There is a moment in The Man From Barbarossa when James Bond feels his mission has “no shape, no form, no logic.” The same could be decreed of this novel, John Gardner’s eleventh stab at the 007 legacy.
I must hold up my hand and say I had never read this novel before. I’m rather disappointed I’ve read it now. The whole project seems bogged down in a conundrum like plot which owes more to Le Carre than Fleming.
Gardner’s tale nominally involves a strange terrorist organisation called The Scales of Justice. Based in a glasnost crazy Russia, this splinter cell seeks retribution for war crimes and have targeted a turncoat Ukrainian Josif Vorontsov, a mass killer of Jews in Kiev during the Second World War. The suspicions of various intelligence agencies are aroused, not least when it becomes apparent the terrorists have kidnapped the wrong man. What starts out as an attempt to destabilise the USSR becomes an international crisis revolving around the Gulf War. I was reminded of the film Octopussy, whose plot is similarly convoluted, and whose rogue bad guys have similar aims.
Bond is assigned to investigate and travels to Moscow along with Pete Natkowitz from Mossad and Nina Bibikova of the KGB. It’s a set up reminiscent of Icebreaker. Later two French agents become involved and the inevitable double crosses and duplicitous behaviours abound. Gardner spends almost the entire novel explaining how every single character in his story fits neatly into the narrative. This is done in a series of extremely tiresome briefings, first in London, then in Moscow, then another in Finland.
There is hardly a single thrill in The Man From Barbarossa. After a good start involving two kidnaps and some gentle spying, I read the words “stalking horses” and my heart sank. Gardner proceeds to rehash much of what he’d already created for Brokenclaw, including sunken houses, mistaken identities and a villain (Yevgeny Yuskovich) who has a preoccupation with nubile young women. Towards the end the tempo lifts, but the author telegraphs “the death of 007” and his hero’s resurrection is in a tired and uninteresting fashion.
Gardner’s shift away from gory action isn’t, in isolation, a bad idea. The world of espionage is multi-faceted and there is no reason why Bond shouldn’t do some cloak-and-dagger counter-spying. The problem is, other than one or two brief instances, Gardner has reduced Fleming’s man of action to an inactive passenger who listens to everyone talking and spends half the novel impersonating a cameraman at a bogus war crimes trial.
The whole exercise is a worn out attempt to disguise miscellaneous familiar twists and turns which, rather than exciting the reader and drawing us in, leaves us perplexed and frustrated. So dense is the plotting that the eventual revelations hardly shock us. Nothing surprises in Gardner’s world of incestuous spies and everyone, and every country, seems to be in bed with their rivals and allies. Some might say this is realistic, but Gardner embellishes it with little more than charcoal sketches. The Man From Barbarossa is no oil painting. It’s horrendously bland.
Occasionally Gardner provides goblets of interest. During an unexpected assault, the villains become statuesque; even “the liquids seemed solidified in a click of time.” His descriptions of a wintery Moscow are particularly fine: “The road ahead looked bleak, rather than romantic... Flakes the size of silver dollars drifted sluggishly in the night air... bundled up people trudged along the pavements.” While these incidental details are good they get lost between pages of dreary narration. It’s indicative of Gardner’s storytelling technique that he’s made the travails of a minor character like Nigsy Meadows or the life-history of Michael Brooks more interesting than what’s happening to James Bond.
“Field agents and airline pilots suffer from the same occupational hazard – nine tenths boredom followed by one tenth sheer terror,” recalls James Bond. That’s how I felt digesting The Man From Barbarossa; spies, plants and double agents crawl out the woodwork at every turn and do very little of any interest. This is less a spider’s web and more a mountain of impenetrable muddle.
To comment on Chris's review on Licence Review, I am surprised the high rating you are giving that rather flacid book. Was Murik's life or his plot that intriguing ? He's one the dullest villians in the Bond universe. This passion for safe nuclear reactors is one of the most inconsequential I have read about the series. Sexual infactuations with gold and hating the english I can understand but safe nuclear energy is something too dull to motivate a James Bond villians. The pace of the novels runs alright but very few highlights in-between IMO, the torture was pretty good and some of the action is fine but it's all very forgetable once you put down the book; It can't compare to running around Doctor No's Island or the Beau Desert. Also you seem to neglect how watered down this Bond really is. He is more the empty shell scene in the films with inconsistences that would later plague Licence To Kill when Timothy Dalton. No, Licenced Renewed, like all of Gardner's tiolet paper, should be ranked pretty low in the literary canon. I've given multiple chances with For Special Services, Win, Loose, or Die, and The Man from Barbarossa. He either over uses the "not who they seem" cliche, too much mundane politics, action reflecting the films, or a combo of all three. I think a lot of his work would have been better off as films co-writing with Richard Maibaum and Micheal G. Wilson.
At the risk of sounding rude, the forum is for my reviews, which people are entitled to comment on. My opening post does state "my continuing series."
Ricardo, if you can edit the post to offer less of an actual review and more of a commentary on my review / opinions, I'd be very happy.
That's not to say your review isn't valid, but it is a review and not a comment. The flow of the thread will be disrupted if everyone starts to post reviews!
Thanks.
Chris
At the risk of sounding rude, the forum is for my reviews, which people are entitled to comment on. My opening post does state "my continuing series."
Ricardo, if you can edit the post to offer less of an actual review and more of a commentary on my review / opinions, I'd be very happy.
That's not to say your review isn't valid, but it is a review and not a comment. The flow of the thread will be disrupted if everyone starts to post reviews!
Thanks.
Chris
To comment on Chris's review on Licence Review, I am surprised the high rating you are giving that rather flacid book. Was Murik's life or his plot that intriguing ? He's one the dullest villians in the Bond universe. This passion for safe nuclear reactors is one of the most inconsequential I have read about the series. Sexual infactuations with gold and hating the english I can understand but safe nuclear energy is something too dull to motivate a James Bond villians. The pace of the novels runs alright but very few highlights in-between IMO, the torture was pretty good and some of the action is fine but it's all very forgetable once you put down the book; It can't compare to running around Doctor No's Island or the Beau Desert. Also you seem to neglect how watered down this Bond really is. He is more the empty shell scene in the films with inconsistences that would later plague Licence To Kill when Timothy Dalton. No, Licenced Renewed, like all of Gardner's tiolet paper, should be ranked pretty low in the literary canon. I've given multiple chances with For Special Services, Win, Loose, or Die, and The Man from Barbarossa. He either over uses the "not who they seem" cliche, too much mundane politics, action reflecting the films, or a combo of all three. I think a lot of his work would have been better off as films co-writing with Richard Maibaum and Micheal G. Wilson.
Thanks, Ricardo.
I did re-review the rating for LR, and I lowered it. I guess if I am honest, I have probably still over-rated it. I think that's because I have great memories of this novel from 1982. It genuinely excited and enthralled me at the time, and I get a flush of good memories from my formative years. So despite my generally unpassioned appreciation [and disdain] for Gardner, I find it very hard to dislike LR. Sorry, it just can't be helped.
I think Murik's plan, while not spectacular, regime threatening or 'end of the world' does have merits and remains relevant in the current climate of impending fuel shortages. I agree he's basically having an extended hissy fit, but he is looking to monopolise the world's nuclear fuel processing, which would bring him riches and world influence [at least we thought so in 1982!] Yes, his appearance is at odds with our perception of a Bond villain, but no stranger than Dr No's seven foot worm or Goldfinger's five foot rotund carrot-top.
I think I mention that the action in Perpignon is most well realised sequence in LR, and while I agree it isn't a patch on Dr No, I'm also not expecting it to be. Some action scenes are very effective and the strangeness of the Mulcaldy chapters, all garters, sporrons and kilts, is less bizarre than Jack Spang's wild west town or Blofeld's samurai outfit (though equally unlikely!). Bond's escape from Castle Mulcaldy is one of the finest pieces of action Gardner ever wrote, straightforward, taut and exciting.
I'm very clear that this is not Fleming's Bond. Gardner does tend to be influenced more by the 'Brocolli Bond', hence the long drawn out finale and the jokey, token love interest at the start. In that respect your suggestion Gardner's novel's might work as film scripts has some credance (and many supporters, not least at Eon where they regularly dived into his canon for ideas).
The slow preamble is important in LR because it is laying the foundations of Gardner's 007 interpretation, whether that's good or bad. Certainly 007 has been watered down and I acknowledge that. The most noticable trait of all Gardner's writing is how poor his characterisations are. I attest, as you do, that they are almost without exception bland and uninteresting and saddled with horrendous names. Having said that I'm quite partial to Lavender Peacock; she is the most 'damsel-in-distress' of Gardner's heroines, very Fleming-esque in that respect. All his other heroines are secret agents.
Lastly, I can only offer my own summary by stating "Gardner has hit the ground running with a solid adventure yarn." That isn't high praise but it isn't bad. Yes, 7 marks might be a bit OTT, but I've just read Brokenclaw and The Man from Barbarossa and in comparison, LR is streets ahead for me. There is nothing solid about those flabby, self-important and muddled endurance tests.
I think Murik's plan, while not spectacular, regime threatening or 'end of the world' does have merits and remains relevant in the current climate of impending fuel shortages. I agree he's basically having an extended hissy fit, but he is looking to monopolise the world's nuclear fuel processing, which would bring him riches and world influence [at least we thought so in 1982!] Yes, his appearance is at odds with our perception of a Bond villain, but no stranger than Dr No's seven foot worm or Goldfinger's five foot rotund carrot-top.
I don't have any problem with his physical appearance, I just think he's a boring villian with a boring plot. Also I am glad you brought up the fact that Gardner's books were used in the films because Licence Renewed was the template for The World is Not Enough. When they adapted this plot they made the same mistake again, the less interesting villian is the focus here. They should have just let the terrorist become the main villian, that would made things slightly more interesting.
Death Is Forever is clearly based on John Gardner’s own 007 adventure No Deals, Mr Bond. Once you shake your disbelieving head past that, James Bond appears to be back to something like his old self, taking on the bad guys with a mixture of earnestness and mirth through a series of nasty, well inscribed scrapes.
