True, all the goons aren't his equal, but they are of the same profession, i.e., professional killers. I guess it just seems a bit of a rehash from Goldeneye, where 006 is virtually an evil 007. I don't necessarily mind the Wild West angle, because nearly all action-oriented plots, be it film or literature, have an ending where good trumps evil quite easily, but I do hate that Benson's Bond never seems worried about this prospect. He just simply goes in the room and kills everyone without a hint of emotion.
Yes, the sex scenes read like an anatomy book or a play-by-play commentary. Very interesting.
Thunderpussy, I share your thoughts. I can see myself rereading Fleming and Gardner but Benson . . . no chance in hell.
After reading "NDOD", Chrisno1 has checked himself into "Shrublands2-The Benson Institute for the Literary Insane". Chrisno1 will be under 24 hour watch and exposed to significant electric shock therapy in the hope of restoring his sanity and in preparation for his very brave future attempt at reading "MWTRT".
This is where we leave you Mr. Bond. (Pilot, Apollo Airlines)
To say that Never Dream of Dying is a bad novel doesn’t quite sum it up. It is far worse than that.
So appalling is Raymond Benson’s seventh attempt to continue the James Bond saga that, unusually, I cannot find any aspect of the piece worthy of praise. There is not a single iota of thought or substance taken over this adventure. It is dreadful at the beginning, seeks out the depths of unbelievable crassness in the middle and plummets to insultingly comic book violence at its climax.
There may be a love story. There may be a vendetta. There may be the continuing saga of The Union and its mysterious "mazzere" leader Le Gerant. The string which binds these subjects together is a bomb threat to the Cannes Film Festival and a lot of messing about on a movie set. It's hopelessly loose, so floppy and long winded that the string may as well not exist at all. It’s very hard to believe I managed to digest all 341 pages of such a distasteful mess, peppered as it is with B-movie dialogue and soap opera situations. Benson desperately tries to inject some thrills into his work, but the endless ridiculous chases and fights slow the action to a crawl, so poorly inscribed as to be neither believable nor fantastical. One of the fights even occurs during the recording of a television game show. Never Dream of Dying really is that bad.
The novel fails on so many levels for three distinct reasons.
Firstly, and most noticeably, is the generally poor standard to prose. Supported [if that’s the right word] by laboured humour and a predictable travel brochure guide to Corsica and the Cote d’Azur, the author creates no tension and precious little intrigue. Even his characters, which in Doubleshot showed signs of coming alive, are devoid of reasonable personas.
Benson can hardly string a decent descriptive sentence together. Extracts like “with an unexpected lurch and the spring of a cobra” with its mixture of contradictory nouns and metaphors are so common it becomes disheartening. When Benson isn’t being over generous with his less than entrancing wordplay, he’s being deliberately blunt: “Too many times the women he [Bond] had grown close to had met with... bad luck.” Yes, he really does insert the pause dots. The writing is frighteningly childlike in its execution. At one point, when introducing the heroine Tylyn, Benson even has the audacity to tell us how to pronounce her name.
As if I wasn’t flabbergasted enough by such a condescending tone, Benson, who apparently is a world authority on James Bond, seems to have completely misread the legacy of Ian Fleming. As always he harks back to James Bond’s past, both literary and cinematic; old friends materialize, scenarios are re-run, quotes are lifted; the whole exercise is a piece meal attempt at re-imagining James Bond.
The prime offence however, is to turn Marc Ange Draco, one of Bond’s greatest allies, into his enemy. This tinkering with the personality of a major and popular character from the original novels is both insulting to the intelligence of the readers, who are predominantly fans well versed in Bond history, and to the creativity of Ian Fleming, who I hope didn’t turn too roughly in his grave. It doesn’t matter how cleverly the author tries to justify such an action, he leaves a very sour taste in the mouth. Dressing the confrontation up with lines from The Man With The Golden Gun, one of Fleming’s lesser works, merely adds injury to the insult.
Finally, Benson’s obsession with sex and school boy pornography has sunk to its lowest level. He genuinely appears to have confused the words ‘exploitation’ and ‘eroticism.’ There is an ill judged sex scene which leaves nothing to the imagination and is more akin to Jackie Collins than James Bond. As if this isn’t bad enough – and it is really, really bad, not even being particularly good pornography – Benson again rekindles the flames of Thunderball by reinforcing an analogy between horses and women:
“I like to get on Commander, my favourite horse,” says Tylyn, “and ride for hours.”
“Bond mused that he knew a certain commander who would like a ride.”
I honestly don’t know why Benson thinks this is sort of thing is appropriate. Reprising the famous egg-spines scene, Bond pulls a splinter form Tylyn’s eye and she falls into his arms, “a catharsis of sorts... noisy animalistic love.” It doesn’t help that Benson makes her the aggressor and these scenes are devoid of any grace and subtlety. As such they fit in rather well with the other cheap tricks surrounding them.
Never Dream of Dying is a massive step back for Raymond Benson. So paltry are his efforts I don’t even consider it worth rating. The only good thing to be said is that the author can’t possibly sink any lower.
The prime offence however, is to turn Marc Ange Draco, one of Bond’s greatest allies, into his enemy. This tinkering with the personality of a major and popular character from the original novels is both insulting to the intelligence of the readers, who are predominantly fans well versed in Bond history, and to the creativity of Ian Fleming, who I hope didn’t turn too roughly in his grave. It doesn’t matter how cleverly the author tries to justify such an action, he leaves a very sour taste in the mouth. Dressing the confrontation up with lines from The Man With The Golden Gun, one of Fleming’s lesser works, merely adds injury to the insult.
I cannot agree more. While there was already plenty to dislike about Benson's efforts (like his horrid prose), this was really the last straw. Never read another Benson novel after this one.
