DMC extract in Times on Sat
Napoleon Plural
LondonPosts: 10,467MI6 Agent
There's an exclusive (they say) extract of the new Bond book in tomorrow Times in the UK. Should give us a taste of his style and whether it's pastiche or something more. 
"This is where we leave you Mr Bond."
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Comments
As for how it will go over with the masses: I predict the response will be appropriately mixed, just like it is with even the most successful of the Bond films: some will love it and some will poop all over it.
"I am not an entrant in the Shakespeare Stakes." - Ian Fleming
"Screw 'em." - Daniel Craig, The Best James Bond EverTM
If this novel doesn't do well, I doubt it will be any reflection on Faulk's ability. On the other hand, if Faulk's novel does well then he certainly deserves all of the credit.
Here you go:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article3963143.ece
This is utter drivel, really appalling stuff. Pastiche? Damn right. I actually had to look at the end to check it wasn't one of those 'Peter Bradshaw imagines how Sebastian Faulks would write his latest Bond book...' Any Bond fan knows those spoof pieces in newspapers that have Bond in the nursing home, or having to deal with a woman boss or whathaveyou. Usually written in cod-Fleming style with amusingly inappropriate references to the Sex Pistols, the ramifications of some EU legislation, Tony Blair or the bete noir of the day. Chatting with May the housekeeper about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and how one of them had been busted for drugs. 'There was a leader in The Times - The Times of all places - asking for lenience in the case of these wretched pop singers.'
Oh no, that last one is actually taken from Devil May Care. Great, cos Fleming's Bond was always fulminating over Elvis or MacMillan's domestic policy, wasn't he? 8-)
What with Indy hanging out with his biker boy son, it's a bad week for cultural mish mashes.
Otherwise, the book doesn't seem well-written at all, just very contrived, while bits are just stolen from other sources - the film Live and Let Die (using drugs to infiltrate the nation's youth) or Moonraker (Bond's instant dislike to the villain), M taking up yoga (like his naturalism in Colonel Sun)...
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Funny you picked out the rolling Stones bit -I was shocked to see it - as my very own Fan fic The Spider and the Fly is set around that very same drugs bust:
http://www.ajb007.co.uk/fanfiction/thespiderandthefly.php
-and according to the excerpt in the Times -M tells Bond of a Russian connection!
Granted the plot is not going to be a complete rip off from my tale but considering The Spider and the Fly predates DMC -I'm a bit shocked -and what with Higson using the name Goodenough in one of his Young Bond tales -and My Modesty Blaise used that same name in The Great Chrysanthemum as a cover name -I feel like these official authors are certainly scanning available fanfiction for inspiration! Or can it just be coincidence?
I have to confess that I am fairly disappointed with this excerpt. It is an excerpt, to be fair, and probably not representative of the novel overall. Nevertheless, it is possible to make some comment. It *does* read as a pastiche. Mr Faulks is a very talented writer. Birdsong is a very good novel, and he can convey atmosphere wonderfully. And while I was somewhat sceptical of the whole 'writing as Ian Fleming' thing, I did expect there to be a literary style, a verve to the writing and an elegance which is evident in Faulks's other work. What I have read of Devil May Care, unfortunately, does not live up to these expectations. It is too knowing, too obvious, with the Stones/Beatles bit reading like the author is shouting 'Look, here, we're in the 1960s, innit!'.
Where is the subtlety, the erudition? It reads like an aping of Fleming. One of Amis's greatest strengths in Colonel Sun is his fidelity to the character of James Bond with the placing of him in a fairly non-Bond context. It is hard to quantify, but there is something faithful about Colonel Sun yet different. Consider the explosive opening. Bond isn't simply briefed by M, Bond is part of the villain's machinations at the outset. The girl is very much a Bond girl, M is very much M. And yet there is something different, daring and new about Colonel Sun.
I fear that Devil May Care will end up being simply a not-that-great re-hash of Fleming's structure. Perhaps the name and reputation of the author created sky-high expectations, however those expectations were based, it must be said, on the strength of his earlier novels. This extract almost reads as if it were written by someone different. It is not as serious, and seems to lack Faulks's astute eye for period settings. I very much hope that the full novel will be much better. We'll find out in a few days. At the moment though, it is like waiting for Casino Royale, and getting a glimpse Die Another Day.
Christopher Wood remains the best Flemingesque writer imo, for his two novelisations. They're just effortless, he nails it.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I agree pretty much with what you are saying there -and hence my experiment of combining 007 with the hip and young in The Spider and The Fly - Even though he forayed into that world which was quite alien too him -he was still a little divorced from it. No doubt Faulks' tale will come to the same conclusion -but Admiral Miles Messervy doing Yoga -Please! That is pretty damn ridiculous.