I say ‘appears to be.’
That he is not, is entirely the fault of the author of this schizophrenic novel that veers alarmingly from the straightforward to the convoluted, from the comic to the horrific and onto the romantic, from the spectacular to the bland. Quite what Gardner thought he was doing here, I’m not sure. He doesn’t plant his feet firmly into any corner and the novel, while at times startlingly effective, is bogged down with intricate detail, has a collection of poorly described characters and is littered with unnecessary throwaway puns.
It starts of very well. Two deep cover agents are assassinated and their demise is framed in an oblique fashion: “In the moment before his death, Puxley... realised the man near the row of taxis had raised his hand... the registration was fouled with mud... and he went into oblivion cursing himself [and] how well it was being done.” I was instantly intrigued, but by the end of chapter two the rot had set in.
Bond is searching for the remnants of a Cold War spy ring codenamed Cabal. The members of the team are being systematically wiped out and it’s his job to reach the survivors before the assassins. Death Is Forever develops into another pan-European chase, but it’s tremendously dense and features a long cast list, every one of whom is given an irrelevant nick name. Gardner has done this before, most notably in Role of Honour, and it adds nothing to the personas of his people. His lead villain, the alliterative Wolfgang Weisen, even shares a moniker with a character from Nobody Lives Forever, “The Poison Dwarf.” That he is not a dwarf is hardly a surprise, but this Stalinist madman is a smooth talking Dickensian dandy with his “moon-like pink rosy cheeks... and a chubby, cherubic benevolence.” He elicits no fascination. Even his assassination plot is a trifle, an inconsequential orderless prelude to a hastily constructed denouement in the Channel Tunnel. The whole exercise becomes irrelevant and so does the Poison Dwarf.
Gardner provides a high staple of excellent violent images to go with his impenetrable plot and this is the redeeming feature of Death Is Forever. Early on there is a nasty incident with spider infested salmon sandwiches, “the swarm of tiny Fiddlebacks... and in their midst two bloated creeping adult females, forcing their way upward through bread, meat and fish... hungry for some other delicacy.”
While travelling on a train, Bond is forced to kill two hit men. He does so in a suitably grimfaced manner, “he had no conscience, no compunction about the work... This was how it happened... You can go from life to death in the twinkling of an eye... This was the law of the jungle of secret Europe.”
Later Bond electrocutes his antagonists on a live rail: “Weisen’s face became a twitching macabre mask... it looked as though someone was slowly melting black wax across his pink head.” The conclusion features a viciously barbed knife fight with a henchwoman, recalling the bleak Cold War days of Ian Fleming.
Best of all are a clutch of night time assaults in and around the villain’s bolt-hole, a Venetian palace, close to the Rialto and the Grand Canal. Gardner evokes the shifting scenes of Venice well and the impending struggle has the intrigue and suspense sadly missing from much of his recent work. Bond has just spent two days avoiding capture in Paris, and leaves on “a misty morning... of autumnal colours” but his arrival in Italy is equally opaque, “the mist was patchy with a swirl-like thin smoke... the houses looked eerily shrouded, their lights refracted through the damp clouds.” The death and destruction Bond and his daftly named accomplice August [Gus] Whimper impart in Venice has an edge unseen in much of Gardner’s recent output. These two agents strike up a partnership not unlike Bond and Felix Leiter, though no where near as serious. Their escapades are written in a no-nonsense style and show what Gardner can achieve when he restricts his cast of characters and condenses the action in and around his main protagonists.
Unfortunately the nature of the beast that is Death Is Forever means this story isn’t just about 007 and Gus, and here Gardner loses his way completely. I lost count of the number of people in the novel and I cared not one iota for any of them. Gardner’s characterisations are flimsy at best. The repetitive pronunciations and puzzling nick-names add nothing to their personalities. When Gardner attempts to inject anything resembling character development, the effect is wooden and clunks like an armour plated cloak.
The prime offender here is his heroine, a comely CIA operative, a pouting prissy little madam called Elizabeth Zara St. John, E-Zee for short, or as its written “Easy.” This is hardly the belter of a double entendre. It’s possibly the most immature, ridiculous and insulting name Gardner has ever come up with. Quite why any self respecting woman, especially one working in the intelligence community where anonymity abounds, would allow herself to be saddled with such a derogatory title seems to have completely passed him by. That she swaps attitudes alarmingly doesn’t help. Easy first appears as a straight laced condescending officious woman, then a helpless, horrified waif and lastly a perky, provocative, feminine sexual animal. Bond has to nurse maid this ineffectual agent through the whole story and their romance is leaden footed and weak.
Towards the story’s end Bond declares his love for this daft woman: “He felt his own emotions well up as he realised... this was the woman for him... He knew nothing of her background and all the other things one should know. Yet there he was looking at her and loving her.” This spur of the moment decision sits ill with what we know about James Bond, a man untouched by love, whose one great romance was cruelly shattered in a matter of hours. That Easy St. John lacks the independence, intelligence and mystery of Tracy makes the triteness of Bond’s declaration even more galling. It doesn’t sound like he really cares and this Mills & Boon interlude seems created solely to provide Bond with an excuse to exact revenge.
The less said about the other insignificant players the better; suffice to say they all share a line in dreadfully pithy dialogue. Humour has a place in James Bond’s world, but this tale is bumper full of asides and witticisms that are sometimes funny, often inappropriate and generally tedious. At one point, Bond and Easy share a whole page of banter with two policemen which would not be out of place on a children’s television show. I had images of shamefaced mugging as “Easy spoke clearly and very distinctly, ‘Paris. We – go – to – Paris’,” while Bond confuses the words “snatch” and “snitch.” Oh, dear.
The jokes come too thick and very fast and provide an uneasy background to the brutal mayhem. It has echoes of Cary Grant in ‘North by Northwest,’ but it lacks all his subtlety. This playful 007 is at odds with the sinister world he inhabits. Perhaps Gardner was attempting to pastiche his hero, for at the end the joke sits squarely with Bond; he’s been dodging bullets and dealing death around Europe, but learns the Poison Dwarf has no interest in eliminating him and was trying to spare his life. Weisen’s eventual plan reads like an inadequate afterthought.
At times Death Is Forever gives us the best of Gardner’s writing. The sequences in Venice are exceptional. When Bond is back in the environment we like to see him in, dealing with spies and spy-masters and dishing out the rough with the smooth, Gardner’s very effective. But the unsophisticated humour he mercilessly flogs and the empty facades of every single one of his characters show probably the nadir of his output. Sadly this split personality of a novel never gives itself a chance to succeed on either level.
Mercifully short, Never Send Flowers adds nothing to John Gardner’s litany of Bondage. It has all his familiar hallmarks: people are not who they seem, M goes into the field, information is with-held for no good reason, there is an over reliance on page after page of tepid dialogue to explain everything not once but twice, every woman is gorgeous and desirable, the humour is forced and school-boyish, the action takes ages in coming and proves relatively unexciting, the plot is convoluted and uninteresting and it all takes place on a sort of whistle stop tour of Europe. Oh, and this time the villain wants to assassinate members of the Royal Family.
I’d like to start with the villain, the alliteratively named David Dragonpol. This is undoubtedly Gardner’s weirdest creation. A great actor, a master of disguise, an obsessive-compulsive and an unhinged killer, Dragonpol, while being well short of normal, has possibly the most random motive of any Bond baddie: he gets a thrill from the organisation, preparation and execution of a sophisticated assassination. His targets are random, though they are all high profile, and he has no motive other than to act out the murders he has plotted. In that respect, he’s hardly a candidate for topping the ‘League of Great Bond Villains.’ He first appears with a hunchback, fake fingers and stage make up re-enacting his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Richard III. There’s nothing remotely spooky about this Richard of Gloucester; he’s simply barking mad. And so are his family and friends, who seem to condone his killings by failing to have him locked up in a lunatic asylum. This chameleon lives in a bizarre fantasy German castle that has all the tricks of Euro-Disney, where co-incidentally the climax of this novel takes place. It’s quite fitting because the impression I had was that Dragonpol is a man who never really grew up, he merely grew deranged. Gardner’s portrait of him is paper thin. I haven’t one decent line to quote about Dragonpol because the facade is so barren.
Indeed, most of Never Send Flowers is equally unquotable. It’s a turgid enterprise from start to finish. When not describing glamorous hotels, expensive meals and the fairy tale fortress of Schloss Drache, Gardner is developing another series of unmemorable characters. There is of course a gorgeous female agent (surprise, bloody surprise). She’s given the impossible name of Flicka von Grusse and while Bond considers her to be “not beautiful by any standard,” it doesn’t stop him copulating with her at every possible opportunity. Flicka’s seduction technique is indescribably obvious, so Gardner hardly bothers: “ ‘I must have some comfort tonight, please,’ she whispered; the last word was not a plea but something else which came from deep within her.” Ugh.
Throughout it all Gardner injects his unsophisticated puns and witticisms. But he’s forgotten to put in any action and when it does come it hardly makes your toes curl. This is a book by numbers in the worst sense and Gardner does his reputation no favours by repeating, after a fashion, scenes and situations he’s already included in many of his earlier 007 novels. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the novel is its lack of a double cross!
I was tremendously disappointed with Never Send Flowers. It’s a slack story all round. I think Gardner was probably disappointed too and, at the novels end, he seems prepared to throw in the 007 towel. Bond appears to have fallen in love with Flicka. Even his redoubtable Scots housekeeper May thinks she’s “a pleasant lass” – though that’s not a word I’d use to describe a girl who can break a man’s arm with karate chop – and M suspects marriage is on the cards.
More tellingly, the curmudgeonly old Admiral intones: “Changes are in the air...The job’s changing with the world, though I personally believe the world’s a more dangerous place than it was when we had a cut-and-dried cold war... which is why the powers that be are demanding a complete reorganisation. It’s going to affect me and it’s particularly going to affect you.”
This reads like a farewell from Gardner to his readers, opening the way for a fresh pen and a new inquisitive mind to continue the adventures of Ian Fleming’s hero. Sadly, as I have three more of the author’s novels to go, that clearly wasn’t to be the case.
