and Bond recognise that he needs “a great deal more than good luck.”
The ensuing story is a good old fashioned chase thriller. Bond tracks down first one female agent and then another and the locations shift from Mayfair to Dublin and Ireland to Paris and finally Hong Kong. At every turn Bond is pursued the bad guys, mallet wielding heavies, Garda police, SMERSH agents, Chinese thugs and lastly four gladiatorial thugs armed to the teeth and dangerous to a man.
The action is suitably brisk and thoroughly entertaining. The novel kicks off with an explosive prologue and hardly lets up. Early on Bond rescues the sophisticated Heather Dare from a vicious attacker who “came at her like a human typhoon... the shattered mirror reflected the gory patches and the great star shaped cracks produced a kaleidoscope of black and red.” There are a couple of chases, a battle with two devil dogs with “stale stinking breath” and latterly a furiously gruesome slow motion encounter with a hit man whose dead body flips “as though he were some grotesque jack-in-the-box.”
The most rewarding feature of No Deals, Mr Bond is the sense of period. Published in 1987, the Cold War, while thawing, was still upper most in people’s minds. There was a genuine fear of the Soviet Union and its ambitions. The closeted, secretive Russian espionage world finally makes an appearance in Gardner’s writing and he rewards us with some well observed passages about spies and spying.
Bond’s daily life is remarked upon and when a mission beckons he anticipates it with “an extraordinary sinking in the pit of his stomach.” This Bond has an odd turn of phrase (“old love... dear sweet lucky Heather”) but he feels much more real than at any time since possibly Licence Renewed. He displays a touch of arrogance; he’s also irritable and prone to moments of almost panic as well as clarity. There is confusion in this man’s psyche and it gives him an edgy vulnerability unseen before. He’s also got his sense of humour back and Gardner’s one liners are something of a treat. He even has a little pop at his own authorship (or possibly the up and coming Timothy Dalton) by claiming Bond was “resurrected against much criticism.”
The two opposing department heads, M and Chernov, are seen as polar opposites, but as the latter points out, M is equally callous: “These little girls were used by your own cold blooded operations planners.” Bond constantly queries his bosses motives, decides not to trust anyone and, when confronted by the defecting Maxim Smolin, he muses that “in this business coincidence was a dirty word... there was no such thing.” By the end of the adventure he’s quite fed up with all the betrayal and is “tired of being the odd one out.” When Bond meets one of his adversaries, the villain suggests they’ve been “following each other in office paper chases.” It's a palpably real world.
In that respect the two Soviet Generals, Smolin and Chernov, are solid, believable characters. They share a manic idealism inside a cool exterior. Chernov, in particular has an air of menace and superiority about him that Gardner has seldom reached with his bad guys. “A wisp of a smile” is all he needs to tell us Chernov is humourless; he’s sleek and powerful with a tone of voice “usually quiet and calm [which] made him even more sinister.” He recognises the quality of his opponent, talks “as though he genuinely liked Bond” and is put out when 007 refuses to shake his hand. Aptly he’s codenamed Black Friar.
The girls are less successful. Heather Dare is a clever early foil, but she’s saddled with an unlikely love affair to service the plot. At the very moment Heather should become interesting she is sidelined in favour of the tiresome Ebbie Heritage. Ebbie is seductive, sexy and precocious, yet this means she amounts to little more than a stroppy young woman. At times she pouts and argues like a teenager. So exasperated is Bond he even “realises he’s talking to her like a child.” It doesn’t stop him having plenty of enthusiastic sex with her though, the old rogue.
As always with Gardner, he shows a tendency to over elaborate his narrative. There are too many double agents, too many nick-names and too many knots to unravel. He spends a lot of time explaining the same things. It’s as heavy going for the reader, as it is for 007. The final twist is utterly preposterous and serves no purpose to the story. It almost ruins the whole novel.
And that’s a shame because the last third of the adventure, the Hong Kong section, is very good. There is a real sense of the city and its bustle of people, the harbour where “junks and sampans ploughed” and new stylised buildings with “porthole windows... designed by an optician” keeping watch over the streets below. Bond likens it to a futuristic vision, “the elusive familiarity... came from Fritz Lang’s Metroplois.”
However even in modern Hong Kong, the Officer’s Club resides with tales of “boozy majors” and Bond is pursued by traditional nasty gangsters. His contact is the unscrupulous carrion Big Thumb Chang. He is one of the novel’s most durable characters. Chang received the peculiar nick-name because of his elongated thumbs, which the locals claim “had grown like this from counting the large sums of money that came his way.” He’s a weasely, chatty, pirate, “a toy with a spring in its neck.” It is also in Hong Kong where Bond meets the operative Swift. Something of an enigma, Swift dips into the tale and flies out again. He’s as studious and calm as Chernov; when Bond sees his corpse it’s as if the man is alive: “there was a terrible stillness about him and the grey eyes looked steady and sightless into the sky above.”
There really isn’t a lot wrong with No Deals, Mr Bond. Yes, it’s overpopulated and overcomplicated, but what Gardner does well is bring his focus back onto the world of James Bond: the spies and spy masters, the skull duggery, the lies and the deceptions, the careful planning, the serendipitous errors, the sickening violence and the inevitability of death. If it isn’t quite up to the standards of Icebreaker, it certainly gives the impression Gardner was coasting for a year or two and hopefully, thankfully, he’s now back on track.
7 from 10
LoeffelholzThe United States, With LovePosts: 8,998Quartermasters
I seem to remember liking that one as well, Chris; nice review -{ But you're right---it's the worst title ever.
Check out my Amazon author page!Mark Loeffelholz
"I am not an entrant in the Shakespeare Stakes." - Ian Fleming
"Screw 'em." - Daniel Craig, The Best James Bond EverTM
In Scorpius James Bond confronts an idealistic terrorist organisation called The Society of the Meek Ones. Set predominantly in Britain during an election campaign the novel has a contemporary as well as a modern relevance. Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister in 1988, had herself narrowly escaped death during a terror attack in Brighton and the IRA was still prevalent in Northern Ireland. Now international terrorism from the likes of Al Qaeda has catapulted recent atrocities to the top of the news headlines. The difference between these organisations and John Gardner’s fictional creation is that while the real life groups have a clear philosophy to their violent acts, this fictional one does not.
Led by a demented religious maniac, Father Valentine, formerly known as Vladimir Scorpius, an arms dealer, the Meek Ones are a mixture of suicide bombers, death wishers, purity worshippers, bizarre cultists, mesmerist, brainwashers, drug runners and technological bank robbers. Gardner is touching on too many themes. Worse, he never explains properly why Scorpius is involved in disrupting the British, and later the American, elections. He mentions he’s being paid to do it, but we never learn by whom.
While this is frustrating enough, Gardner then has to try to explain it all; in doing so he fractures the narrative and we sit through endless meetings between M, Bond, Tanner and numerous other secret service or medical personnel. There are a few neat references to Bond’s spying world, particularly when he trades identities at a branch of Barclay’s bank, but precious little excitement, aside from an early car chase and a couple of gunfights. Most of the rest of the action takes place ‘off the page’ as it were. Scorpius is a slow plod.
With little or no thrills to spice up the tale it is left to the characters to try and carry the plot. Bond is at his arrogant worst here. He seems to be getting more callous with every novel. He’s at his most relaxed in his Chelsea flat. Gardner painstakingly describes Bond’s breakfast routine. Bond may be chilled out, but I was experiencing acute déjà vu. I think it’s the fifth time I’ve read about eggs being boiled for “three and one third minutes” and I’m fed up with it. Gardner is re-cycling his own literature merely to increase the page count.
Bond has never sounded as pompous as in Scorpius. He inspects the heroine’s flat and notes “two good prints [a Frink and a Hockney] which must have belonged to her, for no landlord would ever have left them in a rented apartment.” Later on he is appalled by the mess of fashions at the villain’s hideout, all “vulgarity and pretensions” and wonders why Scorpius is “obsessed by reproductions... an odd attitude from one who could afford the originals twice over.” While hiding in a safe house Bond is angry that the suits come from Marks and Spencer and the wine from the local supermarket, “he fussed and grumbled over the lack of sartorial taste.” This from the man Fleming had drinking Old Granddad bourbon! There is huge snobbery attached to these passages and it sits uncomfortably with the familiar character of Bond. He always liked the good life, but he could slum it too. Gardner seems not to agree.
Bond isn’t alone. M and Tanner, both military types, express similarly unrefined opinions about an uncouth SAS man, the American intelligence services and some rich upper class bankers. One of the characters is constantly referred to as the “Hon Trilby Shrivenham,” as if giving her a title means we’ll care more about her fate (which we don’t). M has an outburst of pique when witnessing a television broadcast of a bombing “My God! My God! ... Get them, James! Kill them! Wipe them off the face of the earth!” I wondered who was more demented for a moment, Scorpius or M.