—Le Samourai
A Gent in Training.... A blog about my continuing efforts to be improve myself, be a better person, and lead a good life. It incorporates such far flung topics as fitness, self defense, music, style, food and drink, and personal philosophy. Agent In Training
I think your review says everything Chrisno1. We've all had a bit of a chuckle about how bad it is. Truth be said, it really is an outrage to the legacy of Fleming and the character/series he created. I am baffled that anyone with any sense allowed this to be published. A big fat zero really sums it up.........X-(
This is where we leave you Mr. Bond. (Pilot, Apollo Airlines)
Chris, you deserve a well-earned vacation after this and perhaps some therapy. The important thing is you're only two books away from freedom. God speed.
Hang on... Never Dream gets four stars out of five on Amazon. And plenty of positive reviews.
Well, everyone is entitled to their opinions :v
I could have been generous and given NDOD a mark of 1 from 10, but honestly, this was a dreadful enterprise. It shows Benson's worst attributes at their very worst: bad sex, silly action scenes, petty dialogue, terrible characters, an awful plot, constant revisiting of 007s adventures, pithy humour, appalling prose, etc etc.
The Draco thing was the straw that broke the camel's back. Perhaps what made this turn of events (a Gardner double cross if ever their was one) so risible is that it deflected the emphasis of villainy away from the more interesting personality of Le Gerant. Whatever you say about the betrayal of 007s Fleming roots - and that is bad enough - to actually change the focus up of your finale for nothing more than a cheap and unnecessary double cross is frankly untenable.
I'd never read NDOD before and I was shocked by its simplicity. I'm not planning to read it again soon.
A lot of people do like it. They have thier reasons. I don't and I have mine.
The Man with the Red Tattoo is Goro Yoshida, exiled nationalist, international terrorist and the power behind one of Japan’s criminal organisations, the Ryujin-kai or Yakuza. Yoshida was briefly introduced in Raymond Benson’s previous opus, Never Dream of Dying, but he’s given a much deeper focus here, being compared to the great post war patriot Mishima and, less clinically, Darth Vader from Star Wars: “Yoshida possessed an enlightened intelligence... a mystique among the yakuza as a man with persuasive charisma and a tangible inner strength that seemed to transcend the earthly plain of existence... the Yami Shogun, the dark lord.”
Benson doesn’t stress the other-worldly aspects too much, as he concentrated on those at some length with Le Gerant in his earlier books, but his portrait of the deluded and logically blinded Yoshida is very close to that of the sightless leader of The Union. Like Le Gerant, Yoshida suffers from a recurring nightmare, this time of his attempted suicide, the ritual seppuku. Yoshida dwells on the lost opportunity of his youth, when Mishima expelled him from his apostles, and still mourns the public suicide of his mentor, to the point he is obsessed by it, imagining “plunging the dagger into his belly as the bright disc of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.”
Yoshida is very effective, and would make an exceptional villain, if it wasn’t that he feels so old fashioned. He’s definitely the closest Benson has come to a genuine Fleming malefactor, a powerful man sitting in his underground bunker, planning his vile schemes with his secret army and displaying a demented grasp of modern politics. Stranded on his secluded island he’s a sort of Fu Manchu figure, who doesn’t get involved in the nitty gritty work of his underlings. As such he’s beholden to their failings, despite offering a commanding presence. It’s disappointing that Bond’s confrontation with him is restricted to a video-link and a climatic gory, though uninspired, samurai sword fight in a hotel room. Goro Yoshida deserved better than this.
Indeed, the whole novel deserves much better than that. Benson returns Bond to the Far East, a region he had some success describing in Zero Minus Ten and Tomorrow Never Dies. He brilliantly conjures the sights and sounds of twenty first Tokyo: “bursting with energy... Bond could feel it in the air... a constant hustle and bustle, it never slept and the lights were always bright.” For once I felt as if I was right there with Bond experiencing the hubbub of the city and its steamy, claustrophobic environment. It is another of those rare times when the author proves he can write creatively. Lines like “the neon was blinding, the billboards were bright and colourful, the traffic was dense and the noise and clamour bombarded the senses” may be sparse but they share maximum effect.
Unfortunately for all the effort made describing the locale, Benson has let us down by fashioning a distinctly second rate and rather bizarre master plan for his baddie: an attempt to infect the G8 summit with a potent strain of the West Nile virus via genetically mutated mosquitoes. Basically a re-hash of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, I didn’t believe it for a second, and even chuckled during a scene on the Sapporo express where Bond’s lissom accomplice Reiko tries to chase infected mosquitoes through the carriages. There is a replaying of this scene at the end, where Bond is also swatting the obdurate insects. Daft.
The story starts off very well, with a mysterious death on an airliner, but quickly descends into Benson’s standard fare of gun battles and fist fights coupled with bouts of sex (thankfully less prominent than usual) and a little detective work. Bond is involved in all the violence, taking one horrific beating after another. There is always another guard to be hit, felled, blasted or dispatched, all in Benson’s atypical manner: “Bond swung out from behind a tree and fired. One of them jerked and fell... The Walther recoiled with a satisfying jolt.” You know the sort of thing.
Due to his carefreeness Bond is constantly in trouble with the police for causing a public affray. Luckily his old mate Tiger Tanaka is on hand is smooth things over. While Tiger gets better treatment than Marc Ange Draco did last time out, the character is somewhat low key. As the two men already know and respect each other there is none of the tension and emotional rhetoric which enlivened You Only Live Twice. It is a very informal, almost nonchalant partnership and Tiger stays in the background for much of the novel. It’s very similar to Bond’s attachment to Felix Leiter. He even starts to sound like the American; at one point, Bond remarks that Tiger has picked up “too many of those western colloquialisms” only for the Japanese to reply “Whatever.”
Tiger’s place as chief tourist guide is taken instead by Reiko Tamura, a more than capable female agent, whose manner is both modern and alluring: “Reiko was a professional... it was difficult to discern whether [she] was serious in her flirting or not.” Seduced, Bond offers to take her on holiday to Hawaii, a sure fire way to ensure her demise. Hence Reiko is killed midway through the book.