This is my first time posting to the forum, but I wanted to say chrisno 1, that I agree full on with your reviews, both of the Fleming works and the continuation novels. I started out really enjoying the Gardner series, but after Icebreaker it just went down hill completely. You could really tell Gardner had had his fill by that point, and the work shows. While I do look forward to the reviews of SeaFire, Goldeneye, and Cold (Fall), I am particularly excited to see what you have to say about the Benson novels. While Gardner's selection was far from perfect, they feel like works of art compared to Benson's. Keep up the good work!
You should read about Gardner's history with Bond at the author's website. It's really just a long explanation about how Gardner didn't even want to write Bond and he thought the series was terrible in the first place. Gee, I wonder why his novels were so bad.
While Gardner's selection was far from perfect, they feel like works of art compared to Benson's. Keep up the good work!
I'll give Benson some credit and say that his ideas were a lot more fun however his writing technique is akin to a teenager creating fan-fiction for his or her dumb friends.
You're right there. His plots were pretty interesting, although poorly written. IFP must have truly been hard up for someone to continue the Bond series.
This is my first time posting to the forum, but I wanted to say chrisno 1, that I agree full on with your reviews, both of the Fleming works and the continuation novels. I started out really enjoying the Gardner series, but after Icebreaker it just went down hill completely. You could really tell Gardner had had his fill by that point, and the work shows. While I do look forward to the reviews of SeaFire, Goldeneye, and Cold (Fall), I am particularly excited to see what you have to say about the Benson novels. While Gardner's selection was far from perfect, they feel like works of art compared to Benson's. Keep up the good work!
Thanks for the good words! We are not alone in thinking it all goes downhill from Icebreaker!!!!
I certainly do get the impression of tiredness; from NDMB Gardner is basically rehashing all the same ideas.
Pity.
You should read about Gardner's history with Bond at the author's website. It's really just a long explanation about how Gardner didn't even want to write Bond and he thought the series was terrible in the first place. Gee, I wonder why his novels were so bad.
While not having read those thoughts for a long time (I thought theyw ere published somewhere?) I am aware of Gardner's reluctance to continue with Bond. He was ill in 1984/85 and felt compelled by Gildrose to write 2 novels when he really wasn't interested. Equally he championed TMFB, but got negative feedback and created that dastardly confection DIF, almost to spite his publisher! What I fail to understand is why he continued to write these novels when he wasn't interested in the product (money? reputation?) Surely he should have been in a position to just say "No!"
You should read about Gardner's history with Bond at the author's website. It's really just a long explanation about how Gardner didn't even want to write Bond and he thought the series was terrible in the first place. Gee, I wonder why his novels were so bad.
While not having read those thoughts for a long time (I thought theyw ere published somewhere?) I am aware of Gardner's reluctance to continue with Bond. He was ill in 1984/85 and felt compelled by Gildrose to write 2 novels when he really wasn't interested. Equally he championed TMFB, but got negative feedback and created that dastardly confection DIF, almost to spite his publisher! What I fail to understand is why he continued to write these novels when he wasn't interested in the product (money? reputation?) Surely he should have been in a position to just say "No!"
It must have been the money. He thought James Bond was crap and even told Kingsley Amis so.
Thanks for the tip, Napoleon... a bit late now mind! )
I'm not a Gardner expert. I don't think I'd be able to conjecturize each text in relation to his personal life even if I tried...
Not his personal life, but what was going on in the world at the time in terms of international politics. That Royal Family story would have been pre-Diana I take it? Had it been around the time of It's a Royal Knockout, the villain might have garnered some support...
Some of his novels, Nobody Lives Forever and Scorpius had interesting ideas, but never came to fruition. An author who actually cared about what he was writing would have been able to do a lot more with those novels than Gardner. The money must have been pretty good to keep churning out the same story over and over again.
The central villain of Seafire is the mad, neo-Nazi multi-millionaire Maximillian Tarn. While Tarn is hardly the most original of characters (think Von Gloda from Icebreaker crossed with Tamil Rahani from Role of Honour), is saddled with a familiar hidden history (think Yevgeny Yskovich from The Man from Barbarossa) and isn’t given the most original of plots (think industrial disaster from Licence Renewed crossed with the Rise of the Fourth Reich from Icebreaker and numerous other non-Bond related fiction) he does inhabit one of the most straightforward of John Gardner’s novels.
Seafire starts with a violent act of piracy aboard a cruise liner, thwarted by 007. This in itself is a change for Gardner who usually begins his tales with a red herring of a murder, so I had high hopes at the out set. Gardner’s Bond is now in charge of a special intelligence division called the ‘Double Zeros’ which operates under an umbrella committee called Micro Globe One. Basically this is an update of Fleming’s wonderfully realised and rather unlikely S.I.S.
I enjoyed the early scenes. Bond is relaxing into the soft life with his live-in-lover, Swiss agent Flicka von Grusse, who has the “distracting habit of wandering around indoors clad in the flimsiest of garments” and their banter, while still bordering on the shallow, does read at times as if they really are a bickering romantic couple. Bond is also wary of his new role. Throughout he shows a “dislike of committees that wasted time” and his assertion that they are “notoriously leaky” has a ring of truth to it.
Very quickly we are introduced to a clear plot line; the villain is identified; the likely causes and effects outlined; Bond’s mission is explained. This old fashioned method of storytelling serves Gardner well. In keeping the story simple, he should be able to develop his set pieces and his characters better.
And yet he fails to do so. The frustration is in the detail. There isn’t much of it. Gardner seems to have given up investing his cast with anything other than spurious personas. There are lots of clever inventions here: a pair of twin female assassins, a drug addled black girl, a dumb giant German, a wily English traitor; yet none of them is given anything remote interesting to say, nor are they described in any detail. The dialogue particularly is long winded and often it seems to fill up the page without telling us anything significant about the people or the plot.
Gardner’s saving grace has sometimes been his fine eye for locations, but he hardly pauses to describe them here. A brief travelogue of Seville is his most successful piece, where flamenco dancers form “a carousel of singing and dancing... a counter rhythm with castanets and stamping feet... the throbbing, colourful and exciting art... clapping, stylised, spontaneous.” Later on San Juan is “cooled by the gentle trade winds, guarded and nurtured... but prey to pirates... the problems of drugs, poverty and violence.” Yet much of the rest of Seafire is ordinary and uninvolving.
Certainly Bond gallivants around Europe and Puerto Rico and gets involved in some nasty scrapes, but the episodic manner first developed for Nobody Lives Forever does Gardner no favours. Between jaunts to Cambridge, Seville, Athens and Munich, Bond is fated to report back to Micro Globe One and in these chapters Seafire is less of a thriller and more of a dull expose of political infighting.
The modicum of good, imaginative action sequences raises the temperature in fits and starts. The motorcycle chase and gunfight through Seville is particularly fine (“three bullets caught him in the face...Flicka’s mouth frozen open in a scream of anger... a dreadful carving of horror”) and its culmination in a ruined amphitheatre (“the womb of the Roman Empire”) suggests Bond is acting out his gladiatorial instincts. There is also a fine piece of suspense as Bond infiltrates a lawyer’s office in Wasserburg, which has parallels to several scenes in the movie series.
Towards the climax, Bond is trapped inside an old German U-Boat and has to enact a sudden daring escape through the trunk hatch. This extended sequence is excellent. Gardner cranks up the atmosphere “the wallowing rocking motion had a hypnotic effect... the mutter of talk...the journey seemed to take endless minutes... hours became days; every nerve and sinew became alert, nervously jumpy with anxiety.” Bond starts to hallucinate about his wife, Tracy, and her image “a blurred picture, lying dead, her face buried in the ruins of a steering wheel” metamorphosis into that of Flicka von Grusse.
For here Gardner has attempted to construct a love story for James Bond. And it is Seafire’s Achilles’ heel. Because while he invests much time on these two lovers, who copulate with frequency and trade one liners like a couple of stand-ups, there isn’t any warmth in their relationship. Flicka is a non-entity of a heroine. She is an exceptional secret agent herself and Gardner’s problem is giving her anything significant to do. Several times she’s merely a foil, at other times she stands idle and silent as Bond plays out his role as head of the ‘Double Zeros.’ In fact Flicka is excluded from most of the action scenes; Bond fights the odds alone. There isn’t anything tangible that binds her to Bond. As much as he pines that “if anything happened to Flicka it would be his fault alone,” we simply don’t care very much about this heroine.
Gardner recognises this, firstly by insisting Bond has developed a personal vendetta against Tarn. This never seems likely. Even a government minister queries it: “I thought that went against all the tenets of your service.” Bond’s reply that “times are changing” is hopelessly derivative. Later Gardner constructs a neat passage where Flicka admits she would be lost without Bond and had “never loved with this kind of intensity.” However even this rings slightly hollow. A more likely precedent is Flicka’s maudlin assertion that “someone just walked over my grave.” Our heroine doesn’t die, but life becomes particularly brutal for her.
Seafire ends in a bit of a rush. It’s not a long novel, but there is no care and attention to the final two chapters. Flicka and that good old lag Felix Leiter are both in trouble, Bond still has to confront Tarn and three innocent scientists need rescuing. It’s all resolved with the minimum of fuss and the least possible elaboration. Gardner’s missed a trick here. Pruning some of the excessive speech ridden scenes mid-book [indeed, cutting the scenes out all together] and focussing more on the climax, particularly a Power-Chute flight over Puerto Rico, would have created a far more rewarding conclusion. As it stands, at the very moment Seafire becomes interesting, it also become spectacularly swift and rather faint.
The gloss and lustre Gardner created in some of his earliest 007 novels has completely vanished from these wishy-washy depictions and I felt hugely let down. Seafire isn’t all that bad, but Gardner hasn’t tried hard enough with this one. He’s a bored writer, offers recurring themes and plot strands and pitches them in an overtly obvious stilted manner. He shows flashes of style, but it simply isn’t enough.
For all the good stuff on display, and there is a fair bit of it, Seafire reads like a first draft when nobody’s bothered to correct the mistakes.