At the finale, Bond also acts like a lunatic. His inappropriately named amour Harriet Horner has been killed. Bond doesn’t care much for her until the last chapters, when Gardner invents a fake wedding and virtually forces them to have sex. Suddenly Bond’s filled with grief stricken madness and pursues the villain with an uncommon zeal, shooting him in the hands and feet before leaving him to the “wriggling squirming mass” of water moccasins. Scorpius ends up pleading for his life. It’s an unedifying end to a rather good antagonist, for one of the few things Gardner has got right is his portrait of Vladimir Scorpius / Father Valentine.
Scorpius is a sinister intense villain. His “eyes glittered, as though fires lay deep within them” and he is “cursed with a strong will, combined with overdeveloped hypnotic strength.” He inhabits a topsy-turvy world where “evil became good, wrong became right... obscene and horrific deeds were works of goodness and charity.” Bond likens him to Cesar Borgia; he commands his underlings with “the gesture of a medieval prince” and is slick and ghoulish, “a voice of honey and milk, mixed with strychnine.” Scorpius’ hidden retreat is camouflaged among the unreal oasis of Hilton Head, South Carolina, “Spanish moss dripping down towards the verges... a place for the lotus eater.” It’s far away from dreary grey dangerous London and the perfect place for the torture of souls.
Bond’s route to Ten Pines is rather unlikely, snatching a glimpse of Scorpius / Valentine on television and then being kidnapped by an over enthusiastic SAS officer Pearlman. Bond suspects Pearlman for a traitor, but the man is only out to rescue his daughter. Small reward for him: by the book’s end Bond expects the poor man to kill his own offspring. Our hero seems to have lost all semblances of humanity; much like his adversary.
Pearlman does provide a moment of sanity among the nonsense: “This is a bloody time for the world. Like the Bible says, there’s a time for living and a time for dying. We live in an age when it’s a time for dying suddenly, most often by war, or the hands of terrorists striking in the streets. People such as us were born to die that way.” For once Bond sagely agrees.
None the less the sense of disbelief continues to the very end as Gardner provides another unlikely twist involving Chief Superintendent Bailey. The Special Branch officer’s downfall is constructed in a completely abstract manner and while it fits the profile of the story, it is telling that Gardner doesn’t bother to explain how Bailey came under the influence of the Meek Ones. We don’t believe it for a second.
And that’s the main problem with Scorpius. Gardner isn’t breaking any new ground here, despite a better than average premise. He tries to put too much flesh on the bones of the narrative and subsequently it becomes a flabby mess.
It’s a pity for the novel starts very well as a missing girl wanders to her death in London. The only clue to her intentions is Bond’s telephone number, yet we are later told he wasn’t necessarily the prime target. That 007’s involvement seems to be a case of wicked serendipity makes the eventual linear narrative somewhat implausible and only serves to highlight how difficult Gardner has made things for himself.
Perhaps the last word should go to the flustered and confused hero himself: “Nothing else made sense in Scorpius’ nightmare world.”
John Gardner’s movie tie-in novel Licence To Kill has moments of interest, but generally it follows the line of all movie adaptations: offer a straight forward, no frills, written interpretation of what the audience sees on screen.
There is none of the character insight we were treated to in Christopher Wood’s James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me; nor does Gardner dramatically change any of the action sequences or the narrative. The story of Licence To Kill needs no explanation and Gardner recreates it faithfully, with a few twists.
Perhaps his most interesting ploy is to alter the cinematic point of view. A brilliant example is where Gardner has Bond plant a miniature bugging device in Sanchez’s office. This was not included in the film, but it allows Gardner to explain the true purpose of Professor Joe’s fundraising activities (a point never made expressly clear in the film) and also makes Bond’s assassination attempt more professional (Bond can listen to the conversations in the office, so he knows when everyone is in another room). Whether the sequences were originally written like this, I couldn’t tell, but Gardner’s take shifts the emphasis of those scenes onto James Bond and away from Franz Sanchez. Later on, particularly at the Meditation Centre, he struggles to continue the ploy, but it is a manful attempt to keep 007 centre-stage.
Equally he doesn’t forget the history of the literary Bond and tries to intertwine this piece with his own continuation novels. So Felix Leiter, who has already had his arm and leg eaten by a shark in Live and Let Die, gets to experience it all over again in a chapter entitled “Lightning Sometimes Strikes Twice.” Della’s demise is treated with some care, as Bond recalls the death of his own wife. There is even a clever little sequence where Bond flies a Beaver bi-plane to the isolated Key West home of an old associate, David Wolkovsky, the CIA man from Scorpius. It’s unfortunate then that the character of Milton Krest plays such a large part, along with his yacht Wavekrest, because Bond of course has already met one Milton Krest, in The Hildebrand Rarity. It wouldn’t have taken much for Gardner to have changed a name, a spelling, or dropped a hint Bond remembered meeting a man with a similar name and yacht.
Occasionally Gardner embellishes the dialogue we see on screen and this works well on most occasions. The dialogue generally falls flat at the same moments as it does in the film: the love scenes. Seduction and sex hasn’t been Gardner’s forte anyway, but as lifted from the movie, they are cringe worthy moments when written down here. Bond and Pam’s prickly romance is even more unlikely on the page than it was in the cinema. At one point Bond asks: “Why could he never resist a beautiful girl?” Why indeed. More concerning is Gardner’s attempts to lampoon the movies.
It’s good that he cuts out the opening sky dive into a wedding, but from here Gardner seems to be gently poking fun at the franchise. He refers to a stripper as dancing “in a manner that would make it fun to watch paint dry;” he mocks Sanchez’s city state, saying the policemen “look as if they are straight from Ruritania,” the latter of course is the famous imaginary country in ‘The Prisoner of Zenda,’ a place as unreal as Isthmus; he recognises the silliness in the bar room brawl, considering “all it needed was a pianist who didn’t stop playing;” and he overplays Pam Bouvier’s stroppiness and Q’s favourite uncle routine. Yet these shenanigans, while quite humorous, sit ill next to the complex character of Franz Sanchez.
Gardner doesn’t spend a lot of time describing anyone’s persona in this novel; the girls are gorgeous, the men threatening. Sanchez however is given the appropriate space: “Bond thought he was probably one of the most callous people he had ever met... On the surface Sanchez was a calm calculating man... behind the lazy charm lay complete indifference to suffering... the terrible cloak of despair, self-loathing, deceit and crime which he activated from afar.” There is something distant about Sanchez, something overpowering and other worldly, the tentacles reaching out to cover the world. Robert Davi captured this brilliantly in the film, but there is something missing on the page. A few well scribed passages can’t make up for the glibness of lines like: “[he] became still, like a snake or some other dangerous creature.”
Bond, who in the film starts to resemble Sanchez in his heightened, impulsive state, is described with hardly a word of interest. We understand what he wants to achieve, but the revenge motive seems very weak in the novel. It needs Dalton’s acerbic expressions to bring those motivations alive. Licence To Kill isn’t a bad novel, but it is very, very ordinary.
You're going to think me strange, but I disagree with much of this consensus (but differing opinion's make life interesting, of course).
I didn't think much of either Licence Renewed, For Special Services or Icebreaker (feeling the latter, in particular, was a touch too long). I loved Role of Honour (but would recommend starting from page 100 as the computer stuff bogs the beginning down considerably). I also loved Nobody Lives Forever, but from No Deals, Mr Bond painfully dull and skipped to the end. That was about eight months ago, and I'm currently taking a break before tackling the rest of Gardner's series.
You're going to think me strange, but I disagree with much of this consensus (but differing opinion's make life interesting, of course).
I didn't think much of either Licence Renewed, For Special Services or Icebreaker (feeling the latter, in particular, was a touch too long). I loved Role of Honour (but would recommend starting from page 100 as the computer stuff bogs the beginning down considerably). I also loved Nobody Lives Forever, but from No Deals, Mr Bond painfully dull and skipped to the end. That was about eight months ago, and I'm currently taking a break before tackling the rest of Gardner's series.
Nothing wrong with differing opinions.
I'm surprised you considered Icebreaker too long, although I agree the early scenes in Maderia are unnecessary. The action sequences in LR, FSS & IB are excellent and very well realised, the plots are coherent and the characters well drawn. These are the focus point sof any good novel, so I'm surprised you prefer the sketchy ROH.
I don't understand how you can claim to love a novel that you start reading from half way in. That suggests you consider the first half as rubbish, so you don't want to read it.
ROH is a poor book IMO because the first 100 pages IS DULL and the personas featured during this section ARE VERY THIN and SHOW MINIMAL TO ZERO CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. Gardner has nothing interesting to say about any character in ROH. You won't convince me.
My review for NLF clearly states I was disappointed with the plot, which is very one-dimensional and only gets interesting in the final few chapters. While Gardner has tried to break the 007 formula with this one, I feel he struggles to create strong characters (similar problems as with ROH). His villain is particularly poor.
NDMB has many detractors (based chiefly on its title!) but it's interesting you find it dull as the 'chase' scenario featured here is much better realised than in NLF, the cast is better drawn (excepting the heroine) and the locations have a menace to them which is missing in the picture postcard world of NLF. Again, you say you skipped sections of this book, so I'm not entirely convinced you are offering valid feedback.
Like you I am taking a short break. I will resume the final wrasp of John Gardner novels in July.