Her place is taken by Mayumi, a spoilt half-British wild child who has become a successful high class whore for the Yakuza. Mayumi bears striking similarities to Benson’s other prostitute made good, Sunni Pei from Zero Minus Ten, being able to shoot people and make energetic love, while staying terribly naive and screaming a lot. Hardly central to Yoshida’s plot, Mayumi is a dated damsel in distress and not nearly as memorable as Reiko. The comparison is somewhat similar to that which critics often make between Kissy and Aki from the movie version of You Only Live Twice.
Bond of course doesn’t do much detecting. Most of the routine investigating is done by a series of agents and contacts who all exhibit a remarkable ability to avoid detection and stay alive until Bond meets them. 007 is merely a receptacle out to extract revenge. Full of rage and faced with Reiko’s death, he again has doubts about his profession, but receives reassurance from an imaginary Kissy Suzuki, “You travel in a dark and dangerous world... [Death] is merely the hand of fate. You could not exist in another world.” Like Yoshida, Bond’s dreams are a haunting from his past.
This reflective interlude is a rare pause for breath amongst the action, most of which is rather lack lustre. The most notable scene comes as Bond and Mayumi flee across the mud geysers of Jingokudani “the Valley of Hell... small bubbling pools of sulphurous water dotted the landscape... a faint beating coming from the ground as if someone were hitting a drum.” But Benson doesn’t give us enough of this Hades and the escapees are quickly and miraculously saved by a pair of marauding brown bears. I kid you not.
Even more disappointing is a scene at a research centre where Bond and Mayumi are about to be fed to the hungry mosquitoes. Having built the tension palpably well, Benson has the temerity to tell us exactly how Bond plans to escape. This is a true crime against thriller writing. Simply switching this paragraph to one page further on would have substantially increased the impact of the scene. The resolution should have been a riveting surprise. As it stands, it’s all a bit of a let down.
As this turn of events wasn’t ill judged enough, Benson has the gall to evoke memories of 007’s cinematic half breed cousin, Austin Powers, by having Bond fight a deadly duel with a demon dwarf, the Kappa. Resembling a mythical Japanese vampire, the Kappa could have been a great adversary for Bond, but their two fight scenes, all springs and jumps and high kicks (“Kappa leaped into the air like something from the netherworld”) simply make one realise how ridiculous it would look. If you’ve seen The Spy Who Shagged Me, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Benson would have been better off watching Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, a fantastic demonstration of how to create atmosphere around a devilish character and strike fear through their actions.
This lack of finesse is, perhaps more than any thing, Benson’s Achilles heel. He seems incapable of developing and sustaining a suspenseful situation, consistently resorting to the afore-mentioned violence that it eventually becomes wearisome. There is some good writing here and a smattering of excellent ideas, but Benson hasn’t got the where-with-all to pull them together. While much better than Never Dream of Dying, this is a confusing mix which in turn delights and appals.
Ultimately, action is all in the author’s view of James Bond: flush from victory over Goro Yoshida, Bond admonishes his adversary’s right hand man with the rebuke “I don’t give a damn. He’s bloody dead and that’s all I care about.” I expect Raymond Benson was thinking the same thing.
4/10 ? I certainly thought it was marginally better than NDOD, but not a 4. Regardless, I think few will argue that Benson is by far the worst writer to get near Bond. Thankfully, his plug was pulled after this "effort".
Your reviews have been a great service to the forum- I'm sure I am not alone in saying "thank you" for sharing these detailed reviews...............
This is where we leave you Mr. Bond. (Pilot, Apollo Airlines)
4/10 ? I certainly thought it was marginally better than NDOD, but not a 4. Regardless, I think few will argue that Benson is by far the worst writer to get near Bond. Thankfully, his plug was pulled after this "effort".
Your reviews have been a great service to the forum- I'm sure I am not alone in saying "thank you" for sharing these detailed reviews...............
Thanks.
As I've said before, we all have opinions. I try to offer mine as honestly as I can.
Raymond Benson’s movie adaptations rarely add anything to James Bond’s literary legacy. They stand alone from his continuation novels and rarely embrace our hero’s history. Die Another Day briefly mentions his dead wife and includes her prophetic epitaph “We have all the time in the world” but that’s about it.
This occurs during a prolonged thesis on the nature of torture and the philosophy of James Bond which runs something thus:
“Man’s cruellest invention… Pain is the great equaliser, the measure by which men and women come to grips with their inner strength… Never the less everyone has a breaking point… If the end was near, then so be it… He hadn’t talked. He hadn’t given his interrogators the satisfaction of winning. He still knew who he was, why he was there and what he stood for.”
There is a similar, though less revealing, passage relating to the genetically altered Korean Colonel Moon / Gustav Graves. It sadly lacks any attempt at significant depth. We never learn why Moon / Graves is such a lunatic egoist, such a psychotic volatile genius; he’s simply a madman and that’s our lot; deal with it.
Ditto the heroine Jinx, as bland as they come, and the fire and ice henchmen Zao and Miranda Frost. The latter is at least afforded the luxury of murdering her father, pairing her nicely with Moon / Graves, otherwise she’s utterly lifeless. Even the usual jittery paternal relationship between 007 and M is stoic, “a strange, strained situation.”
Admittedly Benson does have to transcribe some appalling dialogue and interpret the bemused reactions of the lead actors. No easy task. He painfully elaborates the story where necessary, but the aimless prose, all “then… next… at that moment… as… when… now…” is terribly flat and hardly conjures any tension or excitement. Despite a brief reflection on North Korea, “the victim of its own mindless self destruction… the dreams and lives of countless men and women had ended [in] sorrow, despair and ghosts,” the author has largely chosen to forsake any human substance in his narrative. As such the whole enterprise is fatally flawed.
Die Another Day is a bore and brings a relieved curtain crashing down on Raymond Benson’s tenure as James Bond’s official biographer. On this evidence he was probably disinclined to continue the job anyway. The best thing that can be said about the novel is that it is very, very short. Thank God.
4/10 ? I certainly thought it was marginally better than NDOD, but not a 4. Regardless, I think few will argue that Benson is by far the worst writer to get near Bond. Thankfully, his plug was pulled after this "effort".
Your reviews have been a great service to the forum- I'm sure I am not alone in saying "thank you" for sharing these detailed reviews...............