Goldeneye is a no frills transposition of its movie source. John Gardner’s other adaptation, Licence to Kill, at least showed some grace and attempted to weave Bond’s literary adventures into the novelisation. He focussed on his hero and attempted to embellish his characters with something like realistic personas and backgrounds. There is nothing so detailed here; Goldeneye is a shockingly simple novel. I hesitate to use the word incompetent, but it is sorely lacking in anything to recommend it.
While the movie was fairly enjoyable, the novel does nothing to suggest it is any fun at all. It doesn’t evoke good memories of Goldeneye; in fact the book highlights some of the film’s weaknesses through the author’s own insipid writing.
Occasionally Gardner is snapped out of his furrow and writes one or two swift astute passages. He suggests the new, female M, is a slave to the balance sheet, likening her office to the “sterility of the current technocracy” and compares this nicely to Natalya’s sad post-Glasnost train journey full of “street hoodlums... unwashed bodies” and Bond’s initial impression of St. Petersburg: “decay and lack of direction... instead of surveillance teams, he now kept a wary eye out for criminals.”
It’s surprising then that the criminals concerned (Janus / Alec Trevelyan, Xenia Onatopp, Ourumov and the cheeky sidekick Valentin Zukovsky) are hardly given an inkling of thought. At one moment Janus is referred to as glibly being “not just unpleasant but bordering on evil.” Gardner can’t even decide if his eyes resemble “a lizard or a chameleon.” Zukovsky’s background, as in the film, is glossed over with a few lines of explanation. In Licence to Kill Gardner wasn’t so curt; neither was Christopher Wood in his two ‘70s adaptations.
This short-hand storytelling is frustrating when important moments, like Natalya’s night-time tirade against the world of spies, are related in a blank uninvolving manner. Left sitting on the page, with no effort by the author to involve the conscious thoughts of the character, a scene like this reads very, very flat. Even Gardner’s action sequences lack skill – at one point an orbital satellite is referred to as being simply “far away.”
The worst sin, for such a grimly unstirred novel, is the sudden focus on sexual matters. I actually raised an eyebrow when Bond’s “manhood... slid into her long and thick.” A bit crass. Oddly, given the influx of cod-porn, the author misses the fact that Xenia Onatopp is in a permanent state of arousal, waiting for the next copulation or kill, an element clearly implied in Famke Janssen’s film performance. Maybe Gardner didn’t see the rushes or maybe he didn’t care. It's too late now; Goldeneye is a bad one all round.
Cold was not a novel I had happy memories about. It was with some surprise that upon second reading (my first was in 1996 and I have feared to touch it since) I found myself enjoying this energetic and well described adventure.
True, it repeats many of the situations familiar to devotees of 007 books, from Fleming through Amis and onto Gardner himself, but more thought has been directed to this opus and Cold is much better for it. The malaise the author got stuck in around the time of Scorpius and Win, Lose or Die has been thrown off. He finally seems to be writing because he wants to write, not because he has to write. There is flair to many of the descriptive passages and, for the first time in many years, the character of James Bond is presented in a viable manner and in a framework that involves the reader in his emotions.
Recent previous efforts tended to offer glib remarks about politics, espionage, lost love and dicing with death. This was not helped by a succession of unlikely psycho-style villians, who died with ease, and uninteresting bed mates, who tended to copulate with Bond as soon as he said ‘Hello, ___,’ [you can fill in the blank]. There simply wasn’t any emotional involvement for our hero. Things are very different here, and it is one of the reasons why I enjoyed re-reading Cold. It isn’t a perfect yarn, I’m afraid, and never scales the heights of Gardner’s earliest output, but at times it does remind us that he can write effective, efficient thrillers.
The biggest drawback, and one that befalls all of the author’s latter novels, is the piecemeal story structure: action, suspense or love scenes are interspersed with a series of over complicated briefings, culminating in a sudden revelation and a swift gore filled climax. So Cold is populated with too much talk; Bond doesn’t need to uncover or fathom out his adversaries’ plans. They are explained and presented to him by proxy. He’s only required to deliver summary justice, a fact our hero realises himself: “That’s what I’ve always been,” he sighs, “A kind of lethal errand boy. I follow orders. I use my initiative to get the job done.” His personal justification is satisfied by believing “things aren’t what they were... life’s much more dangerous now than it was in the middle of the cold war.” This sort of philosophising, however bland, has been rare in Gardner’s novels and it enlivens some often shapeless and talky chapters.
Indeed, it isn’t only Bond who considers the world has changed. One of the chief villains, Luigi Tempesta, talks of Italy sinking “under the weight of crime.” He suggests “drugs... are a destabilizer, they cost America a war... they are responsible for rising violent crime” and their effect ravages the traditional Italian lifestyle for “the young are abandoning their heritage... vanishing before our eyes, they vaporise to reappear in other parts of Europe... when this happens, our villages die and the country seems to disappear.” Luigi, a small man whose hands “express the unspoken detail behind every word,” is one of Gardner’s better creations. Nominal head of an Italian crime syndicate, he is powerful, loyal and cruel; it’s disappointing this very believable protagonist is sidelined in favour of the more traditionally bonkers renegade general, an American called Brutus Clay.
Clay hardly features in the tale. Bond and the FBI don’t take him particularly seriously and when he does appear it’s almost an afterthought, a necessary evil to tie up a couple of loose ends. Clay is a crippled third-degree burns victim, his “face made up of partly hanging flaps of skin... four misshapen holes where there had once been eyes, nose and mouth... a gaping oval which moved like the mouth of a ventriloquist’s dummy.” He talks and acts like a psychotic monster from a Hammer movie and, while I thought he was superfluous to the story, he certainly has dramatic [melodramatic?] impact, something lacking in most of Gardner’s baddies. Clay’s crazy scheme is entitled the Children of Last Days (C.O.L.D. get it?) – the ultimate in a long line of clunking acronyms from Gardner. It’s not a very believable plot, baring striking similarities to those in Scorpius and The Man from Barbarossa. Clay’s death by drowning is one of the most cursory ever for a Bond baddie: three lines of “thrashing out ineffectually with his prosthetic legs.” This monster deserved a far richer send off.
These couple of racy baddies don’t completely compensate for the stop start nature of Gardner’s storytelling. The tension swings dramatically. There are exciting suspenseful set pieces, but many readers may find the explanatory interludes a bit dreary. What makes the difference is that the nominally one dimensional story technique is built around a solid central character and, particularly in the first half of the novel, Bond is challenged by a series of conundrums which he fails to fully understand. The second half disappoints as it is no more than the set up and execution of a sort of ‘Who Dares Wins’ assault on an Italian villa. Here Bond really is a pawn to the FBI kings, to whom he has been loaned as the ubiquitous stalking horse.
The novel starts with the destruction of a Boeing 747, blown apart like “an obscene firework” at Dulles airport. When Bond arrives as part of an international investigation team, he is witness to “shock and disgust...it showed in the way they [the salvage team] walked.” Later Bond’s old flame, Sukie Tempesta the widowed millionairess from Nobody Lives Forever, is murdered when her car turns into a fireball. Called to the scene, “the tangled lump of scorched and twisted metal,” Bond begins to suffer similar traumas: “burned paint... the sickly scent of singed human flesh... the stench of death in his nostrils.” He even has to stop himself from vomiting. This is a plausible James Bond, confused by his feelings of loss and by the web of lies which is unfolding before him.
Gardner pulls on this very real manifestation of 007 time and again. Our hero begins to suffer nightmares and hallucinations: a Venetian masquerade turns into dance macabre and, haunted by her death, he sees images of Sukie everywhere. During the second half of the novel, set three years on and neatly following directly from Seafire, Bond is grieving for his lover, Flicka von Grusse, tending everyday to her comatose body and watching, waiting, “always to say goodbye.”
Bond has only loved four women, we are told, and there is a sense of regret for his past failures (“his bad luck with women”) and also a fear of the future: “now he had to face the possible loss of her life, or a life spent looking after a vegetable... he could not see himself living out the years as a nurse.” To retain his sanity, he reverts to his old routines, breakfast and exercise, before attending to her hospital bed. But even inside the routine, “black depression... was a visible cloud.”
This is one of the few times I really empathised with Gardner’s Bond and had a sense of the man behind the mask of the license to kill. It’s a sterling piece of writing. While not infused with the intensity of Fleming’s occasional maudlin anecdotes, Gardner succeeds through an oblique detached style. The reader espies on Bond’s own bleak world. The harsh realisation that the once active and vibrant Flicka will spend her life as an invalid, contrives a bitterly selfish response: “he hoped she would die.”
Forced back into the field, Bond rekindles his affair with the delicious Beatrice di Ricci and there is a painful scene when, after spending the evening making love, Bond and Beatrice learn Flicka has died. It isn’t Bond’s sombre reaction that shocks, but Beatrice’s, “a keening requiem for a woman she never met... sobs like the stutter of a dying engine.” Rarely have Gardner’s heroines been given such weight of gravitas. The limb-some Beatrice was certainly given less erudite treatment in Win, Lose or Die.
Away from Bond’s own state of mind, Gardner is tying up many of the threads that run through his other thirteen novels (I’m excluding the stand-alone movie tie-ins). There are harks back to previous adventures and two past lovers resurface. His portrait of M sees the Admiral finally retire and take on the air of a curmudgeonly uncle. Bond refers to him as “the old man” and a FBI agent suggests he “can make you feel a heel,” these two asides defining much of how Gardner has portrayed the head of the S.I.S. Here, M is much more conciliatory than normal, even calling his favourite agent James and offering him personal advice. While we all recognise the father-son relationship, Gardner oversteps the mark by eventually referring to it directly.
Where he doesn’t overstep is in two quite brilliant action sequences; first, an escape from the Villa Tempesta on jet-skis and second a dogfight between a Cobra helicopter and two HIP air bourn gunships, the latter a desperate attempt by Bond to rescue his kidnapped boss. These taut, terrifying scenes invoke much of what was good about Gardner’s earliest novels.