Maybe I should give No Deals another go. It was the seventh consecutive Gardner I read, so was probably getting a bit complacent.
For me it was the one and only. Although a good spy novel it didn't feel very "Bond." I much prefer just reading Fleming...even Amis' Colonel Sun left me wanting, not to mention Devil May Care. I will keep trying with the continuation novels, but nobody's come close to matching Fleming IMHO.
Published in 1989, Win, Lose or Die was John Gardner’s ninth 007 novel. As with his previous few adventures, Gardner tries to twist his established formula, but it’s already creaking with age. There are interesting parallels with Broccoli’s film productions, which took on an increasingly weary look in the 1980s. The films tended to be episodic and long winded, substituting big set pieces and conundrum-like plots for good characters and a clear narrative. Gardner suffers a similar fate here.
Briefly, Bond is sent back to the Royal Navy as a Captain, so he can oversee security on a NATO training exercise called Landsea, which is a ridiculously elaborate front for a peace conference between the PM and the US and USSR Presidents. We don’t learn this until the end of the book and how we get there takes an awfully long time. Bond is also left unaware of the full details of his mission. This leaves him doing a certain amount of unnecessary detective work and is a wearisome repetition of a plot device Gardner has already used in Nobody Lives Forever and No Deals Mr Bond.
The most striking illustration of this is when Bond is sent “on a Christmas holiday” to Ischia, essentially as a stalking horse to tempt one of the villians into assassinating him. Gardner wastes a lot of time here, introducing a mawkish love story with the rather fetching Beatrice, a girl who has rediscovered the lost art of kissing and "practised the craft in a way that had been hidden for centuries." It ends in sudden tragedy, as befalls every heroine who falls madly in love with Bond. After this 007 ends up spending a whole week being debriefed by the villians, who rather than kill him, disguise themselves as good guys and send him back into the fray. When, towards the end of the novel, Bond is told the truth, he begins to wonder (as we do) why no-one kills anyone straight off any more. There is an explanation but it’s hopelessly preposterous.
Subsequently almost every chapter has a plot hole which Gardner has to spend time filling. The list is endless, but perhaps most tellingly he never bothers to explain how MI6 came across the recognition tagline “Health depends on strength.” It’s a remarkable stroke of ill-luck that the chief villain forgets to use it near the climax and avoids detection for another thirty pages.
The narrative is confused further by Gardner’s inability to restrict the number of character’s he creates. There must be almost thirty of them and they all have his usual silly names and even dafter nick-names. He gives us three women who are all described like naive, blushing innocents, when each one is a trained killer. The worst offender here is a Russian called Nikola Ratnikov. She’s a body guard to the President, but gets hysterical when confronted with a dead body and ends up making love to Bond because she “feels so alone, so afraid.” It’s a ridiculous characterisation. The others fare equally badly.
The less said about the main villain, the impossible to pronounce Bassam Baradj, the better. This is a man of a hundred aliases whose sole aim is to procure $600 billion for no reason other than his own personal greed. To do this he’s funded and trained a team of expendable terrorists coined BAST, the Brotherhood of Anarchy and Secret Terror. Bond likens to SPECTRE. But they have none of SPECTRE’s panache; even their acronym is rubbish. Never has a protagonist’s motive been less involving.
Even James Bond is bland and uninteresting. Since M never briefs his top agent properly 007 becomes (again) little more than an excitable pawn in a world of spies governed by sharks in suits. There is a line, early in the novel, where Bond disputes that espionage is dead “because these days it’s all done by satellites.” Yet there is something about Gardner’s stories which actually seems to back up the statement. Bond doesn’t do a lot of spying any more. He just gets moved around to where the action is – like a chess piece. His dialogue has become equally trite. When not issuing pithy knock backs to silly girls or offering Mills & Boon romantic gestures, he becomes rather hectoring, admitting “he sounded like a headmaster who had summoned a recalcitrant boy to his study.”
Gardner does provide one or two fine descriptive passages, especially during the sojourn to Naples. (“In summer the earth red houses and terracotta roofs soaked up the sun and filled the streets with dust; in winter the same walls seemed to blot up the rain so the buildings took on an even more crumbling look, as if they might turn to sludge and slide into the sea.”) But he also baffles us with technical jargon, and that dulls his story telling, which plods enough as it is. Even the few moments of genuine excitement seem slow and methodical. There is one neat hark back to Fleming as the infiltrators on board an aircraft carrier drug the food supply. But even this device (stolen from Goldfinger) was already reused by the author in For Special Services.
Overall Win, Lose or Die is complicated and dull. Gardner has a good idea at the core of his story, but like the films of this time, he has seen fit to embellish it with so much more than is necessary. He is obviously repeating himself, but even worse, he isn’t adding anything significantly new. Gardner’s James Bond may be a man for the modern age, but his author is losing his modern touch.
Brokenclaw starts in Victoria, British Colombia, and James Bond isn’t endeared to his surroundings. Bored, he’s intrigued by the sudden appearance of the half-Chinese half-Native American Brokenclaw Lee. Gifted with a twisted left hand and psychopathic tendencies, Lee ought to be interesting. That he is not comes as a result of Gardner’s over familiar and cliché ridden narrative.
The nearest the author comes to originality is in chapter six, where the delectable U.S. Naval Intelligence agent Wanda Hing becomes the focus of the story. Clearly a confused girl, she allows Lee to seduce her, hiding a multitude of reservations, yet unable to “deny a tiny electric thrill as she felt his hand touch her thigh.” It’s a one of several sordid interludes that pepper the story and interrupts a briefing and preamble that takes up almost a third of the book.
This is dull as ditch water stuff. The plot involves a submarine tracking device which is a blatant steal from The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). During his marathon briefing, even “Bond sounded irritated” by the slow pace. Towards the end one of the plethora of intelligence big-wigs summaries the whole of the first seven chapters in a succinct four pages. How I wish he’d done so earlier.
The numerous characters in this tale are a blunt bunch saddled with dispensable code-names and unbelievable dialogue that borders on teenage slapstick and sea-side innuendo. Bond’s new best friend, Ed Rushia, is an Iowa huckster who makes Willard Whyte sound positively Harvard. 007 has probably the book’s worst line: when confronted by a spaced out rock star, he says: “We thought it was kind of humongously awesome ourselves.” Never has our hero sounded triter and less modern than this. I was almost ashamed to be reading it.
The afore mentioned Wanda is the most interesting character, displaying sexual dexterity as well as physical and mental fortitude, but she’s relegated to the background in favour of the beautiful novice agent Chi-Chi. Initially she too seems more than competent as “beneath the fragility she was as hard as tempered steel.” Later on Chi-Chi's reduced to sobbing and making increasingly mawkish passes at Bond, who does well to resist them until the last few pages.
Brokenclaw Lee himself is as feeble a villain as you can get. He might be “an appalling aberration locked within a human body,” but his attitude is still that of “the son of a Chinese tailor and a Blackfoot whore,” for he displays “voyeuristic habits... like a lecherous schoolboy” and is prone to talk in maxims without any real depth or meaning.
At the climax Lee challenges Bond to a gruesome Native Indian ritual, “The O-Kee-Pa,” which is possibly the most grisly and distasteful thing I’ve ever read in Bond novel. Gardner cranks up the blood and thunder here, but I was hardly holding my breath, and the whole sorry episode ends with Chi-Chi cracking a very bad joke at Bond’s expense.
I was glad when the whole thing finished. Like her jest, Brokenclaw is simply dreadful.
Comments
Roger Moore 1927-2017
24/3/2010
1982
John Gardner’s second James Bond novel features, for me, his most Fleming-esque title, which is derived from a true story. During an official war time visit to New York, Fleming outlined to William Donovan the structure and function of a national secret service. Donovan used this as a template for the fledgling C.I.A. For his efforts, Fleming was presented with a .38 Colt revolver inscribed with the moniker ‘For Special Services.’
Having found probably his best title, Gardner also paints his most traditional Bond adventure, one which bears more than a passing resemblance to Fleming’s novels, as well as offering a few deferential nods to the movie franchise. For Special Services was also a number one best seller, but here the similarities between Fleming and Gardner seem to drift apart.
The story starts exceptionally well with a tense plane hijack, thwarted in suitably vicious style by 007. The reintroduction of SPECTRE seems entirely appropriate and the early sections evoke the opening of Thunderball, as the executive committee congregates at a clapboard house on the Louisiana Bayou. The Leader, who is mysteriously also called Blofeld, executes a hapless minion in a suitably macabre fashion: a giant python kills and then consumes him in “an obscene dance of death.”
From here, Gardner wings his merry way through a story of fake Hogarth prints, elaborate Texan ranches, car chases, drugged ice cream, particle beam satellites and a one breasted villainess. There are a few tense touches, including a free falling elevator, a bedroom infested by harvester ants, an escape on a monorail and a worthwhile battle at NORAD H.Q. in the Cheyenne Mountains. He even spends time dissecting Bond’s emotions as he reflects on “the greatest lust for another man’s blood he had ever experienced.” FSS also contains a fair amount of wit among the moments of sporadic action, but it’s let down by a succession of bland characters, a trio of them the major bad guys.