Thanks.
As I've said before, we all have opinions. I try to offer mine as honestly as I can.
Having said that, I just re-read all of my Benson reviews and there is too much negative stuff in my take on TMWTRT for it to warrant a 4.
I just downgraded it to 3 from 10.
And the chasing after mosquitoes on a train makes it a 0 )
While I admit it's "daft" (I quote myself) there is a lot of other stuff going on in TMWTRT and much of it is good. I enjoyed the insights into modern Japanese culture and generally Benson's descriptive abilities seem a bit more in tune this time around.
Benson doesn't actually rate TMWTRT, he thinks it's his worst novel, but I'm surprised by that as he gives us a solid narrative (not, note, a solid villian's plot) with a good central antagonist in Yoshida. It's a worthwhile effort and quietly builds to a climax, albeit a rather lacklustre one.
I agree there is plenty of tosh here (yes, the mosquitoes, and the Kappa) but at least Benson hasn't turned Tiger Tanaka into the chief baddie (I spent most of the book praying it wasn't going to happen, and thank god it didn't) but I can't ignore what is good as well.
There is much more thought involved in TMWTRT when you compare it to NDOD, which is frankly a second rate production of dire proportions, and I can't knock it down so completely.
Well, not yet, I need a rest. I'm thinking of starting in April.
To be honest with you, I have been very surprised by the length of the YB series, each book is well over 300 pages, quite long haul for young fans. Never mind, once more into the breach and all that.
After a brief respite, I thought it was time to offer a brief summary of Raymond Benson’s catalogue of 007 continuation novels.
It’s sad to report that I wasn’t over impressed with the collection of six original stories and three movie tie-ins. Benson seems to have a grasp of what makes James Bond’s adventures special – beautiful women, mad villains, even madder plots, violence, sex, a bit of jokey banter, exotic locations – but he seems to slot these into his narrative with little regard for how the eventual product will read.
Most of his tales are inspired by Fleming’s SPECTRE trilogy, repeating scenarios and featuring characters (or similar characters) to one’s we’ve met before. Unfortunately the narratives are less involving and the persona’s less detailed. There is a lot of sketchy writing here. Benson seems more interested in explaining how Bond operates the multitude of gadgets Q-branch offer him than how he out thinks his antagonists.
In fact the real loss to the series isn’t so much the sub-standard plotting and people, but the disappearance of James Bond altogether, who here has become an almost robotic, testosterone fuelled entity, so ready is he to fight and **** his way out of any situation. There is little time for contemplation and reflection in Benson’s world. When it does come, it feels slightly fraudulent, as if I’ve already read the words and phrases somewhere before.
This is another slightly worrying aspect of Benson’s writing. He has a tendency, whether in tribute to real quality or through recognizing the paucity of his own ability, to paraphrase or even quote Ian Fleming and the movies he inspired. This isn’t only lazy writing; it’s rather insulting to the reader. Did he think we might not notice?
Galling enough, but when Benson starts to interfere with decades of legacy and turns one of Bond’s oldest allies into a villain, it was surely time for a rethink. His treatment of the character Marc Ange Draco in Never Dream of Dying was curious at best, downright insane at the worst. The problem wasn’t that I can’t believe a character could turn from hero to villain, but that there was no discernable reason for it to happen, certainly not to Draco. That the Corsican – who despised Blofeld’s SPECTRE in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – should suddenly fund a fledgling organization established on similar principles seems remarkable. That he raised his son to be such a criminal mastermind when he was happy for his daughter to lead a life away from crime and, eventually he hoped, to escape it with Bond, seems contradictory to his nature. Benson also seems to have completely forgotten how cleverly he was developing the character of Le Gerant, a blind soothsayer of the highest degree, and his solution to the conundrum he created is sloppy and, frankly, cheap.
That all of this is wrapped up in turgid, plain prose and even duller dialogue doesn’t make me want for anything.
There are a few glimmers of excitement. The first two Union novels, High Time to Kill and Double Shot, offer a little more intrigue, either through unique settings or through investing a bit more time in the characters (the latter features probably Benson’s most astute understanding of 007 and of the villains). Meanwhile The Man with the Red Tattoo recalls the travelogue style of You Only Live Twice and we are at last immersed in a locale rather than skimming the surface of it. It’s disappointing the madcap plot of this one lets it down.
Benson’s women are as robotic as James Bond. Energetic lovers one and all, there is not a single woman who doesn’t flirt with our hero. Even the ugly ones seem to notice his devilish good looks. These routine love affairs, with their sort of slap and tickle seduction technique, are boring beyond belief. It says something when Benson’s most interesting female character is Wai Lin from the movie adaptation Tomorrow Never Dies.
Indeed the people who populate this novel seem much more real and defined than most of Benson’s output. The less said about his other tie-ins the better; he shows little interest in them and they are nothing but a cheap and quick reminder of expensive and long films.
The slightly disconcerting thing about Raymond Benson is that he fails to elaborate on a series of very good ideas. He genuinely wants to create a worthwhile story, with all the prerequisite ingredients of Bond-like derring-do, but he gets so caught up in the latter he forgets all about the former. He is influenced for the worse by the movie franchise and by other modern heroes, often cinematic ones.
His novels bear little relation to the literary James Bond, who rarely engaged in three page fist fights or extended car chases and whose supporting cast was capable but never so physically involved. Perhaps the most telling observation is in High Time to Kill, when Bond and his nemesis Roland Marquis, having both been horribly injured, still manage to summit a 27000ft mountain. It stinks of Die Hard all round.
These are not books I would recommend.
It’s hard to know if the casual reader or the dedicated fan is best served here. I fear neither would finish one of Benson’s opus very satisfied.
For what it’s worth, my personal order, 'from best to worst':
1. Double Shot
2. High Time to Kill
3. The Man with the Red Tattoo
4. Zero Minus Ten
5. Tomorrow Never Dies
6. The Facts of Death
7. The World is Not Enough
8. Die Another Day
9. Never Dream of Dying
As promised, I am continuing the series with the 'Young Bond' novels...