When Bond is forced to ditch the Cobra, he almost drowns and, in a beautifully scripted re-enactment of the torture scene in Icebreaker, Bond wavers close to death. “He saw wrecked bodies, women he had long forgotten: a girl covered head to toe in gold paint, a young Japanese woman whispering endearments, his wife of hours, shattered and bleeding... times of great pain and times of wonder... they became a beautiful whirling kaleidoscope of minutes and seconds... he was dying, he thought with incredible clarity... he heard voices and felt hands lifting him... is this how it is? Angels pull you across the Styx and into the far beyond...”
This finely textured piece genuinely exacts a visceral response; we understand and recognise exactly Bond’s personal experience. It’s a major turning point for John Gardner’s prose. The crime is that it has come so late in his career as James Bond’s biographer [my choice of word!].
So Cold is a more rewarding novel than many John Gardner’s canon. It isn’t necessarily the most accessible and suffers the same foibles which affected all his novels after Icebreaker, but it does succeed on an emotional level. For that alone Gardner deserves praise. The story’s unique three year timeframe allows the author to spin his yarn from two distinct angles, one featuring the forthright, irrefutable Bond, and the other a circumspect, almost relieved figure who finally reaches “the beginning of the end... the end of the beginning.”
I can’t cover it in glory, Cold has a fairly nonsensical villain and master plan and suffers a grandstand conclusion that is rushed and unsatisfying; yet at the outset, the novel grips, intrigues and enthuses, because the reader identifies with the central character. John Gardner deserves a lot of credit for delivering a persona of James Bond that is instantly recognisable as human and humane. That, at the very least, gives us something to remember in his final 007 novel.
I have only read that first half COLD. You definetly enjoyed it more than I do, I thought it was one of Gardner's very worst and gives a very uneasy preview of what we are going to get with Benson.
I have only read that first half COLD. You definetly enjoyed it more than I do, I thought it was one of Gardner's very worst and gives a very uneasy preview of what we are going to get with Benson.
Cold gets very mixed feedback across the web. I don't know if, like me, that was your first and only time reading it. I too struggled with it the first time, but I don't remember why (it was over ten years ago!). I don't claim its a great novel, but in Gardner's canon it is, for me, one of his better efforts.
Benson's reviews will follow, but I need a break! Gardner's very shallow latterly stories have quite worn my enthusiasm down!
Comments
13/8/2010
1991
There is a moment in The Man From Barbarossa when James Bond feels his mission has “no shape, no form, no logic.” The same could be decreed of this novel, John Gardner’s eleventh stab at the 007 legacy.
I must hold up my hand and say I had never read this novel before. I’m rather disappointed I’ve read it now. The whole project seems bogged down in a conundrum like plot which owes more to Le Carre than Fleming.
Gardner’s tale nominally involves a strange terrorist organisation called The Scales of Justice. Based in a glasnost crazy Russia, this splinter cell seeks retribution for war crimes and have targeted a turncoat Ukrainian Josif Vorontsov, a mass killer of Jews in Kiev during the Second World War. The suspicions of various intelligence agencies are aroused, not least when it becomes apparent the terrorists have kidnapped the wrong man. What starts out as an attempt to destabilise the USSR becomes an international crisis revolving around the Gulf War. I was reminded of the film Octopussy, whose plot is similarly convoluted, and whose rogue bad guys have similar aims.
Bond is assigned to investigate and travels to Moscow along with Pete Natkowitz from Mossad and Nina Bibikova of the KGB. It’s a set up reminiscent of Icebreaker. Later two French agents become involved and the inevitable double crosses and duplicitous behaviours abound. Gardner spends almost the entire novel explaining how every single character in his story fits neatly into the narrative. This is done in a series of extremely tiresome briefings, first in London, then in Moscow, then another in Finland.
There is hardly a single thrill in The Man From Barbarossa. After a good start involving two kidnaps and some gentle spying, I read the words “stalking horses” and my heart sank. Gardner proceeds to rehash much of what he’d already created for Brokenclaw, including sunken houses, mistaken identities and a villain (Yevgeny Yuskovich) who has a preoccupation with nubile young women. Towards the end the tempo lifts, but the author telegraphs “the death of 007” and his hero’s resurrection is in a tired and uninteresting fashion.
Gardner’s shift away from gory action isn’t, in isolation, a bad idea. The world of espionage is multi-faceted and there is no reason why Bond shouldn’t do some cloak-and-dagger counter-spying. The problem is, other than one or two brief instances, Gardner has reduced Fleming’s man of action to an inactive passenger who listens to everyone talking and spends half the novel impersonating a cameraman at a bogus war crimes trial.
The whole exercise is a worn out attempt to disguise miscellaneous familiar twists and turns which, rather than exciting the reader and drawing us in, leaves us perplexed and frustrated. So dense is the plotting that the eventual revelations hardly shock us. Nothing surprises in Gardner’s world of incestuous spies and everyone, and every country, seems to be in bed with their rivals and allies. Some might say this is realistic, but Gardner embellishes it with little more than charcoal sketches. The Man From Barbarossa is no oil painting. It’s horrendously bland.
Occasionally Gardner provides goblets of interest. During an unexpected assault, the villains become statuesque; even “the liquids seemed solidified in a click of time.” His descriptions of a wintery Moscow are particularly fine: “The road ahead looked bleak, rather than romantic... Flakes the size of silver dollars drifted sluggishly in the night air... bundled up people trudged along the pavements.” While these incidental details are good they get lost between pages of dreary narration. It’s indicative of Gardner’s storytelling technique that he’s made the travails of a minor character like Nigsy Meadows or the life-history of Michael Brooks more interesting than what’s happening to James Bond.
“Field agents and airline pilots suffer from the same occupational hazard – nine tenths boredom followed by one tenth sheer terror,” recalls James Bond. That’s how I felt digesting The Man From Barbarossa; spies, plants and double agents crawl out the woodwork at every turn and do very little of any interest. This is less a spider’s web and more a mountain of impenetrable muddle.
2 from 10
To comment on Chris's review on Licence Review, I am surprised the high rating you are giving that rather flacid book. Was Murik's life or his plot that intriguing ? He's one the dullest villians in the Bond universe. This passion for safe nuclear reactors is one of the most inconsequential I have read about the series. Sexual infactuations with gold and hating the english I can understand but safe nuclear energy is something too dull to motivate a James Bond villians. The pace of the novels runs alright but very few highlights in-between IMO, the torture was pretty good and some of the action is fine but it's all very forgetable once you put down the book; It can't compare to running around Doctor No's Island or the Beau Desert. Also you seem to neglect how watered down this Bond really is. He is more the empty shell scene in the films with inconsistences that would later plague Licence To Kill when Timothy Dalton. No, Licenced Renewed, like all of Gardner's tiolet paper, should be ranked pretty low in the literary canon. I've given multiple chances with For Special Services, Win, Loose, or Die, and The Man from Barbarossa. He either over uses the "not who they seem" cliche, too much mundane politics, action reflecting the films, or a combo of all three. I think a lot of his work would have been better off as films co-writing with Richard Maibaum and Micheal G. Wilson.
Ricardo, if you can edit the post to offer less of an actual review and more of a commentary on my review / opinions, I'd be very happy.
That's not to say your review isn't valid, but it is a review and not a comment.
The flow of the thread will be disrupted if everyone starts to post reviews!
Thanks.
Chris
Sorry about that, edited my post.
Thanks, Ricardo.
I did re-review the rating for LR, and I lowered it. I guess if I am honest, I have probably still over-rated it. I think that's because I have great memories of this novel from 1982. It genuinely excited and enthralled me at the time, and I get a flush of good memories from my formative years. So despite my generally unpassioned appreciation [and disdain] for Gardner, I find it very hard to dislike LR. Sorry, it just can't be helped.
I think Murik's plan, while not spectacular, regime threatening or 'end of the world' does have merits and remains relevant in the current climate of impending fuel shortages. I agree he's basically having an extended hissy fit, but he is looking to monopolise the world's nuclear fuel processing, which would bring him riches and world influence [at least we thought so in 1982!] Yes, his appearance is at odds with our perception of a Bond villain, but no stranger than Dr No's seven foot worm or Goldfinger's five foot rotund carrot-top.
I think I mention that the action in Perpignon is most well realised sequence in LR, and while I agree it isn't a patch on Dr No, I'm also not expecting it to be. Some action scenes are very effective and the strangeness of the Mulcaldy chapters, all garters, sporrons and kilts, is less bizarre than Jack Spang's wild west town or Blofeld's samurai outfit (though equally unlikely!). Bond's escape from Castle Mulcaldy is one of the finest pieces of action Gardner ever wrote, straightforward, taut and exciting.
I'm very clear that this is not Fleming's Bond. Gardner does tend to be influenced more by the 'Brocolli Bond', hence the long drawn out finale and the jokey, token love interest at the start. In that respect your suggestion Gardner's novel's might work as film scripts has some credance (and many supporters, not least at Eon where they regularly dived into his canon for ideas).
The slow preamble is important in LR because it is laying the foundations of Gardner's 007 interpretation, whether that's good or bad. Certainly 007 has been watered down and I acknowledge that. The most noticable trait of all Gardner's writing is how poor his characterisations are. I attest, as you do, that they are almost without exception bland and uninteresting and saddled with horrendous names. Having said that I'm quite partial to Lavender Peacock; she is the most 'damsel-in-distress' of Gardner's heroines, very Fleming-esque in that respect. All his other heroines are secret agents.
Lastly, I can only offer my own summary by stating "Gardner has hit the ground running with a solid adventure yarn." That isn't high praise but it isn't bad. Yes, 7 marks might be a bit OTT, but I've just read Brokenclaw and The Man from Barbarossa and in comparison, LR is streets ahead for me. There is nothing solid about those flabby, self-important and muddled endurance tests.
Chris
I don't have any problem with his physical appearance, I just think he's a boring villian with a boring plot. Also I am glad you brought up the fact that Gardner's books were used in the films because Licence Renewed was the template for The World is Not Enough. When they adapted this plot they made the same mistake again, the less interesting villian is the focus here. They should have just let the terrorist become the main villian, that would made things slightly more interesting.