Gardner’s biggest error however is with his leading lady, Cedar. This sleeper agent ticks all the boxes; she’s young and sexy and Bond recognises her as a professional from the start; she shows “a tranquillity which belied a fast working mind, accurate and deadly.” Yet, as the story progresses, Cedar becomes little more than a foil for a running gag about a cradle snatching secret agent. Cedar, of course, is the daughter of Bond’s best friend, Felix Leiter. We sense Bond will never take this heroine to bed, even if his best friend seems to permit it.
As FSS misses a central love story, Gardner provides another even less successful romance between Bond and Nena Bismaquer. Bond knows becoming involved with Nena is madness, but isn’t inclined to fight her off in the same way he avoids Cedar’s advances. Eventually, the married and neglected Nena wins him over with “her smile... which seemed to go like a lance to his heart.” Nena is as deliberate and obvious as Cedar; “You are in my power,” she cryptically tells Bond, “I need a good man... There’s evil here... more evil than you could dream of.”
The most evil creation at the bizarre Rancho Bismaquer is Walter Luxor, whose name conjures up the pharaohs. He’s described like Caron, boatman of the River Styx, with “a face which looked like a skull over which transparent skin had been tightly stretched” and a smile that resembles “a grim joke of death.” Bond likens his handshake to “clasping the palm of a corpse.” This is a fine villainous portrait, but Gardner then equips him with a “high pitched squeak” of a voice and this negates the aura of evil. It seems unlikely that Luxor would shout furiously at the henchman Mike Mazzard and even less likely he’d do it within earshot of Cedar.
There is an air of the ridiculous to the trio of villains in FSS and it isn’t helped by the main protagonist being rather inadequate. Marcus Bismaquer reads like a larger version of Anton Murik. He’s bold, larger than life, splendidly rich and infuriatingly inept socially, but he doesn’t really contribute anything towards the main plot. To that end, it is Luxor who is always the most threatening. The monstrous deaf mute Criton isn’t utilised at all and the final climax, a desperate shoot out at the Bayou, is under whelming.
Here Gardner reveals a plot twist, clearing up many of the idiosyncrasies of his characters, but it’s a desperate contrivance and the reader is left wondering exactly how Bond feels about it all. Gardner doesn’t tell us and we are left to guess at his emotions regarding Nena and SPECTRE. It is an unsatisfactory end to a fairly exciting novel, as FSS reads very well.
Gardner has constructed a good story, using Goldfinger’s attack on Fort Knox as a basis for SPECTRE’s assault on Cheyenne Mountain, and Bond’s role in the plan is well thought out. However after the early shenanigans, the middle section of the novel flags badly, bogged down with byplay between Bond, Cedar and the uninteresting supporting characters. Gardner spices it up with a horrific encounter between Cedar and the ants, “a constantly moving sea of creatures,” and a sexually charged contretemps between Bond and Nena.
He saves his best until last. Bond anticipates “a deep velvet blue night, with stars like diamonds” but is instead forced to escape under “a steam bath of hot air, with the sky at war... great sheets of lightning sizzled and cracked as though heaven had taken a pre-emptive strike.” The storm mirrors the death of a guard against an electric fence which “danced with a flash of blue fire... jerking and kicking [the body] as the massive voltage poured through him.” Pre-emptive indeed! When Bond is captured, his world turns “darker and darker, until he seemed to hurtle into space... and all knowledge was blotted out.”
Gardner rarely writes as well as this in FSS. Most of his descriptions tend to be longwinded. He simply isn’t very concise and it slows down the telling of a fairly suspenseful story. That he resolves the adventure in only four chapters suggests he concentrated far too much on building up to the climax and not enough on the eventual denouement. None the less FSS is an admirable follow up to Licence Renewed and provides a solid reintroduction of SPECTRE. Its disappointing Gardner’s haphazard approach to his characters mars an otherwise splendid story.
7 from 10
Roger Moore 1927-2017
1/4/2010
1983
Icebreaker, John Gardner’s third continuation novel, starts at a cracking pace. The sinister fascist terrorist group the National Socialist Action Army (NSAA for short) assassinates a Soviet trade delegation in Tripoli and, a year later, James Bond is thrown to the wolves in an attempt to bring down its leader Count Konrad von Gloda.
The premise of the novel, that an aging Nazi is attempting to resurrect the glories of the Third Reich, has been touched on by authors before, but while James Bond has confronted terrorists, they’ve never had such an ideological slant. Gardner doesn’t quite make the most of this angle and the motive of his central villain remains somewhat obscure. We have to take the strength of his organisation at face value. Equally his perplexing plot, with cross and double cross, duplicity and secrecy does not bear close examination. The real success of the book is the frantic action and high drama, neither pausing for breath. It’s for that reason that Icebreaker is far and away Gardner’s most accomplished Bond novel to date.
Set predominantly in Finland and the snowy wastes of the Arctic Circle, Bond is used by M (and it transpires almost everyone else) as bait to lure Count von Gloda out of hiding. Von Gloda has “star quality... charisma... glittering grey eyes [and] an arrogant tilt of the head.” He recognises Bond as a worthy opponent and offers him a “look of near tangible menace.” At times he becomes enraged by Bond’s insolence. He interprets everything in black and white and is a man “who imagines the world is his destiny.” Von Gloda is a strong character, controlling the chess pieces of his espionage game from inside a hidden fortress, the Ice Palace.
The other pieces of the jigsaw are a quartet of spies, each of them an unreliable narrator. The aptly named Paula Vacker is a beautiful Finn, who shares a romantic past with Bond. This allows Gardner to dispense with a seduction scene. Instead our introduction to her is swift, concise and believable. We also learn something of Bond’s attitude’s towards women; during their courtship he steered clear of Paula until certain she is single, he tried (and failed) to impress her and became ruffled when the patron of a restaurant took a passing interest in her. Paula is occasionally vivacious, but not very enticing.
More tantalising is Rivke Ingber, an agent of Mossad. She is a delectable foil for Bond given to contradictory behaviour and changeable moods: “the possibility of friendship was offered and then withdrawn.” She’s armed with an “almost conscious sensuality” and a hypnotic “musical voice” that alters from “steel hard then back once more to softness.” Several times Bond considers she is an “ultra professional... a deadly young lady... copied from the Venus de Milo.” Bond’s encounters with her have an undercurrent of stealth and deliberate confusion. He correctly likens her to “a maze of secrets.”
Kolya Mosolov, a KGB officer, is equally duplicitous. His “features were like the sea” and he switches sides as easily as he switches languages. We know he speaks several, but Gardner makes him sound American most of the time. Kolya meets a suitably vicious end.
The final spy, the CIA’s Brad Tirpitz, is the least interesting character and almost irrelevant to the plot. His double, or possibly triple, cross displays Gardner’s lack of succinct plotting and alongside Rivke’s bizarre double-life as a Jew is the most unsatisfying element of the story.
The web Gardner has weaved unravels badly at the end. He spends two whole chapters untying his knots (one of the episodes is even entitled “loose ends”) and Bond himself states “I find it hard to swallow.” It does seem odd that M sends his top agent to work without the full facts and even odder that the NSAA has been penetrated by several foreign agents who all wait for 007 to arrive before announcing their real interests. It’s odder still that von Gloda appears in broad daylight and no-one, not even Bond, makes a move on him.
Bond seems to be losing his touch. He ignores Kolya’s cryptic warning that Rivke will “reappear when she’s ready” and ultimately falls for the villainess in much the same way as he was seduced by Nena in the previous For Special Services. As his friends betray him, Bond pictures them with “feet of melting wax” and has flashes of “damoclean” foresight, of “silent ghosts passing into dead ground.”
Yet the untidy resolution hardly matters here. Icebreaker is full of excellent action sequences which absorb the reader from the off. There is a nasty fight in Helsinki, a roadside battle with three snowploughs, a night time raid on an arms depot, an air strike on the Ice Palace, a gunfight at Vantaa airport and a chase through the snow covered tundra on skidoos; Gardner’s writing is alive and kicking and he fills the pages with vivid and memorable descriptions.
Taking the shapes and sounds of winter for inspiration, Gardner’s snow storms are “slanting, stinging” and the air itself appears as if frozen: “you could almost see the cold... you could cut it with a knife.” Bond passes an icicle laden tree, “its sharp tower fingering the sky... like a white cowled monk clutching a glittering dagger,” seconds before confronting two knife wielding thugs. The cries of wild Arctic wolves, “a blood chilling howl,” are compared to “a jet whine... like a wail carried on the wind.” There is a sense of bleakness, of endless dazzling white, interrupted by eruptions of violent colour, of the “crimson heart” of explosions and spilt blood.
Gardner’s best prose is saved for a torture scene during which Bond is dunked into a subterranean ice lake. The frozen water is like an explosion to the senses and Gardner portrays its brutal agony brilliantly. He likens immersion to being “enveloped in an invisible coat of sharp needles.” Bond resists, “his body jerking... like a puppet controlled by a convulsive master,” and experiences black outs and “streaking pain” as if “tiny animals [were] gnawing and biting into the numbed flesh” and “vipers lashed at his brain.”