SILVERFIN
18/4/2011
2005
Charlie Higson’s first novel to feature a school age James Bond was very well received when first published. Retrospectively, and in the context of children’s novels, Silverfin just about does all right. In the context of James Bond it’s very rough and ready. Other than providing new questions and answering old ones about Bond’s upbringing, there’s very little to interest an adult reader.
Perhaps the most curious aspect of the book is its fantastical Frankenstein-like plot. With overtures of Arian supremacy and genetic engineering, it is much more science fiction than espionage thriller. Kids will no doubt love it.
The fantastic events only take root in the final third of the book, when Bond and his new best mate Red Kelly decide to investigate the goings on at Loch Silverfin, where Kelly’s cousin mysteriously disappeared – this latter event covered in a well described opening chapter. The eventual denouement is a mix of tree climbing, Dr Moreau style experiments, cave swimming, devilish drugs, arson and horses. Add into the mix a power mad villain, Randolph Hellebore, who is the father of the school bully, and a crazy scientist, Perseus Frend, and all the traditional bases are pretty much covered.
The problem with the novel isn’t the finale, but what comes before it. The first two thirds of the novel are ordinary beyond belief, a ‘rites of passage’ sequence, as Bond learns about Eton, wins a triathlon, learns to drive a car, learns about his parents and discovers a father figure in his Uncle Max, who handily turns out to have been a spy during the war.
There’s nothing original in this. Cleverly, Higson dresses up some of this extended prologue as an educational exercise for his readers: he describes Eton and its traditions, breathing techniques for athletes, how to shoot a rifle and the workings of the internal combustion engine. Oh, and there are a few mean scrapes for our young hero to endure, but it’s nothing compared to Tom Brown’s roasting, and when Bond finally decides to “lose his temper” it hardly seems worth his effort.
Higson improves dramatically towards the climax. Captured in a horrific laboratory, the young James Bond is forcefully injected with a steroid serum while Hellebore regales him with his nefarious schemes. This well-constructed episode has the stamp of Fleming all over it, intertwining torture, revenge and ambition with a healthy dose of idealistic politics. Hellebore’s obsession with creating a master race stems from the Great War and this tallies neatly with the onset of Fascism: “We are living in a new age, forged in the horrors of war, and your ideas about right and wrong, good and bad, no longer have value. Now there are only weak and strong, quick and slow, the living and the dead, the rich and the poor… Which would you rather be?”
Higson’s Bond, unfortunately, is only a boy, and his reply “I’d rather be anything than a stinking cheat” takes the edge off what is probably the best constructed scene in the whole novel. And that’s the major issue with Silverfin. It isn’t badly written, but it is written for children and young teenagers.
Higson is hamstrung by the need to stay succinct and elementary in his prose. I sense he wants to do more, but recognizes the restrictions of his genre. A good children’s author should be more ingenious, both with language and narrative. Higson, sadly, is pedestrian at best. For the most part the tale is told in a straightforward uninvolving manner and with the barest glimpse of authorial technique. The occasional simile brings a smile, but they are tempered by the blandness of “expression of pure murder” and its ilk.
It’s a recurring problem and subsequently the story lacks depth of description and insight. The contradiction between Uncle Max’s abhorrence and Hellebore’s adoration of war remains the sole hint of any conscience in the story, which is hopelessly impassive. Later, in attempt to bring some emotion to the proceedings, Higson resorts to a Jedi-inspired ghostly portend which is simply unbelievable.
Like his continuation predecessors, Higson also tries to introduce us to 007 folklore. He fills in the perceived gaps in Bond’s life, which might please or agitate seasoned fans depending on how familiar they are with Fleming’s original work and John Pearson’s The Authorized Biography.
Unlike Raymond Benson, who seemed to alter history for spurious reasons, Higson seems to be gently poking fun at the legacy. He even paraphrases the opening lines from Casino Royale. I found Higson’s technique as mystifying and disagreeable as Benson’s.
For all that I can understand why children would be enthralled by the novel as it has most of their prerequisite expectations: growing up fast, a pretty girl, cheerful pals, a nice cozy old couple, a couple of big bullies, monstrous goings on and a few monsters to boot. For adults it is best left well alone.
3 from 10
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 27,757Chief of Staff
Looking forward to the rest, chrisno1....I'm just about of adult age and I have to say I enjoyed SilverFin immensley...it's not perfect...but a good "Boy's Own Adventure..." style novel.
I don't have the eloquence of Chrisno1 and have enjoyed his reviews but have to disagree with "High Time To Kill" as one of Benson's Best. It's total Crap. ) a real drudge of a read. I'd take the worst of Gardner over Bensons work anytime.
"I've been informed that there ARE a couple of QAnon supporters who are fairly regular posters in AJB."
Comments
Yes, the sex scenes read like an anatomy book or a play-by-play commentary. Very interesting.
Thunderpussy, I share your thoughts. I can see myself rereading Fleming and Gardner but Benson . . . no chance in hell.
After reading "NDOD", Chrisno1 has checked himself into "Shrublands2-The Benson Institute for the Literary Insane". Chrisno1 will be under 24 hour watch and exposed to significant electric shock therapy in the hope of restoring his sanity and in preparation for his very brave future attempt at reading "MWTRT".
:007)
Not yet!!!!!
25/2/2011
2001
To say that Never Dream of Dying is a bad novel doesn’t quite sum it up. It is far worse than that.
So appalling is Raymond Benson’s seventh attempt to continue the James Bond saga that, unusually, I cannot find any aspect of the piece worthy of praise. There is not a single iota of thought or substance taken over this adventure. It is dreadful at the beginning, seeks out the depths of unbelievable crassness in the middle and plummets to insultingly comic book violence at its climax.