17/8/2010
1992
Death Is Forever is clearly based on John Gardner’s own 007 adventure No Deals, Mr Bond. Once you shake your disbelieving head past that, James Bond appears to be back to something like his old self, taking on the bad guys with a mixture of earnestness and mirth through a series of nasty, well inscribed scrapes.
I say ‘appears to be.’
That he is not, is entirely the fault of the author of this schizophrenic novel that veers alarmingly from the straightforward to the convoluted, from the comic to the horrific and onto the romantic, from the spectacular to the bland. Quite what Gardner thought he was doing here, I’m not sure. He doesn’t plant his feet firmly into any corner and the novel, while at times startlingly effective, is bogged down with intricate detail, has a collection of poorly described characters and is littered with unnecessary throwaway puns.
It starts of very well. Two deep cover agents are assassinated and their demise is framed in an oblique fashion: “In the moment before his death, Puxley... realised the man near the row of taxis had raised his hand... the registration was fouled with mud... and he went into oblivion cursing himself [and] how well it was being done.” I was instantly intrigued, but by the end of chapter two the rot had set in.
Bond is searching for the remnants of a Cold War spy ring codenamed Cabal. The members of the team are being systematically wiped out and it’s his job to reach the survivors before the assassins. Death Is Forever develops into another pan-European chase, but it’s tremendously dense and features a long cast list, every one of whom is given an irrelevant nick name. Gardner has done this before, most notably in Role of Honour, and it adds nothing to the personas of his people. His lead villain, the alliterative Wolfgang Weisen, even shares a moniker with a character from Nobody Lives Forever, “The Poison Dwarf.” That he is not a dwarf is hardly a surprise, but this Stalinist madman is a smooth talking Dickensian dandy with his “moon-like pink rosy cheeks... and a chubby, cherubic benevolence.” He elicits no fascination. Even his assassination plot is a trifle, an inconsequential orderless prelude to a hastily constructed denouement in the Channel Tunnel. The whole exercise becomes irrelevant and so does the Poison Dwarf.
Gardner provides a high staple of excellent violent images to go with his impenetrable plot and this is the redeeming feature of Death Is Forever. Early on there is a nasty incident with spider infested salmon sandwiches, “the swarm of tiny Fiddlebacks... and in their midst two bloated creeping adult females, forcing their way upward through bread, meat and fish... hungry for some other delicacy.”
While travelling on a train, Bond is forced to kill two hit men. He does so in a suitably grimfaced manner, “he had no conscience, no compunction about the work... This was how it happened... You can go from life to death in the twinkling of an eye... This was the law of the jungle of secret Europe.”
Later Bond electrocutes his antagonists on a live rail: “Weisen’s face became a twitching macabre mask... it looked as though someone was slowly melting black wax across his pink head.” The conclusion features a viciously barbed knife fight with a henchwoman, recalling the bleak Cold War days of Ian Fleming.
Best of all are a clutch of night time assaults in and around the villain’s bolt-hole, a Venetian palace, close to the Rialto and the Grand Canal. Gardner evokes the shifting scenes of Venice well and the impending struggle has the intrigue and suspense sadly missing from much of his recent work. Bond has just spent two days avoiding capture in Paris, and leaves on “a misty morning... of autumnal colours” but his arrival in Italy is equally opaque, “the mist was patchy with a swirl-like thin smoke... the houses looked eerily shrouded, their lights refracted through the damp clouds.” The death and destruction Bond and his daftly named accomplice August [Gus] Whimper impart in Venice has an edge unseen in much of Gardner’s recent output. These two agents strike up a partnership not unlike Bond and Felix Leiter, though no where near as serious. Their escapades are written in a no-nonsense style and show what Gardner can achieve when he restricts his cast of characters and condenses the action in and around his main protagonists.
Unfortunately the nature of the beast that is Death Is Forever means this story isn’t just about 007 and Gus, and here Gardner loses his way completely. I lost count of the number of people in the novel and I cared not one iota for any of them. Gardner’s characterisations are flimsy at best. The repetitive pronunciations and puzzling nick-names add nothing to their personalities. When Gardner attempts to inject anything resembling character development, the effect is wooden and clunks like an armour plated cloak.
The prime offender here is his heroine, a comely CIA operative, a pouting prissy little madam called Elizabeth Zara St. John, E-Zee for short, or as its written “Easy.” This is hardly the belter of a double entendre. It’s possibly the most immature, ridiculous and insulting name Gardner has ever come up with. Quite why any self respecting woman, especially one working in the intelligence community where anonymity abounds, would allow herself to be saddled with such a derogatory title seems to have completely passed him by. That she swaps attitudes alarmingly doesn’t help. Easy first appears as a straight laced condescending officious woman, then a helpless, horrified waif and lastly a perky, provocative, feminine sexual animal. Bond has to nurse maid this ineffectual agent through the whole story and their romance is leaden footed and weak.
Towards the story’s end Bond declares his love for this daft woman: “He felt his own emotions well up as he realised... this was the woman for him... He knew nothing of her background and all the other things one should know. Yet there he was looking at her and loving her.” This spur of the moment decision sits ill with what we know about James Bond, a man untouched by love, whose one great romance was cruelly shattered in a matter of hours. That Easy St. John lacks the independence, intelligence and mystery of Tracy makes the triteness of Bond’s declaration even more galling. It doesn’t sound like he really cares and this Mills & Boon interlude seems created solely to provide Bond with an excuse to exact revenge.
The less said about the other insignificant players the better; suffice to say they all share a line in dreadfully pithy dialogue. Humour has a place in James Bond’s world, but this tale is bumper full of asides and witticisms that are sometimes funny, often inappropriate and generally tedious. At one point, Bond and Easy share a whole page of banter with two policemen which would not be out of place on a children’s television show. I had images of shamefaced mugging as “Easy spoke clearly and very distinctly, ‘Paris. We – go – to – Paris’,” while Bond confuses the words “snatch” and “snitch.” Oh, dear.
The jokes come too thick and very fast and provide an uneasy background to the brutal mayhem. It has echoes of Cary Grant in ‘North by Northwest,’ but it lacks all his subtlety. This playful 007 is at odds with the sinister world he inhabits. Perhaps Gardner was attempting to pastiche his hero, for at the end the joke sits squarely with Bond; he’s been dodging bullets and dealing death around Europe, but learns the Poison Dwarf has no interest in eliminating him and was trying to spare his life. Weisen’s eventual plan reads like an inadequate afterthought.
At times Death Is Forever gives us the best of Gardner’s writing. The sequences in Venice are exceptional. When Bond is back in the environment we like to see him in, dealing with spies and spy-masters and dishing out the rough with the smooth, Gardner’s very effective. But the unsophisticated humour he mercilessly flogs and the empty facades of every single one of his characters show probably the nadir of his output. Sadly this split personality of a novel never gives itself a chance to succeed on either level.
3 from 10
25/8/2010
1993
Mercifully short, Never Send Flowers adds nothing to John Gardner’s litany of Bondage. It has all his familiar hallmarks: people are not who they seem, M goes into the field, information is with-held for no good reason, there is an over reliance on page after page of tepid dialogue to explain everything not once but twice, every woman is gorgeous and desirable, the humour is forced and school-boyish, the action takes ages in coming and proves relatively unexciting, the plot is convoluted and uninteresting and it all takes place on a sort of whistle stop tour of Europe. Oh, and this time the villain wants to assassinate members of the Royal Family.
I’d like to start with the villain, the alliteratively named David Dragonpol. This is undoubtedly Gardner’s weirdest creation. A great actor, a master of disguise, an obsessive-compulsive and an unhinged killer, Dragonpol, while being well short of normal, has possibly the most random motive of any Bond baddie: he gets a thrill from the organisation, preparation and execution of a sophisticated assassination. His targets are random, though they are all high profile, and he has no motive other than to act out the murders he has plotted. In that respect, he’s hardly a candidate for topping the ‘League of Great Bond Villains.’ He first appears with a hunchback, fake fingers and stage make up re-enacting his interpretation of Shakespeare’s Richard III. There’s nothing remotely spooky about this Richard of Gloucester; he’s simply barking mad. And so are his family and friends, who seem to condone his killings by failing to have him locked up in a lunatic asylum. This chameleon lives in a bizarre fantasy German castle that has all the tricks of Euro-Disney, where co-incidentally the climax of this novel takes place. It’s quite fitting because the impression I had was that Dragonpol is a man who never really grew up, he merely grew deranged. Gardner’s portrait of him is paper thin. I haven’t one decent line to quote about Dragonpol because the facade is so barren.
Indeed, most of Never Send Flowers is equally unquotable. It’s a turgid enterprise from start to finish. When not describing glamorous hotels, expensive meals and the fairy tale fortress of Schloss Drache, Gardner is developing another series of unmemorable characters. There is of course a gorgeous female agent (surprise, bloody surprise). She’s given the impossible name of Flicka von Grusse and while Bond considers her to be “not beautiful by any standard,” it doesn’t stop him copulating with her at every possible opportunity. Flicka’s seduction technique is indescribably obvious, so Gardner hardly bothers: “ ‘I must have some comfort tonight, please,’ she whispered; the last word was not a plea but something else which came from deep within her.” Ugh.
Throughout it all Gardner injects his unsophisticated puns and witticisms. But he’s forgotten to put in any action and when it does come it hardly makes your toes curl. This is a book by numbers in the worst sense and Gardner does his reputation no favours by repeating, after a fashion, scenes and situations he’s already included in many of his earlier 007 novels. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the novel is its lack of a double cross!
I was tremendously disappointed with Never Send Flowers. It’s a slack story all round. I think Gardner was probably disappointed too and, at the novels end, he seems prepared to throw in the 007 towel. Bond appears to have fallen in love with Flicka. Even his redoubtable Scots housekeeper May thinks she’s “a pleasant lass” – though that’s not a word I’d use to describe a girl who can break a man’s arm with karate chop – and M suspects marriage is on the cards.
More tellingly, the curmudgeonly old Admiral intones: “Changes are in the air...The job’s changing with the world, though I personally believe the world’s a more dangerous place than it was when we had a cut-and-dried cold war... which is why the powers that be are demanding a complete reorganisation. It’s going to affect me and it’s particularly going to affect you.”