Bond’s glimmer of hope is in the memory of “a summer day... of grass and hay.” Later Gardner elicits this memory again as Bond dreams of Royale-les-Eaux “as it used to be... the tricolour beds of salvia, alyssum and lobelia bloomed in a riot of colour.” Like the ice dungeon with its “single black eye” cut in the floor, it is a “cold spot... a single cold object,” the silencer of a gun, which draws Bond back to reality.
Gardner hasn’t previously been as ebullient as this and his prose lifts Icebreaker out of the ordinary. While his first two efforts were almost conspicuously reverential, Icebreaker reads like a genuine adventure novel. It’s unhindered by long references to Bond’s past, lacks Gardner’s usual pithy humour and is fast, solid and exciting. If the convoluted plot is ultimately unsatisfying, it doesn’t seem to matter as the violence and suspense keeps us frantically turning the pages.
A big thumbs up.
9 from 10
"You see Mr Bond. You can't kill my dreams. But my dreams can kill you!"
"Time to face destiny."
-Gaustav Graves in Die Another Day-
That's good - especially when you read what I have to say about the next one....
Icebreaker, however, is a very good novel.
5/4/2010
1984
Role of Honour is a massive failure on almost every level.
John Gardner’s earliest 007 adventures mixed spurious violence with involving, clever plots; he drew us a fine central portrait of James Bond; and he wrote with a style worthy of fair critical consideration. While never rising to the standards of Ian Fleming, the three previous novels at least attested to the Bond legacy and with the most recent, Icebreaker, Gardner at last seemed to be finding his own platform. I had high hopes for Role of Honour when I first read it in 1985; I am still disappointed twenty five years on.
This book is dreadful. It starts with an ‘Italian Job’ style robbery, goes into horrendously dull detail about computer programs, war craft simulations and the EPOC nuclear arms systems (the latter could be half-true) and ends with a whimper in a hot air balloon.
James Bond hardly stretches his licence to kill in this one: there are a couple of half hearted car chases and a fairly exciting gunfight at a terrorist training camp, itself hindered by the feeling the set up is unnecessary. Still worse, Bond doesn’t even need to do any espionage. Everything is done for him by a succession of ‘deep cover’ agents, most of whom are not who they claim to be. One of the agents even turns out to be an old dalliance of Bond’s – so M’s had him under watch even when he’s off duty.
Towards the end of the story Gardner concocts a scene where the team comes together and hatches a plan to foil the bad guys. It reads like one of the scenes that end every episode of Scooby-Doo, where each character says ‘Oh I did this’ or ‘He did that’ and ‘I know what happens.’ There is something totally childlike about Role of Honour. While the story touches on adult themes of nuclear disarmament, computerized theft and terrorism, it is written in a simple, dispassionate style.
There is none of the flair Gardner displayed in Icebreaker and the action moves from scene to scene with the barest of creative style. There is no lyricism, no symbolism, no expressive similes; Role of Honour is spectacularly ordinary and there is hardly a quotable line in it. Gardner raises the bar briefly mid-novel with the brutal slow motion killing of four terrorists, the bullets “tearing through flesh, bone, arteries and sinews... leaving a cloud of fine pink and grey matter hanging in the air... a mushroom of blood and flesh,” but he seldom bothers to embellish the rest of the proceedings with such graphic sentences.
However, not content with dumbing down his prose, Gardner dumbs down all his characters. While Bond does precious little, he’s surrounded by a plethora of people who are all given childish alliterative rhyming names, like Percy Proud (this is a woman, believe it or not), Freddie Fortune (and so is this), Tigerbalm Balmer (curiously, this one is a man) and Harry Hopcraft. When he can’t make it rhyme, he provides a nick name: so Cindy Chalmer becomes Sinful Cindy, General Zwingli is called Rolling Joe and the chief architect of the piece, Dr Jay Autem Holy, is provided with a pseudonym, Jason St-John Finnes, and two monikers, Old Bald Eagle and Holy Terror. This is one of the poorest attempts of character building I’ve ever read, as if names are enough to tell us everything about a person.
In fairness Gardner tries to inject something more than the superficial into his main villains, Dr Holy and the terrorist Tamil Rahani. Holy is a computer genius who ultimately turns out to be something of an idealistic dreamer. At one point his “green eyes went bitterly cold, all sign of normal human life ebbing from them,” but as we’ve already seen him have a hissy fit, this menacing pose seems in direct contradiction to his earlier behaviour. Rahani, a businessman and the new leader of SPECTRE, is more interesting; given to military leanings, a “quiet calm” surrounds him, lending an air of “authority... an immense unflinching resolve.” Sadly that’s as interesting as these two get.
There really isn’t much more to say about this novel, except it’s mercifully short. The story is open ended, so the ghost of SPECTRE is set for another come back, I just hope Gardner can rediscover some of his own form in time.
1 from 10
Roger Moore 1927-2017
ROH represents a major drop in quality but I think 1/10 is a bit harsh...and it leaves you nowhere to go with later books
all three of the early Gardner's are worthwhile reads imho
I quite like Role Of Honour...not Gardner's best....but up there with them - for me anyway. Sure...it has its faults....but not as many as some of the others.
If this scores 1 out of 10 - I can't wait to see the scores given to Seafire & ColdFall
8/4/2010
1986
Towards the end of Nobody Lives Forever, James Bond attempts to reach the SPECTRE stronghold by embarking on a dangerous moonlight swim through shark infested waters. While this certainly has a touch of déjà vu about it (think LALD), John Gardner’s handling of the scene lacks most of the suspense, drama and sheer poetical gusto of Ian Fleming. Hence the oncoming climax stutters and starts and eventually falls a bit flat, much like the rest of this episodic and rather violent story.
Nobody Lives Forever delivers more promises than Role of Honour, but is hamstrung by similar tendencies from its author. It lacks in-depth characterization, has little or no vivid detail and suffers from a less than engaging narrative. In this one, SPECTRE has put a price on Bond’s head and he embarks on a wild chase through Central Europe, avoiding assorted gangsters at every turn. Gardner complicates the plot with numerous cross and double cross and several unbelievable revelations; it has more holes in it than a sieve.
The story begins with Bond starting what turns into a nightmare of a holiday, but he really ought to know better and is already thinking his boss has set him up for a fall: “There was a sharp, steely look in his eyes that made Bond wonder whether something was being hidden from him.” 007’s definitely not the man he once was and his foibles haunt him throughout. We see the chink in his armour and so do the bad guys; “You’re an old fashioned gentleman...” says one, “You’d give your life to save a defenceless woman... the people you care for the most.” Bond knows it is true.
This is a rare moment of insight, but it is delivered in a rather obtuse fashion. Gardner doesn’t spend a lot of time describing anything here. He kicks off at breakneck speed and we’ve hardly paused for breath before Bond has saved a beautiful woman from a couple of hoodlums, avoided a bomb on the motorway and been implicated in the death of a Mafia hit man. This rapid fire storytelling has inherent problems which are evident as early as chapters one and two: everything happens so fast there is no time to build the tension, portray the main characters and untwist the plot.
I don’t care much for the people in this novel. There are two beautiful women, both of whom display a more than capable attitude to death and violence. They remain “buoyant, even elated, as though killing men was like swatting flies” and Bond is shocked and slightly resentful of their ambivalence. Neither Sukie nor Nannie is memorable. Their odd behaviour opens questions which are unsatisfactorily resolved very late in the novel.
It isn’t only the girls who prove to be not what they appear, for almost everyone Bond encounters is out to kill him. They perfect very elaborate schemes to do so, including lots of gun play and a rather nasty confrontation with a vampire bat. One of the better scrapes involves Paul Cordova, a dwarf assassin, who is killed by Lake Maggiore. Another features a corrupt and very creepy Austrian policeman known as Der Haken. He meets a suitably grisly demise impaled on a butcher’s hook. Both sequences lack any subtlety, but remain horrifically memorable.
Much better is the hoodwinking of Dr Kirchtum, a reluctant KGB operative who has been offered funding for his Salzburg clinic in exchange for favours, “the odd visitor to be kept under sedation... sometimes a body, occasionally some surgery.” Unlike most of the protagonists, Kirchtum has a desperate, genuine air to him. It was the only twist I didn’t see coming and even Bond remarks the doctor's acting is worth an Oscar. Generally though everyone is very black and white and grey in Nobody Lives Forever; it lacks technicolor portraits.
Even when Bond comes face to face with SPECTRE’s kingpin on the aptly named Shark Island, the scene lacks high level suspense and intrigue because Gardner has reduced Bond’s nemesis to a rotting, reticent husk. Tamil Rahani is suffering from terminal cancer; Bond remembers him as being “dark skinned, muscular, radiating dynamism... a ruthless powerful leader” but now he’s “reduced to a human doll... the shrunken face with skin the colour of parchment.” Rahani hardly says a word and his portrait is as thin as his skin.
The novel climaxes in a fierce gun battle accompanied by copious explosions. It’s rather well depicted, has plenty of bite and contains several quite fearful images; disappointingly it is also very swift.