There may be a love story. There may be a vendetta. There may be the continuing saga of The Union and its mysterious "mazzere" leader Le Gerant. The string which binds these subjects together is a bomb threat to the Cannes Film Festival and a lot of messing about on a movie set. It's hopelessly loose, so floppy and long winded that the string may as well not exist at all. It’s very hard to believe I managed to digest all 341 pages of such a distasteful mess, peppered as it is with B-movie dialogue and soap opera situations. Benson desperately tries to inject some thrills into his work, but the endless ridiculous chases and fights slow the action to a crawl, so poorly inscribed as to be neither believable nor fantastical. One of the fights even occurs during the recording of a television game show. Never Dream of Dying really is that bad.
The novel fails on so many levels for three distinct reasons.
Firstly, and most noticeably, is the generally poor standard to prose. Supported [if that’s the right word] by laboured humour and a predictable travel brochure guide to Corsica and the Cote d’Azur, the author creates no tension and precious little intrigue. Even his characters, which in Doubleshot showed signs of coming alive, are devoid of reasonable personas.
Benson can hardly string a decent descriptive sentence together. Extracts like “with an unexpected lurch and the spring of a cobra” with its mixture of contradictory nouns and metaphors are so common it becomes disheartening. When Benson isn’t being over generous with his less than entrancing wordplay, he’s being deliberately blunt: “Too many times the women he [Bond] had grown close to had met with... bad luck.” Yes, he really does insert the pause dots. The writing is frighteningly childlike in its execution. At one point, when introducing the heroine Tylyn, Benson even has the audacity to tell us how to pronounce her name.
As if I wasn’t flabbergasted enough by such a condescending tone, Benson, who apparently is a world authority on James Bond, seems to have completely misread the legacy of Ian Fleming. As always he harks back to James Bond’s past, both literary and cinematic; old friends materialize, scenarios are re-run, quotes are lifted; the whole exercise is a piece meal attempt at re-imagining James Bond.
The prime offence however, is to turn Marc Ange Draco, one of Bond’s greatest allies, into his enemy. This tinkering with the personality of a major and popular character from the original novels is both insulting to the intelligence of the readers, who are predominantly fans well versed in Bond history, and to the creativity of Ian Fleming, who I hope didn’t turn too roughly in his grave. It doesn’t matter how cleverly the author tries to justify such an action, he leaves a very sour taste in the mouth. Dressing the confrontation up with lines from The Man With The Golden Gun, one of Fleming’s lesser works, merely adds injury to the insult.
Finally, Benson’s obsession with sex and school boy pornography has sunk to its lowest level. He genuinely appears to have confused the words ‘exploitation’ and ‘eroticism.’ There is an ill judged sex scene which leaves nothing to the imagination and is more akin to Jackie Collins than James Bond. As if this isn’t bad enough – and it is really, really bad, not even being particularly good pornography – Benson again rekindles the flames of Thunderball by reinforcing an analogy between horses and women:
“I like to get on Commander, my favourite horse,” says Tylyn, “and ride for hours.”
“Bond mused that he knew a certain commander who would like a ride.”
I honestly don’t know why Benson thinks this is sort of thing is appropriate. Reprising the famous egg-spines scene, Bond pulls a splinter form Tylyn’s eye and she falls into his arms, “a catharsis of sorts... noisy animalistic love.” It doesn’t help that Benson makes her the aggressor and these scenes are devoid of any grace and subtlety. As such they fit in rather well with the other cheap tricks surrounding them.
Never Dream of Dying is a massive step back for Raymond Benson. So paltry are his efforts I don’t even consider it worth rating. The only good thing to be said is that the author can’t possibly sink any lower.
0 from 10
A Gent in Training.... A blog about my continuing efforts to be improve myself, be a better person, and lead a good life. It incorporates such far flung topics as fitness, self defense, music, style, food and drink, and personal philosophy.
Agent In Training
If only that were true Chris. Just wait.
-Casino Royale, Ian Fleming
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Chris, you deserve a well-earned vacation after this and perhaps some therapy. The important thing is you're only two books away from freedom. God speed.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Don't be fooled by the reviews on Amazon, Nap - NDOD is AWFUL !!
Well, everyone is entitled to their opinions :v
I could have been generous and given NDOD a mark of 1 from 10, but honestly, this was a dreadful enterprise. It shows Benson's worst attributes at their very worst: bad sex, silly action scenes, petty dialogue, terrible characters, an awful plot, constant revisiting of 007s adventures, pithy humour, appalling prose, etc etc.
The Draco thing was the straw that broke the camel's back. Perhaps what made this turn of events (a Gardner double cross if ever their was one) so risible is that it deflected the emphasis of villainy away from the more interesting personality of Le Gerant. Whatever you say about the betrayal of 007s Fleming roots - and that is bad enough - to actually change the focus up of your finale for nothing more than a cheap and unnecessary double cross is frankly untenable.
I'd never read NDOD before and I was shocked by its simplicity. I'm not planning to read it again soon.
A lot of people do like it. They have thier reasons. I don't and I have mine.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Mind you, IMO Amazon's has a rather over enthusiastic rating system...
1/3/2011
2002
The Man with the Red Tattoo is Goro Yoshida, exiled nationalist, international terrorist and the power behind one of Japan’s criminal organisations, the Ryujin-kai or Yakuza. Yoshida was briefly introduced in Raymond Benson’s previous opus, Never Dream of Dying, but he’s given a much deeper focus here, being compared to the great post war patriot Mishima and, less clinically, Darth Vader from Star Wars: “Yoshida possessed an enlightened intelligence... a mystique among the yakuza as a man with persuasive charisma and a tangible inner strength that seemed to transcend the earthly plain of existence... the Yami Shogun, the dark lord.”
Benson doesn’t stress the other-worldly aspects too much, as he concentrated on those at some length with Le Gerant in his earlier books, but his portrait of the deluded and logically blinded Yoshida is very close to that of the sightless leader of The Union. Like Le Gerant, Yoshida suffers from a recurring nightmare, this time of his attempted suicide, the ritual seppuku. Yoshida dwells on the lost opportunity of his youth, when Mishima expelled him from his apostles, and still mourns the public suicide of his mentor, to the point he is obsessed by it, imagining “plunging the dagger into his belly as the bright disc of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.”