This reads like a farewell from Gardner to his readers, opening the way for a fresh pen and a new inquisitive mind to continue the adventures of Ian Fleming’s hero. Sadly, as I have three more of the author’s novels to go, that clearly wasn’t to be the case.
1 from 10
I'll give Benson some credit and say that his ideas were a lot more fun however his writing technique is akin to a teenager creating fan-fiction for his or her dumb friends.
Thanks for the good words! We are not alone in thinking it all goes downhill from Icebreaker!!!!
I certainly do get the impression of tiredness; from NDMB Gardner is basically rehashing all the same ideas.
Pity.
While not having read those thoughts for a long time (I thought theyw ere published somewhere?) I am aware of Gardner's reluctance to continue with Bond. He was ill in 1984/85 and felt compelled by Gildrose to write 2 novels when he really wasn't interested. Equally he championed TMFB, but got negative feedback and created that dastardly confection DIF, almost to spite his publisher! What I fail to understand is why he continued to write these novels when he wasn't interested in the product (money? reputation?) Surely he should have been in a position to just say "No!"
Mentioning the year each novel was released in your reviews might help provide a useful context, ChrisNo1.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
It must have been the money. He thought James Bond was crap and even told Kingsley Amis so.
I'm not a Gardner expert. I don't think I'd be able to conjecturize each text in relation to his personal life even if I tried...
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Here is the Gardner on Bond article I have been refering to; revealing and not quite surprising.
4/9/2010
1994
The central villain of Seafire is the mad, neo-Nazi multi-millionaire Maximillian Tarn. While Tarn is hardly the most original of characters (think Von Gloda from Icebreaker crossed with Tamil Rahani from Role of Honour), is saddled with a familiar hidden history (think Yevgeny Yskovich from The Man from Barbarossa) and isn’t given the most original of plots (think industrial disaster from Licence Renewed crossed with the Rise of the Fourth Reich from Icebreaker and numerous other non-Bond related fiction) he does inhabit one of the most straightforward of John Gardner’s novels.
Seafire starts with a violent act of piracy aboard a cruise liner, thwarted by 007. This in itself is a change for Gardner who usually begins his tales with a red herring of a murder, so I had high hopes at the out set. Gardner’s Bond is now in charge of a special intelligence division called the ‘Double Zeros’ which operates under an umbrella committee called Micro Globe One. Basically this is an update of Fleming’s wonderfully realised and rather unlikely S.I.S.
I enjoyed the early scenes. Bond is relaxing into the soft life with his live-in-lover, Swiss agent Flicka von Grusse, who has the “distracting habit of wandering around indoors clad in the flimsiest of garments” and their banter, while still bordering on the shallow, does read at times as if they really are a bickering romantic couple. Bond is also wary of his new role. Throughout he shows a “dislike of committees that wasted time” and his assertion that they are “notoriously leaky” has a ring of truth to it.
Very quickly we are introduced to a clear plot line; the villain is identified; the likely causes and effects outlined; Bond’s mission is explained. This old fashioned method of storytelling serves Gardner well. In keeping the story simple, he should be able to develop his set pieces and his characters better.
And yet he fails to do so. The frustration is in the detail. There isn’t much of it. Gardner seems to have given up investing his cast with anything other than spurious personas. There are lots of clever inventions here: a pair of twin female assassins, a drug addled black girl, a dumb giant German, a wily English traitor; yet none of them is given anything remote interesting to say, nor are they described in any detail. The dialogue particularly is long winded and often it seems to fill up the page without telling us anything significant about the people or the plot.
Gardner’s saving grace has sometimes been his fine eye for locations, but he hardly pauses to describe them here. A brief travelogue of Seville is his most successful piece, where flamenco dancers form “a carousel of singing and dancing... a counter rhythm with castanets and stamping feet... the throbbing, colourful and exciting art... clapping, stylised, spontaneous.” Later on San Juan is “cooled by the gentle trade winds, guarded and nurtured... but prey to pirates... the problems of drugs, poverty and violence.” Yet much of the rest of Seafire is ordinary and uninvolving.
Certainly Bond gallivants around Europe and Puerto Rico and gets involved in some nasty scrapes, but the episodic manner first developed for Nobody Lives Forever does Gardner no favours. Between jaunts to Cambridge, Seville, Athens and Munich, Bond is fated to report back to Micro Globe One and in these chapters Seafire is less of a thriller and more of a dull expose of political infighting.
The modicum of good, imaginative action sequences raises the temperature in fits and starts. The motorcycle chase and gunfight through Seville is particularly fine (“three bullets caught him in the face...Flicka’s mouth frozen open in a scream of anger... a dreadful carving of horror”) and its culmination in a ruined amphitheatre (“the womb of the Roman Empire”) suggests Bond is acting out his gladiatorial instincts. There is also a fine piece of suspense as Bond infiltrates a lawyer’s office in Wasserburg, which has parallels to several scenes in the movie series.
Towards the climax, Bond is trapped inside an old German U-Boat and has to enact a sudden daring escape through the trunk hatch. This extended sequence is excellent. Gardner cranks up the atmosphere “the wallowing rocking motion had a hypnotic effect... the mutter of talk...the journey seemed to take endless minutes... hours became days; every nerve and sinew became alert, nervously jumpy with anxiety.” Bond starts to hallucinate about his wife, Tracy, and her image “a blurred picture, lying dead, her face buried in the ruins of a steering wheel” metamorphosis into that of Flicka von Grusse.
For here Gardner has attempted to construct a love story for James Bond. And it is Seafire’s Achilles’ heel. Because while he invests much time on these two lovers, who copulate with frequency and trade one liners like a couple of stand-ups, there isn’t any warmth in their relationship. Flicka is a non-entity of a heroine. She is an exceptional secret agent herself and Gardner’s problem is giving her anything significant to do. Several times she’s merely a foil, at other times she stands idle and silent as Bond plays out his role as head of the ‘Double Zeros.’ In fact Flicka is excluded from most of the action scenes; Bond fights the odds alone. There isn’t anything tangible that binds her to Bond. As much as he pines that “if anything happened to Flicka it would be his fault alone,” we simply don’t care very much about this heroine.
Gardner recognises this, firstly by insisting Bond has developed a personal vendetta against Tarn. This never seems likely. Even a government minister queries it: “I thought that went against all the tenets of your service.” Bond’s reply that “times are changing” is hopelessly derivative. Later Gardner constructs a neat passage where Flicka admits she would be lost without Bond and had “never loved with this kind of intensity.” However even this rings slightly hollow. A more likely precedent is Flicka’s maudlin assertion that “someone just walked over my grave.” Our heroine doesn’t die, but life becomes particularly brutal for her.
Seafire ends in a bit of a rush. It’s not a long novel, but there is no care and attention to the final two chapters. Flicka and that good old lag Felix Leiter are both in trouble, Bond still has to confront Tarn and three innocent scientists need rescuing. It’s all resolved with the minimum of fuss and the least possible elaboration. Gardner’s missed a trick here. Pruning some of the excessive speech ridden scenes mid-book [indeed, cutting the scenes out all together] and focussing more on the climax, particularly a Power-Chute flight over Puerto Rico, would have created a far more rewarding conclusion. As it stands, at the very moment Seafire becomes interesting, it also become spectacularly swift and rather faint.
The gloss and lustre Gardner created in some of his earliest 007 novels has completely vanished from these wishy-washy depictions and I felt hugely let down. Seafire isn’t all that bad, but Gardner hasn’t tried hard enough with this one. He’s a bored writer, offers recurring themes and plot strands and pitches them in an overtly obvious stilted manner. He shows flashes of style, but it simply isn’t enough.
For all the good stuff on display, and there is a fair bit of it, Seafire reads like a first draft when nobody’s bothered to correct the mistakes.
4 from 10
13/9/2010
1995
Goldeneye is a no frills transposition of its movie source. John Gardner’s other adaptation, Licence to Kill, at least showed some grace and attempted to weave Bond’s literary adventures into the novelisation. He focussed on his hero and attempted to embellish his characters with something like realistic personas and backgrounds. There is nothing so detailed here; Goldeneye is a shockingly simple novel. I hesitate to use the word incompetent, but it is sorely lacking in anything to recommend it.
While the movie was fairly enjoyable, the novel does nothing to suggest it is any fun at all. It doesn’t evoke good memories of Goldeneye; in fact the book highlights some of the film’s weaknesses through the author’s own insipid writing.
Occasionally Gardner is snapped out of his furrow and writes one or two swift astute passages. He suggests the new, female M, is a slave to the balance sheet, likening her office to the “sterility of the current technocracy” and compares this nicely to Natalya’s sad post-Glasnost train journey full of “street hoodlums... unwashed bodies” and Bond’s initial impression of St. Petersburg: “decay and lack of direction... instead of surveillance teams, he now kept a wary eye out for criminals.”
It’s surprising then that the criminals concerned (Janus / Alec Trevelyan, Xenia Onatopp, Ourumov and the cheeky sidekick Valentin Zukovsky) are hardly given an inkling of thought. At one moment Janus is referred to as glibly being “not just unpleasant but bordering on evil.” Gardner can’t even decide if his eyes resemble “a lizard or a chameleon.” Zukovsky’s background, as in the film, is glossed over with a few lines of explanation. In Licence to Kill Gardner wasn’t so curt; neither was Christopher Wood in his two ‘70s adaptations.
This short-hand storytelling is frustrating when important moments, like Natalya’s night-time tirade against the world of spies, are related in a blank uninvolving manner. Left sitting on the page, with no effort by the author to involve the conscious thoughts of the character, a scene like this reads very, very flat. Even Gardner’s action sequences lack skill – at one point an orbital satellite is referred to as being simply “far away.”