Nobody Lives Forever won’t win many prizes for imagination and originality, but it’s okay as far as it goes. The problem is: it doesn’t go far enough. Gardner falls far short of the standard he set with Icebreaker. He is also beginning to reference himself. The story is blatantly repetitious in terms of ideas, characters and literary content. While not as bereft of style as Role of Honour, it is badly in need of some narrative deftness, realistic personas and a different descriptive colour to monochrome.
3 from 10
Roger Moore 1927-2017
"You see Mr Bond. You can't kill my dreams. But my dreams can kill you!"
"Time to face destiny."
-Gaustav Graves in Die Another Day-
Also, the use of SPECTRE is odd. Because in YOLT, Blofeld is using the members of Black Dragon. It sort of signals that SPECTRE was destroyed at the end of OHMSS.
"You see Mr Bond. You can't kill my dreams. But my dreams can kill you!"
"Time to face destiny."
-Gaustav Graves in Die Another Day-
That's a good analogy re: Ronin etc.
As I understand it, Gardner deliberately chose to alter the standard Bond formula (e.g. Bond meets a girl, infiltrates the villain's lair, finds out the plot is bigger and more world threatening than first thought, kills the villain and gets the girl) because he was already bored with it. This after only 4 novels!
I also read that he was seriously ill while he wrote ROH and while not wishing to strike a man when he's been down, I think he should have had the guts to stand up to Glidrose and say "I'm too ill to write."
I'd agree with you re: SPECTRE. I don't touch on them much in the reviews because frankly their inclusion adds nothing nor takes anything from the stories. While SPECTRE's return in FSS was nicely handled, with these two Gardner could just as easily have called the organisation QUANTUM, THRUSH, YANNIS, STENCH, ___________ (fill in the blank) etc.
"You see Mr Bond. You can't kill my dreams. But my dreams can kill you!"
"Time to face destiny."
-Gaustav Graves in Die Another Day-
15/4/2010
1987
Once you get past the terrible title, No Deals, Mr Bond is a rip-snorter of a novel. John Gardner follows the path he laid in his previous opus, but while Nobody Lives Forever felt underwritten, episodic and therefore slightly stilted, this time he succeeds in creating an involving and exciting story with strong characters and well constructed scenarios.
Bond has been abandoned by the Secret Service again. M orders him to trace three repatriated agents, who were part of an aborted undercover operation entitled Cream Cake, and in the process unmask a traitor. Two other agents have already died in grisly circumstances, but M can’t allow Bond to operate officially; the Cream Cake affair is a closed book. Both M and Bond recognise that he needs “a great deal more than good luck.”
The ensuing story is a good old fashioned chase thriller. Bond tracks down first one female agent and then another and the locations shift from Mayfair to Dublin and Ireland to Paris and finally Hong Kong. At every turn Bond is pursued the bad guys, mallet wielding heavies, Garda police, SMERSH agents, Chinese thugs and lastly four gladiatorial thugs armed to the teeth and dangerous to a man.
The action is suitably brisk and thoroughly entertaining. The novel kicks off with an explosive prologue and hardly lets up. Early on Bond rescues the sophisticated Heather Dare from a vicious attacker who “came at her like a human typhoon... the shattered mirror reflected the gory patches and the great star shaped cracks produced a kaleidoscope of black and red.” There are a couple of chases, a battle with two devil dogs with “stale stinking breath” and latterly a furiously gruesome slow motion encounter with a hit man whose dead body flips “as though he were some grotesque jack-in-the-box.”
The most rewarding feature of No Deals, Mr Bond is the sense of period. Published in 1987, the Cold War, while thawing, was still upper most in people’s minds. There was a genuine fear of the Soviet Union and its ambitions. The closeted, secretive Russian espionage world finally makes an appearance in Gardner’s writing and he rewards us with some well observed passages about spies and spying.
Bond’s daily life is remarked upon and when a mission beckons he anticipates it with “an extraordinary sinking in the pit of his stomach.” This Bond has an odd turn of phrase (“old love... dear sweet lucky Heather”) but he feels much more real than at any time since possibly Licence Renewed. He displays a touch of arrogance; he’s also irritable and prone to moments of almost panic as well as clarity. There is confusion in this man’s psyche and it gives him an edgy vulnerability unseen before. He’s also got his sense of humour back and Gardner’s one liners are something of a treat. He even has a little pop at his own authorship (or possibly the up and coming Timothy Dalton) by claiming Bond was “resurrected against much criticism.”
The two opposing department heads, M and Chernov, are seen as polar opposites, but as the latter points out, M is equally callous: “These little girls were used by your own cold blooded operations planners.” Bond constantly queries his bosses motives, decides not to trust anyone and, when confronted by the defecting Maxim Smolin, he muses that “in this business coincidence was a dirty word... there was no such thing.” By the end of the adventure he’s quite fed up with all the betrayal and is “tired of being the odd one out.” When Bond meets one of his adversaries, the villain suggests they’ve been “following each other in office paper chases.” It's a palpably real world.
In that respect the two Soviet Generals, Smolin and Chernov, are solid, believable characters. They share a manic idealism inside a cool exterior. Chernov, in particular has an air of menace and superiority about him that Gardner has seldom reached with his bad guys. “A wisp of a smile” is all he needs to tell us Chernov is humourless; he’s sleek and powerful with a tone of voice “usually quiet and calm [which] made him even more sinister.” He recognises the quality of his opponent, talks “as though he genuinely liked Bond” and is put out when 007 refuses to shake his hand. Aptly he’s codenamed Black Friar.
The girls are less successful. Heather Dare is a clever early foil, but she’s saddled with an unlikely love affair to service the plot. At the very moment Heather should become interesting she is sidelined in favour of the tiresome Ebbie Heritage. Ebbie is seductive, sexy and precocious, yet this means she amounts to little more than a stroppy young woman. At times she pouts and argues like a teenager. So exasperated is Bond he even “realises he’s talking to her like a child.” It doesn’t stop him having plenty of enthusiastic sex with her though, the old rogue.
As always with Gardner, he shows a tendency to over elaborate his narrative. There are too many double agents, too many nick-names and too many knots to unravel. He spends a lot of time explaining the same things. It’s as heavy going for the reader, as it is for 007. The final twist is utterly preposterous and serves no purpose to the story. It almost ruins the whole novel.
And that’s a shame because the last third of the adventure, the Hong Kong section, is very good. There is a real sense of the city and its bustle of people, the harbour where “junks and sampans ploughed” and new stylised buildings with “porthole windows... designed by an optician” keeping watch over the streets below. Bond likens it to a futuristic vision, “the elusive familiarity... came from Fritz Lang’s Metroplois.”
However even in modern Hong Kong, the Officer’s Club resides with tales of “boozy majors” and Bond is pursued by traditional nasty gangsters. His contact is the unscrupulous carrion Big Thumb Chang. He is one of the novel’s most durable characters. Chang received the peculiar nick-name because of his elongated thumbs, which the locals claim “had grown like this from counting the large sums of money that came his way.” He’s a weasely, chatty, pirate, “a toy with a spring in its neck.” It is also in Hong Kong where Bond meets the operative Swift. Something of an enigma, Swift dips into the tale and flies out again. He’s as studious and calm as Chernov; when Bond sees his corpse it’s as if the man is alive: “there was a terrible stillness about him and the grey eyes looked steady and sightless into the sky above.”
There really isn’t a lot wrong with No Deals, Mr Bond. Yes, it’s overpopulated and overcomplicated, but what Gardner does well is bring his focus back onto the world of James Bond: the spies and spy masters, the skull duggery, the lies and the deceptions, the careful planning, the serendipitous errors, the sickening violence and the inevitability of death. If it isn’t quite up to the standards of Icebreaker, it certainly gives the impression Gardner was coasting for a year or two and hopefully, thankfully, he’s now back on track.
7 from 10
"I am not an entrant in the Shakespeare Stakes." - Ian Fleming
"Screw 'em." - Daniel Craig, The Best James Bond EverTM
21/4/2010
1988
In Scorpius James Bond confronts an idealistic terrorist organisation called The Society of the Meek Ones. Set predominantly in Britain during an election campaign the novel has a contemporary as well as a modern relevance. Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister in 1988, had herself narrowly escaped death during a terror attack in Brighton and the IRA was still prevalent in Northern Ireland. Now international terrorism from the likes of Al Qaeda has catapulted recent atrocities to the top of the news headlines. The difference between these organisations and John Gardner’s fictional creation is that while the real life groups have a clear philosophy to their violent acts, this fictional one does not.
Led by a demented religious maniac, Father Valentine, formerly known as Vladimir Scorpius, an arms dealer, the Meek Ones are a mixture of suicide bombers, death wishers, purity worshippers, bizarre cultists, mesmerist, brainwashers, drug runners and technological bank robbers. Gardner is touching on too many themes. Worse, he never explains properly why Scorpius is involved in disrupting the British, and later the American, elections. He mentions he’s being paid to do it, but we never learn by whom.