Yoshida is very effective, and would make an exceptional villain, if it wasn’t that he feels so old fashioned. He’s definitely the closest Benson has come to a genuine Fleming malefactor, a powerful man sitting in his underground bunker, planning his vile schemes with his secret army and displaying a demented grasp of modern politics. Stranded on his secluded island he’s a sort of Fu Manchu figure, who doesn’t get involved in the nitty gritty work of his underlings. As such he’s beholden to their failings, despite offering a commanding presence. It’s disappointing that Bond’s confrontation with him is restricted to a video-link and a climatic gory, though uninspired, samurai sword fight in a hotel room. Goro Yoshida deserved better than this.
Indeed, the whole novel deserves much better than that. Benson returns Bond to the Far East, a region he had some success describing in Zero Minus Ten and Tomorrow Never Dies. He brilliantly conjures the sights and sounds of twenty first Tokyo: “bursting with energy... Bond could feel it in the air... a constant hustle and bustle, it never slept and the lights were always bright.” For once I felt as if I was right there with Bond experiencing the hubbub of the city and its steamy, claustrophobic environment. It is another of those rare times when the author proves he can write creatively. Lines like “the neon was blinding, the billboards were bright and colourful, the traffic was dense and the noise and clamour bombarded the senses” may be sparse but they share maximum effect.
Unfortunately for all the effort made describing the locale, Benson has let us down by fashioning a distinctly second rate and rather bizarre master plan for his baddie: an attempt to infect the G8 summit with a potent strain of the West Nile virus via genetically mutated mosquitoes. Basically a re-hash of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, I didn’t believe it for a second, and even chuckled during a scene on the Sapporo express where Bond’s lissom accomplice Reiko tries to chase infected mosquitoes through the carriages. There is a replaying of this scene at the end, where Bond is also swatting the obdurate insects. Daft.
The story starts off very well, with a mysterious death on an airliner, but quickly descends into Benson’s standard fare of gun battles and fist fights coupled with bouts of sex (thankfully less prominent than usual) and a little detective work. Bond is involved in all the violence, taking one horrific beating after another. There is always another guard to be hit, felled, blasted or dispatched, all in Benson’s atypical manner: “Bond swung out from behind a tree and fired. One of them jerked and fell... The Walther recoiled with a satisfying jolt.” You know the sort of thing.
Due to his carefreeness Bond is constantly in trouble with the police for causing a public affray. Luckily his old mate Tiger Tanaka is on hand is smooth things over. While Tiger gets better treatment than Marc Ange Draco did last time out, the character is somewhat low key. As the two men already know and respect each other there is none of the tension and emotional rhetoric which enlivened You Only Live Twice. It is a very informal, almost nonchalant partnership and Tiger stays in the background for much of the novel. It’s very similar to Bond’s attachment to Felix Leiter. He even starts to sound like the American; at one point, Bond remarks that Tiger has picked up “too many of those western colloquialisms” only for the Japanese to reply “Whatever.”
Tiger’s place as chief tourist guide is taken instead by Reiko Tamura, a more than capable female agent, whose manner is both modern and alluring: “Reiko was a professional... it was difficult to discern whether [she] was serious in her flirting or not.” Seduced, Bond offers to take her on holiday to Hawaii, a sure fire way to ensure her demise. Hence Reiko is killed midway through the book.
Her place is taken by Mayumi, a spoilt half-British wild child who has become a successful high class whore for the Yakuza. Mayumi bears striking similarities to Benson’s other prostitute made good, Sunni Pei from Zero Minus Ten, being able to shoot people and make energetic love, while staying terribly naive and screaming a lot. Hardly central to Yoshida’s plot, Mayumi is a dated damsel in distress and not nearly as memorable as Reiko. The comparison is somewhat similar to that which critics often make between Kissy and Aki from the movie version of You Only Live Twice.
Bond of course doesn’t do much detecting. Most of the routine investigating is done by a series of agents and contacts who all exhibit a remarkable ability to avoid detection and stay alive until Bond meets them. 007 is merely a receptacle out to extract revenge. Full of rage and faced with Reiko’s death, he again has doubts about his profession, but receives reassurance from an imaginary Kissy Suzuki, “You travel in a dark and dangerous world... [Death] is merely the hand of fate. You could not exist in another world.” Like Yoshida, Bond’s dreams are a haunting from his past.
This reflective interlude is a rare pause for breath amongst the action, most of which is rather lack lustre. The most notable scene comes as Bond and Mayumi flee across the mud geysers of Jingokudani “the Valley of Hell... small bubbling pools of sulphurous water dotted the landscape... a faint beating coming from the ground as if someone were hitting a drum.” But Benson doesn’t give us enough of this Hades and the escapees are quickly and miraculously saved by a pair of marauding brown bears. I kid you not.
Even more disappointing is a scene at a research centre where Bond and Mayumi are about to be fed to the hungry mosquitoes. Having built the tension palpably well, Benson has the temerity to tell us exactly how Bond plans to escape. This is a true crime against thriller writing. Simply switching this paragraph to one page further on would have substantially increased the impact of the scene. The resolution should have been a riveting surprise. As it stands, it’s all a bit of a let down.
As this turn of events wasn’t ill judged enough, Benson has the gall to evoke memories of 007’s cinematic half breed cousin, Austin Powers, by having Bond fight a deadly duel with a demon dwarf, the Kappa. Resembling a mythical Japanese vampire, the Kappa could have been a great adversary for Bond, but their two fight scenes, all springs and jumps and high kicks (“Kappa leaped into the air like something from the netherworld”) simply make one realise how ridiculous it would look. If you’ve seen The Spy Who Shagged Me, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Benson would have been better off watching Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, a fantastic demonstration of how to create atmosphere around a devilish character and strike fear through their actions.
This lack of finesse is, perhaps more than any thing, Benson’s Achilles heel. He seems incapable of developing and sustaining a suspenseful situation, consistently resorting to the afore-mentioned violence that it eventually becomes wearisome. There is some good writing here and a smattering of excellent ideas, but Benson hasn’t got the where-with-all to pull them together. While much better than Never Dream of Dying, this is a confusing mix which in turn delights and appals.