The worst sin, for such a grimly unstirred novel, is the sudden focus on sexual matters. I actually raised an eyebrow when Bond’s “manhood... slid into her long and thick.” A bit crass. Oddly, given the influx of cod-porn, the author misses the fact that Xenia Onatopp is in a permanent state of arousal, waiting for the next copulation or kill, an element clearly implied in Famke Janssen’s film performance. Maybe Gardner didn’t see the rushes or maybe he didn’t care. It's too late now; Goldeneye is a bad one all round.
1 from 10
That's something I'd expect from a 13 year old virgin to write.
Thanks for the review chrisno1, I have been curious about the GE novelization.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Ah, yes, I don't quite know what I was think of there! Duly changed to "curt"
18/9/2010
(U.S. title: Cold Fall)
1996
Cold was not a novel I had happy memories about. It was with some surprise that upon second reading (my first was in 1996 and I have feared to touch it since) I found myself enjoying this energetic and well described adventure.
True, it repeats many of the situations familiar to devotees of 007 books, from Fleming through Amis and onto Gardner himself, but more thought has been directed to this opus and Cold is much better for it. The malaise the author got stuck in around the time of Scorpius and Win, Lose or Die has been thrown off. He finally seems to be writing because he wants to write, not because he has to write. There is flair to many of the descriptive passages and, for the first time in many years, the character of James Bond is presented in a viable manner and in a framework that involves the reader in his emotions.
Recent previous efforts tended to offer glib remarks about politics, espionage, lost love and dicing with death. This was not helped by a succession of unlikely psycho-style villians, who died with ease, and uninteresting bed mates, who tended to copulate with Bond as soon as he said ‘Hello, ___,’ [you can fill in the blank]. There simply wasn’t any emotional involvement for our hero. Things are very different here, and it is one of the reasons why I enjoyed re-reading Cold. It isn’t a perfect yarn, I’m afraid, and never scales the heights of Gardner’s earliest output, but at times it does remind us that he can write effective, efficient thrillers.
The biggest drawback, and one that befalls all of the author’s latter novels, is the piecemeal story structure: action, suspense or love scenes are interspersed with a series of over complicated briefings, culminating in a sudden revelation and a swift gore filled climax. So Cold is populated with too much talk; Bond doesn’t need to uncover or fathom out his adversaries’ plans. They are explained and presented to him by proxy. He’s only required to deliver summary justice, a fact our hero realises himself: “That’s what I’ve always been,” he sighs, “A kind of lethal errand boy. I follow orders. I use my initiative to get the job done.” His personal justification is satisfied by believing “things aren’t what they were... life’s much more dangerous now than it was in the middle of the cold war.” This sort of philosophising, however bland, has been rare in Gardner’s novels and it enlivens some often shapeless and talky chapters.
Indeed, it isn’t only Bond who considers the world has changed. One of the chief villains, Luigi Tempesta, talks of Italy sinking “under the weight of crime.” He suggests “drugs... are a destabilizer, they cost America a war... they are responsible for rising violent crime” and their effect ravages the traditional Italian lifestyle for “the young are abandoning their heritage... vanishing before our eyes, they vaporise to reappear in other parts of Europe... when this happens, our villages die and the country seems to disappear.” Luigi, a small man whose hands “express the unspoken detail behind every word,” is one of Gardner’s better creations. Nominal head of an Italian crime syndicate, he is powerful, loyal and cruel; it’s disappointing this very believable protagonist is sidelined in favour of the more traditionally bonkers renegade general, an American called Brutus Clay.
Clay hardly features in the tale. Bond and the FBI don’t take him particularly seriously and when he does appear it’s almost an afterthought, a necessary evil to tie up a couple of loose ends. Clay is a crippled third-degree burns victim, his “face made up of partly hanging flaps of skin... four misshapen holes where there had once been eyes, nose and mouth... a gaping oval which moved like the mouth of a ventriloquist’s dummy.” He talks and acts like a psychotic monster from a Hammer movie and, while I thought he was superfluous to the story, he certainly has dramatic [melodramatic?] impact, something lacking in most of Gardner’s baddies. Clay’s crazy scheme is entitled the Children of Last Days (C.O.L.D. get it?) – the ultimate in a long line of clunking acronyms from Gardner. It’s not a very believable plot, baring striking similarities to those in Scorpius and The Man from Barbarossa. Clay’s death by drowning is one of the most cursory ever for a Bond baddie: three lines of “thrashing out ineffectually with his prosthetic legs.” This monster deserved a far richer send off.
These couple of racy baddies don’t completely compensate for the stop start nature of Gardner’s storytelling. The tension swings dramatically. There are exciting suspenseful set pieces, but many readers may find the explanatory interludes a bit dreary. What makes the difference is that the nominally one dimensional story technique is built around a solid central character and, particularly in the first half of the novel, Bond is challenged by a series of conundrums which he fails to fully understand. The second half disappoints as it is no more than the set up and execution of a sort of ‘Who Dares Wins’ assault on an Italian villa. Here Bond really is a pawn to the FBI kings, to whom he has been loaned as the ubiquitous stalking horse.
The novel starts with the destruction of a Boeing 747, blown apart like “an obscene firework” at Dulles airport. When Bond arrives as part of an international investigation team, he is witness to “shock and disgust...it showed in the way they [the salvage team] walked.” Later Bond’s old flame, Sukie Tempesta the widowed millionairess from Nobody Lives Forever, is murdered when her car turns into a fireball. Called to the scene, “the tangled lump of scorched and twisted metal,” Bond begins to suffer similar traumas: “burned paint... the sickly scent of singed human flesh... the stench of death in his nostrils.” He even has to stop himself from vomiting. This is a plausible James Bond, confused by his feelings of loss and by the web of lies which is unfolding before him.
Gardner pulls on this very real manifestation of 007 time and again. Our hero begins to suffer nightmares and hallucinations: a Venetian masquerade turns into dance macabre and, haunted by her death, he sees images of Sukie everywhere. During the second half of the novel, set three years on and neatly following directly from Seafire, Bond is grieving for his lover, Flicka von Grusse, tending everyday to her comatose body and watching, waiting, “always to say goodbye.”
Bond has only loved four women, we are told, and there is a sense of regret for his past failures (“his bad luck with women”) and also a fear of the future: “now he had to face the possible loss of her life, or a life spent looking after a vegetable... he could not see himself living out the years as a nurse.” To retain his sanity, he reverts to his old routines, breakfast and exercise, before attending to her hospital bed. But even inside the routine, “black depression... was a visible cloud.”
This is one of the few times I really empathised with Gardner’s Bond and had a sense of the man behind the mask of the license to kill. It’s a sterling piece of writing. While not infused with the intensity of Fleming’s occasional maudlin anecdotes, Gardner succeeds through an oblique detached style. The reader espies on Bond’s own bleak world. The harsh realisation that the once active and vibrant Flicka will spend her life as an invalid, contrives a bitterly selfish response: “he hoped she would die.”
Forced back into the field, Bond rekindles his affair with the delicious Beatrice di Ricci and there is a painful scene when, after spending the evening making love, Bond and Beatrice learn Flicka has died. It isn’t Bond’s sombre reaction that shocks, but Beatrice’s, “a keening requiem for a woman she never met... sobs like the stutter of a dying engine.” Rarely have Gardner’s heroines been given such weight of gravitas. The limb-some Beatrice was certainly given less erudite treatment in Win, Lose or Die.
Away from Bond’s own state of mind, Gardner is tying up many of the threads that run through his other thirteen novels (I’m excluding the stand-alone movie tie-ins). There are harks back to previous adventures and two past lovers resurface. His portrait of M sees the Admiral finally retire and take on the air of a curmudgeonly uncle. Bond refers to him as “the old man” and a FBI agent suggests he “can make you feel a heel,” these two asides defining much of how Gardner has portrayed the head of the S.I.S. Here, M is much more conciliatory than normal, even calling his favourite agent James and offering him personal advice. While we all recognise the father-son relationship, Gardner oversteps the mark by eventually referring to it directly.
Where he doesn’t overstep is in two quite brilliant action sequences; first, an escape from the Villa Tempesta on jet-skis and second a dogfight between a Cobra helicopter and two HIP air bourn gunships, the latter a desperate attempt by Bond to rescue his kidnapped boss. These taut, terrifying scenes invoke much of what was good about Gardner’s earliest novels.
When Bond is forced to ditch the Cobra, he almost drowns and, in a beautifully scripted re-enactment of the torture scene in Icebreaker, Bond wavers close to death. “He saw wrecked bodies, women he had long forgotten: a girl covered head to toe in gold paint, a young Japanese woman whispering endearments, his wife of hours, shattered and bleeding... times of great pain and times of wonder... they became a beautiful whirling kaleidoscope of minutes and seconds... he was dying, he thought with incredible clarity... he heard voices and felt hands lifting him... is this how it is? Angels pull you across the Styx and into the far beyond...”
This finely textured piece genuinely exacts a visceral response; we understand and recognise exactly Bond’s personal experience. It’s a major turning point for John Gardner’s prose. The crime is that it has come so late in his career as James Bond’s biographer [my choice of word!].
So Cold is a more rewarding novel than many John Gardner’s canon. It isn’t necessarily the most accessible and suffers the same foibles which affected all his novels after Icebreaker, but it does succeed on an emotional level. For that alone Gardner deserves praise. The story’s unique three year timeframe allows the author to spin his yarn from two distinct angles, one featuring the forthright, irrefutable Bond, and the other a circumspect, almost relieved figure who finally reaches “the beginning of the end... the end of the beginning.”
I can’t cover it in glory, Cold has a fairly nonsensical villain and master plan and suffers a grandstand conclusion that is rushed and unsatisfying; yet at the outset, the novel grips, intrigues and enthuses, because the reader identifies with the central character. John Gardner deserves a lot of credit for delivering a persona of James Bond that is instantly recognisable as human and humane. That, at the very least, gives us something to remember in his final 007 novel.
6 from 10
Cold gets very mixed feedback across the web. I don't know if, like me, that was your first and only time reading it. I too struggled with it the first time, but I don't remember why (it was over ten years ago!). I don't claim its a great novel, but in Gardner's canon it is, for me, one of his better efforts.
Benson's reviews will follow, but I need a break! Gardner's very shallow latterly stories have quite worn my enthusiasm down!