While this is frustrating enough, Gardner then has to try to explain it all; in doing so he fractures the narrative and we sit through endless meetings between M, Bond, Tanner and numerous other secret service or medical personnel. There are a few neat references to Bond’s spying world, particularly when he trades identities at a branch of Barclay’s bank, but precious little excitement, aside from an early car chase and a couple of gunfights. Most of the rest of the action takes place ‘off the page’ as it were. Scorpius is a slow plod.
With little or no thrills to spice up the tale it is left to the characters to try and carry the plot. Bond is at his arrogant worst here. He seems to be getting more callous with every novel. He’s at his most relaxed in his Chelsea flat. Gardner painstakingly describes Bond’s breakfast routine. Bond may be chilled out, but I was experiencing acute déjà vu. I think it’s the fifth time I’ve read about eggs being boiled for “three and one third minutes” and I’m fed up with it. Gardner is re-cycling his own literature merely to increase the page count.
Bond has never sounded as pompous as in Scorpius. He inspects the heroine’s flat and notes “two good prints [a Frink and a Hockney] which must have belonged to her, for no landlord would ever have left them in a rented apartment.” Later on he is appalled by the mess of fashions at the villain’s hideout, all “vulgarity and pretensions” and wonders why Scorpius is “obsessed by reproductions... an odd attitude from one who could afford the originals twice over.” While hiding in a safe house Bond is angry that the suits come from Marks and Spencer and the wine from the local supermarket, “he fussed and grumbled over the lack of sartorial taste.” This from the man Fleming had drinking Old Granddad bourbon! There is huge snobbery attached to these passages and it sits uncomfortably with the familiar character of Bond. He always liked the good life, but he could slum it too. Gardner seems not to agree.
Bond isn’t alone. M and Tanner, both military types, express similarly unrefined opinions about an uncouth SAS man, the American intelligence services and some rich upper class bankers. One of the characters is constantly referred to as the “Hon Trilby Shrivenham,” as if giving her a title means we’ll care more about her fate (which we don’t). M has an outburst of pique when witnessing a television broadcast of a bombing “My God! My God! ... Get them, James! Kill them! Wipe them off the face of the earth!” I wondered who was more demented for a moment, Scorpius or M.
At the finale, Bond also acts like a lunatic. His inappropriately named amour Harriet Horner has been killed. Bond doesn’t care much for her until the last chapters, when Gardner invents a fake wedding and virtually forces them to have sex. Suddenly Bond’s filled with grief stricken madness and pursues the villain with an uncommon zeal, shooting him in the hands and feet before leaving him to the “wriggling squirming mass” of water moccasins. Scorpius ends up pleading for his life. It’s an unedifying end to a rather good antagonist, for one of the few things Gardner has got right is his portrait of Vladimir Scorpius / Father Valentine.
Scorpius is a sinister intense villain. His “eyes glittered, as though fires lay deep within them” and he is “cursed with a strong will, combined with overdeveloped hypnotic strength.” He inhabits a topsy-turvy world where “evil became good, wrong became right... obscene and horrific deeds were works of goodness and charity.” Bond likens him to Cesar Borgia; he commands his underlings with “the gesture of a medieval prince” and is slick and ghoulish, “a voice of honey and milk, mixed with strychnine.” Scorpius’ hidden retreat is camouflaged among the unreal oasis of Hilton Head, South Carolina, “Spanish moss dripping down towards the verges... a place for the lotus eater.” It’s far away from dreary grey dangerous London and the perfect place for the torture of souls.
Bond’s route to Ten Pines is rather unlikely, snatching a glimpse of Scorpius / Valentine on television and then being kidnapped by an over enthusiastic SAS officer Pearlman. Bond suspects Pearlman for a traitor, but the man is only out to rescue his daughter. Small reward for him: by the book’s end Bond expects the poor man to kill his own offspring. Our hero seems to have lost all semblances of humanity; much like his adversary.
Pearlman does provide a moment of sanity among the nonsense: “This is a bloody time for the world. Like the Bible says, there’s a time for living and a time for dying. We live in an age when it’s a time for dying suddenly, most often by war, or the hands of terrorists striking in the streets. People such as us were born to die that way.” For once Bond sagely agrees.
None the less the sense of disbelief continues to the very end as Gardner provides another unlikely twist involving Chief Superintendent Bailey. The Special Branch officer’s downfall is constructed in a completely abstract manner and while it fits the profile of the story, it is telling that Gardner doesn’t bother to explain how Bailey came under the influence of the Meek Ones. We don’t believe it for a second.
And that’s the main problem with Scorpius. Gardner isn’t breaking any new ground here, despite a better than average premise. He tries to put too much flesh on the bones of the narrative and subsequently it becomes a flabby mess.
It’s a pity for the novel starts very well as a missing girl wanders to her death in London. The only clue to her intentions is Bond’s telephone number, yet we are later told he wasn’t necessarily the prime target. That 007’s involvement seems to be a case of wicked serendipity makes the eventual linear narrative somewhat implausible and only serves to highlight how difficult Gardner has made things for himself.
Perhaps the last word should go to the flustered and confused hero himself: “Nothing else made sense in Scorpius’ nightmare world.”
4 from 10
24/4/2010
1989
John Gardner’s movie tie-in novel Licence To Kill has moments of interest, but generally it follows the line of all movie adaptations: offer a straight forward, no frills, written interpretation of what the audience sees on screen.
There is none of the character insight we were treated to in Christopher Wood’s James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me; nor does Gardner dramatically change any of the action sequences or the narrative. The story of Licence To Kill needs no explanation and Gardner recreates it faithfully, with a few twists.
Perhaps his most interesting ploy is to alter the cinematic point of view. A brilliant example is where Gardner has Bond plant a miniature bugging device in Sanchez’s office. This was not included in the film, but it allows Gardner to explain the true purpose of Professor Joe’s fundraising activities (a point never made expressly clear in the film) and also makes Bond’s assassination attempt more professional (Bond can listen to the conversations in the office, so he knows when everyone is in another room). Whether the sequences were originally written like this, I couldn’t tell, but Gardner’s take shifts the emphasis of those scenes onto James Bond and away from Franz Sanchez. Later on, particularly at the Meditation Centre, he struggles to continue the ploy, but it is a manful attempt to keep 007 centre-stage.
Equally he doesn’t forget the history of the literary Bond and tries to intertwine this piece with his own continuation novels. So Felix Leiter, who has already had his arm and leg eaten by a shark in Live and Let Die, gets to experience it all over again in a chapter entitled “Lightning Sometimes Strikes Twice.” Della’s demise is treated with some care, as Bond recalls the death of his own wife. There is even a clever little sequence where Bond flies a Beaver bi-plane to the isolated Key West home of an old associate, David Wolkovsky, the CIA man from Scorpius. It’s unfortunate then that the character of Milton Krest plays such a large part, along with his yacht Wavekrest, because Bond of course has already met one Milton Krest, in The Hildebrand Rarity. It wouldn’t have taken much for Gardner to have changed a name, a spelling, or dropped a hint Bond remembered meeting a man with a similar name and yacht.
Occasionally Gardner embellishes the dialogue we see on screen and this works well on most occasions. The dialogue generally falls flat at the same moments as it does in the film: the love scenes. Seduction and sex hasn’t been Gardner’s forte anyway, but as lifted from the movie, they are cringe worthy moments when written down here. Bond and Pam’s prickly romance is even more unlikely on the page than it was in the cinema. At one point Bond asks: “Why could he never resist a beautiful girl?” Why indeed. More concerning is Gardner’s attempts to lampoon the movies.
It’s good that he cuts out the opening sky dive into a wedding, but from here Gardner seems to be gently poking fun at the franchise. He refers to a stripper as dancing “in a manner that would make it fun to watch paint dry;” he mocks Sanchez’s city state, saying the policemen “look as if they are straight from Ruritania,” the latter of course is the famous imaginary country in ‘The Prisoner of Zenda,’ a place as unreal as Isthmus; he recognises the silliness in the bar room brawl, considering “all it needed was a pianist who didn’t stop playing;” and he overplays Pam Bouvier’s stroppiness and Q’s favourite uncle routine. Yet these shenanigans, while quite humorous, sit ill next to the complex character of Franz Sanchez.
Gardner doesn’t spend a lot of time describing anyone’s persona in this novel; the girls are gorgeous, the men threatening. Sanchez however is given the appropriate space: “Bond thought he was probably one of the most callous people he had ever met... On the surface Sanchez was a calm calculating man... behind the lazy charm lay complete indifference to suffering... the terrible cloak of despair, self-loathing, deceit and crime which he activated from afar.” There is something distant about Sanchez, something overpowering and other worldly, the tentacles reaching out to cover the world. Robert Davi captured this brilliantly in the film, but there is something missing on the page. A few well scribed passages can’t make up for the glibness of lines like: “[he] became still, like a snake or some other dangerous creature.”
Bond, who in the film starts to resemble Sanchez in his heightened, impulsive state, is described with hardly a word of interest. We understand what he wants to achieve, but the revenge motive seems very weak in the novel. It needs Dalton’s acerbic expressions to bring those motivations alive. Licence To Kill isn’t a bad novel, but it is very, very ordinary.