There's a Geoffrey Jenkins novel that was published in the Seventies where he has a Bond stand-in character, a British Royal Naval Commander, meet an M stand-in character. It's a fairly obvious nod to the debriefing scenes in Fleming. But he doesn't just have Bond turn up, flirt with a secretary, go in and have an unformed and illogical conversation with the M figure about a dire villain who, for no given reason, has suddenly come on the MI6 stand-in's radar and Bond has to rush off to... meet him. No: he used his thriller-writer's imagination, and came up with something rather Flemingish, but different. The Bond character learns his mother is about to die in Cape Town and flies there at once. But then he's greeted by security, whisked off in a helicopter and taken into an odd underground bunker in the middle of nowhere, which looks like something out of a sci-fi film. Inside, of course, is the M figure, who made up the story about the mother. We discover the Bond character resigned a year or so earlier; now he's been shanghaied back in.
Imagine if Faulks had done that! Instead, he's just rewritten the standard set-up Fleming used, which was always the weakest one. He's got a villain with a moneky's paw for a hand, which takes us firmly into parody of the Austin Powers variety and makesit hard to come back from, and we're soon to discover, I suspect, that just as diamond-smugglning gal Tiffany Case had a name that ironically punned on her profession, a beautiful woman involved in the heroin trade will be called something like Poppy Flowers.
I do hope the rest of it is a lot better than this!
Roger Moore 1927-2017
We'll see soon enough, though. Hope I'm wrong!
I must admit I was surprised having thoroughly enjoyed on Green Dolphin Street. but maybe we are getting ahead of ourselves. I mean the monkey's hand isn't a "real" Monkey's hand but actually a deformed one. so even though we may think it uneccessary for the villain to have a deformity - Faulks has basically followed the route we are all familiar with -Fleming's villains are not "normal" people. Faulks has chosen 1967 -so yes The summer of Love might actually be credible -Still I wouldn't have minded if it had been 1966 and then it could have had the world cup as part of the backdrop.
Still I'll be there on Wednesday getting my copy.
I take all your points but this one, Scaramanga. I don't think pastiche was his brief. Faulks has said in several interviews that he didn't want to stay into pastiche, using that very word. Even in the introduction to the extract he says:
'I like parodying other writers and I thought I could “do” Fleming easily enough; but where a pastiche has 125 per cent of the author’s characteristics, in a homage or tribute I thought I should pull up short and incorporate perhaps only 75 per cent of the original manner. That would work.'
And I hope he has done that. This passage, however, reads to me like about 110 percent of the author's characteristics - not a straight Bond novel (I'm sorry but I can't take the monkey paw thing seriously however it is explained - and it is not explained!), but not quite full-blown parody either. Amis said he thought long and hard about whether to take on the project of writing a Bond novel because he didn't want to simply serve up a 'mere rechauffage' of previous ingredients. I don't think a third of that book works - but he did serve up more.
But let's see what Mr Faulks has done. I'm jumping the gun, I know.
And here's the second helping folks.
After the early comments that Barbara Broccoli thought it could have been a 'Fleming manuscript', I'm beginning to wonder if she's actually even read any Fleming.
If I buy this book, it won't be until I find it on the deep discount shelf.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
I stand corrected -or do I?
here is the Cambridge dictionary definition of pastiche
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=57963&dict=CALD
He has been asked to immitate fleming's art -by writing DMC in Fleming's style -that to me is Pastiche. -However a good pastiche can be a work of art in itself if done well.
I still don't feel it's really Bond as a real person, just a cardboard cut out. He has no animus.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
The second extract is only slightly better. I struggled to get past the opening paragraphs of Bond 'burglar-proofing' his hotel room with the hair and talcum powder. As a reader, I don't need to know this. Here it serves only to show, again, that Faulks is familiar with what came before in Bond novels, which so far does not separate the author from any one else who has read Fleming. These details regurgitated so conspicuously in the story really ruin it for me.
It's all Moonraker really, tennis match instead of cards at Blades... it's all 'a little bit of this, a little bit of that...'
Roger Moore 1927-2017
If refrences to past Bond novels will annoy you then you will probably not enjoy this book. if tyou can look past these, part of me thinks Faulks might have been asked to refrence the past novels by IFP to commemerate the centenary or something, then you may well enjoy it. Its not Fleming, but it is Bond and for me it reads much better than any of the other continuation novels.
Btw, that extract with May, for me, reads better in context than it did as an extract but I still believe it was a very poor extract to choose, I would have chosen the assasination at the beginning, because that is a scene that is both Fleming and not Fleming at the same time.
Finally, the only thing that really bothered me about what I've read so far is how Bond acts around Moneypenny, he acts a lot more like he does in the early Connery films than he ever did in Fleming's novels.
If anyone else is currently reading it, post what you think so far.
PS. what do the postcards you get at waterstones look like? Because I preordered it at WHSmith for the same price, but minus the cards, (I had a voucher =D)
If I'd been given such a remarkable opportunity, I'd certainly have taken longer than six weeks to do it, regardless of how Fleming worked. The important bits are what end up on the page, not the daily minutiae of how it's actually produced.
That said, I'll be buying it today. I was flying back from California yesterday, and looked for it in the airports, but it hadn't got there yet. It's up next on my 'To Read' list.
"I am not an entrant in the Shakespeare Stakes." - Ian Fleming
"Screw 'em." - Daniel Craig, The Best James Bond EverTM