3 from 10
I didn't think much of either Licence Renewed, For Special Services or Icebreaker (feeling the latter, in particular, was a touch too long). I loved Role of Honour (but would recommend starting from page 100 as the computer stuff bogs the beginning down considerably). I also loved Nobody Lives Forever, but from No Deals, Mr Bond painfully dull and skipped to the end. That was about eight months ago, and I'm currently taking a break before tackling the rest of Gardner's series.
Nothing wrong with differing opinions.
I'm surprised you considered Icebreaker too long, although I agree the early scenes in Maderia are unnecessary. The action sequences in LR, FSS & IB are excellent and very well realised, the plots are coherent and the characters well drawn. These are the focus point sof any good novel, so I'm surprised you prefer the sketchy ROH.
I don't understand how you can claim to love a novel that you start reading from half way in. That suggests you consider the first half as rubbish, so you don't want to read it.
ROH is a poor book IMO because the first 100 pages IS DULL and the personas featured during this section ARE VERY THIN and SHOW MINIMAL TO ZERO CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. Gardner has nothing interesting to say about any character in ROH. You won't convince me.
My review for NLF clearly states I was disappointed with the plot, which is very one-dimensional and only gets interesting in the final few chapters. While Gardner has tried to break the 007 formula with this one, I feel he struggles to create strong characters (similar problems as with ROH). His villain is particularly poor.
NDMB has many detractors (based chiefly on its title!) but it's interesting you find it dull as the 'chase' scenario featured here is much better realised than in NLF, the cast is better drawn (excepting the heroine) and the locations have a menace to them which is missing in the picture postcard world of NLF. Again, you say you skipped sections of this book, so I'm not entirely convinced you are offering valid feedback.
Like you I am taking a short break. I will resume the final wrasp of John Gardner novels in July.
For me it was the one and only. Although a good spy novel it didn't feel very "Bond." I much prefer just reading Fleming...even Amis' Colonel Sun left me wanting, not to mention Devil May Care. I will keep trying with the continuation novels, but nobody's come close to matching Fleming IMHO.
27/7/2010
1989
Published in 1989, Win, Lose or Die was John Gardner’s ninth 007 novel. As with his previous few adventures, Gardner tries to twist his established formula, but it’s already creaking with age. There are interesting parallels with Broccoli’s film productions, which took on an increasingly weary look in the 1980s. The films tended to be episodic and long winded, substituting big set pieces and conundrum-like plots for good characters and a clear narrative. Gardner suffers a similar fate here.
Briefly, Bond is sent back to the Royal Navy as a Captain, so he can oversee security on a NATO training exercise called Landsea, which is a ridiculously elaborate front for a peace conference between the PM and the US and USSR Presidents. We don’t learn this until the end of the book and how we get there takes an awfully long time. Bond is also left unaware of the full details of his mission. This leaves him doing a certain amount of unnecessary detective work and is a wearisome repetition of a plot device Gardner has already used in Nobody Lives Forever and No Deals Mr Bond.
The most striking illustration of this is when Bond is sent “on a Christmas holiday” to Ischia, essentially as a stalking horse to tempt one of the villians into assassinating him. Gardner wastes a lot of time here, introducing a mawkish love story with the rather fetching Beatrice, a girl who has rediscovered the lost art of kissing and "practised the craft in a way that had been hidden for centuries." It ends in sudden tragedy, as befalls every heroine who falls madly in love with Bond. After this 007 ends up spending a whole week being debriefed by the villians, who rather than kill him, disguise themselves as good guys and send him back into the fray. When, towards the end of the novel, Bond is told the truth, he begins to wonder (as we do) why no-one kills anyone straight off any more. There is an explanation but it’s hopelessly preposterous.
Subsequently almost every chapter has a plot hole which Gardner has to spend time filling. The list is endless, but perhaps most tellingly he never bothers to explain how MI6 came across the recognition tagline “Health depends on strength.” It’s a remarkable stroke of ill-luck that the chief villain forgets to use it near the climax and avoids detection for another thirty pages.
The narrative is confused further by Gardner’s inability to restrict the number of character’s he creates. There must be almost thirty of them and they all have his usual silly names and even dafter nick-names. He gives us three women who are all described like naive, blushing innocents, when each one is a trained killer. The worst offender here is a Russian called Nikola Ratnikov. She’s a body guard to the President, but gets hysterical when confronted with a dead body and ends up making love to Bond because she “feels so alone, so afraid.” It’s a ridiculous characterisation. The others fare equally badly.
The less said about the main villain, the impossible to pronounce Bassam Baradj, the better. This is a man of a hundred aliases whose sole aim is to procure $600 billion for no reason other than his own personal greed. To do this he’s funded and trained a team of expendable terrorists coined BAST, the Brotherhood of Anarchy and Secret Terror. Bond likens to SPECTRE. But they have none of SPECTRE’s panache; even their acronym is rubbish. Never has a protagonist’s motive been less involving.
Even James Bond is bland and uninteresting. Since M never briefs his top agent properly 007 becomes (again) little more than an excitable pawn in a world of spies governed by sharks in suits. There is a line, early in the novel, where Bond disputes that espionage is dead “because these days it’s all done by satellites.” Yet there is something about Gardner’s stories which actually seems to back up the statement. Bond doesn’t do a lot of spying any more. He just gets moved around to where the action is – like a chess piece. His dialogue has become equally trite. When not issuing pithy knock backs to silly girls or offering Mills & Boon romantic gestures, he becomes rather hectoring, admitting “he sounded like a headmaster who had summoned a recalcitrant boy to his study.”
Gardner does provide one or two fine descriptive passages, especially during the sojourn to Naples. (“In summer the earth red houses and terracotta roofs soaked up the sun and filled the streets with dust; in winter the same walls seemed to blot up the rain so the buildings took on an even more crumbling look, as if they might turn to sludge and slide into the sea.”) But he also baffles us with technical jargon, and that dulls his story telling, which plods enough as it is. Even the few moments of genuine excitement seem slow and methodical. There is one neat hark back to Fleming as the infiltrators on board an aircraft carrier drug the food supply. But even this device (stolen from Goldfinger) was already reused by the author in For Special Services.
Overall Win, Lose or Die is complicated and dull. Gardner has a good idea at the core of his story, but like the films of this time, he has seen fit to embellish it with so much more than is necessary. He is obviously repeating himself, but even worse, he isn’t adding anything significantly new. Gardner’s James Bond may be a man for the modern age, but his author is losing his modern touch.
2 from 10
3/8/2010
1990
Brokenclaw starts in Victoria, British Colombia, and James Bond isn’t endeared to his surroundings. Bored, he’s intrigued by the sudden appearance of the half-Chinese half-Native American Brokenclaw Lee. Gifted with a twisted left hand and psychopathic tendencies, Lee ought to be interesting. That he is not comes as a result of Gardner’s over familiar and cliché ridden narrative.
The nearest the author comes to originality is in chapter six, where the delectable U.S. Naval Intelligence agent Wanda Hing becomes the focus of the story. Clearly a confused girl, she allows Lee to seduce her, hiding a multitude of reservations, yet unable to “deny a tiny electric thrill as she felt his hand touch her thigh.” It’s a one of several sordid interludes that pepper the story and interrupts a briefing and preamble that takes up almost a third of the book.
This is dull as ditch water stuff. The plot involves a submarine tracking device which is a blatant steal from The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). During his marathon briefing, even “Bond sounded irritated” by the slow pace. Towards the end one of the plethora of intelligence big-wigs summaries the whole of the first seven chapters in a succinct four pages. How I wish he’d done so earlier.
The numerous characters in this tale are a blunt bunch saddled with dispensable code-names and unbelievable dialogue that borders on teenage slapstick and sea-side innuendo. Bond’s new best friend, Ed Rushia, is an Iowa huckster who makes Willard Whyte sound positively Harvard. 007 has probably the book’s worst line: when confronted by a spaced out rock star, he says: “We thought it was kind of humongously awesome ourselves.” Never has our hero sounded triter and less modern than this. I was almost ashamed to be reading it.
The afore mentioned Wanda is the most interesting character, displaying sexual dexterity as well as physical and mental fortitude, but she’s relegated to the background in favour of the beautiful novice agent Chi-Chi. Initially she too seems more than competent as “beneath the fragility she was as hard as tempered steel.” Later on Chi-Chi's reduced to sobbing and making increasingly mawkish passes at Bond, who does well to resist them until the last few pages.
Brokenclaw Lee himself is as feeble a villain as you can get. He might be “an appalling aberration locked within a human body,” but his attitude is still that of “the son of a Chinese tailor and a Blackfoot whore,” for he displays “voyeuristic habits... like a lecherous schoolboy” and is prone to talk in maxims without any real depth or meaning.
At the climax Lee challenges Bond to a gruesome Native Indian ritual, “The O-Kee-Pa,” which is possibly the most grisly and distasteful thing I’ve ever read in Bond novel. Gardner cranks up the blood and thunder here, but I was hardly holding my breath, and the whole sorry episode ends with Chi-Chi cracking a very bad joke at Bond’s expense.
I was glad when the whole thing finished. Like her jest, Brokenclaw is simply dreadful.
2 from 10