Ultimately, action is all in the author’s view of James Bond: flush from victory over Goro Yoshida, Bond admonishes his adversary’s right hand man with the rebuke “I don’t give a damn. He’s bloody dead and that’s all I care about.” I expect Raymond Benson was thinking the same thing.
3 from 10
Your reviews have been a great service to the forum- I'm sure I am not alone in saying "thank you" for sharing these detailed reviews...............
Thanks.
As I've said before, we all have opinions. I try to offer mine as honestly as I can.
8/3/2011
2002
Raymond Benson’s movie adaptations rarely add anything to James Bond’s literary legacy. They stand alone from his continuation novels and rarely embrace our hero’s history. Die Another Day briefly mentions his dead wife and includes her prophetic epitaph “We have all the time in the world” but that’s about it.
This occurs during a prolonged thesis on the nature of torture and the philosophy of James Bond which runs something thus:
“Man’s cruellest invention… Pain is the great equaliser, the measure by which men and women come to grips with their inner strength… Never the less everyone has a breaking point… If the end was near, then so be it… He hadn’t talked. He hadn’t given his interrogators the satisfaction of winning. He still knew who he was, why he was there and what he stood for.”
There is a similar, though less revealing, passage relating to the genetically altered Korean Colonel Moon / Gustav Graves. It sadly lacks any attempt at significant depth. We never learn why Moon / Graves is such a lunatic egoist, such a psychotic volatile genius; he’s simply a madman and that’s our lot; deal with it.
Ditto the heroine Jinx, as bland as they come, and the fire and ice henchmen Zao and Miranda Frost. The latter is at least afforded the luxury of murdering her father, pairing her nicely with Moon / Graves, otherwise she’s utterly lifeless. Even the usual jittery paternal relationship between 007 and M is stoic, “a strange, strained situation.”
Admittedly Benson does have to transcribe some appalling dialogue and interpret the bemused reactions of the lead actors. No easy task. He painfully elaborates the story where necessary, but the aimless prose, all “then… next… at that moment… as… when… now…” is terribly flat and hardly conjures any tension or excitement. Despite a brief reflection on North Korea, “the victim of its own mindless self destruction… the dreams and lives of countless men and women had ended [in] sorrow, despair and ghosts,” the author has largely chosen to forsake any human substance in his narrative. As such the whole enterprise is fatally flawed.
Die Another Day is a bore and brings a relieved curtain crashing down on Raymond Benson’s tenure as James Bond’s official biographer. On this evidence he was probably disinclined to continue the job anyway. The best thing that can be said about the novel is that it is very, very short. Thank God.
1 from 10
Having said that, I just re-read all of my Benson reviews and there is too much negative stuff in my take on TMWTRT for it to warrant a 4.
I just downgraded it to 3 from 10.
While I admit it's "daft" (I quote myself) there is a lot of other stuff going on in TMWTRT and much of it is good. I enjoyed the insights into modern Japanese culture and generally Benson's descriptive abilities seem a bit more in tune this time around.
Benson doesn't actually rate TMWTRT, he thinks it's his worst novel, but I'm surprised by that as he gives us a solid narrative (not, note, a solid villian's plot) with a good central antagonist in Yoshida. It's a worthwhile effort and quietly builds to a climax, albeit a rather lacklustre one.
I agree there is plenty of tosh here (yes, the mosquitoes, and the Kappa) but at least Benson hasn't turned Tiger Tanaka into the chief baddie (I spent most of the book praying it wasn't going to happen, and thank god it didn't) but I can't ignore what is good as well.
There is much more thought involved in TMWTRT when you compare it to NDOD, which is frankly a second rate production of dire proportions, and I can't knock it down so completely.
I see what you mean
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Well, not yet, I need a rest. I'm thinking of starting in April.
To be honest with you, I have been very surprised by the length of the YB series, each book is well over 300 pages, quite long haul for young fans. Never mind, once more into the breach and all that.
-Casino Royale, Ian Fleming
After a brief respite, I thought it was time to offer a brief summary of Raymond Benson’s catalogue of 007 continuation novels.
It’s sad to report that I wasn’t over impressed with the collection of six original stories and three movie tie-ins. Benson seems to have a grasp of what makes James Bond’s adventures special – beautiful women, mad villains, even madder plots, violence, sex, a bit of jokey banter, exotic locations – but he seems to slot these into his narrative with little regard for how the eventual product will read.
Most of his tales are inspired by Fleming’s SPECTRE trilogy, repeating scenarios and featuring characters (or similar characters) to one’s we’ve met before. Unfortunately the narratives are less involving and the persona’s less detailed. There is a lot of sketchy writing here. Benson seems more interested in explaining how Bond operates the multitude of gadgets Q-branch offer him than how he out thinks his antagonists.
In fact the real loss to the series isn’t so much the sub-standard plotting and people, but the disappearance of James Bond altogether, who here has become an almost robotic, testosterone fuelled entity, so ready is he to fight and **** his way out of any situation. There is little time for contemplation and reflection in Benson’s world. When it does come, it feels slightly fraudulent, as if I’ve already read the words and phrases somewhere before.
This is another slightly worrying aspect of Benson’s writing. He has a tendency, whether in tribute to real quality or through recognizing the paucity of his own ability, to paraphrase or even quote Ian Fleming and the movies he inspired. This isn’t only lazy writing; it’s rather insulting to the reader. Did he think we might not notice?
Galling enough, but when Benson starts to interfere with decades of legacy and turns one of Bond’s oldest allies into a villain, it was surely time for a rethink. His treatment of the character Marc Ange Draco in Never Dream of Dying was curious at best, downright insane at the worst. The problem wasn’t that I can’t believe a character could turn from hero to villain, but that there was no discernable reason for it to happen, certainly not to Draco. That the Corsican – who despised Blofeld’s SPECTRE in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – should suddenly fund a fledgling organization established on similar principles seems remarkable. That he raised his son to be such a criminal mastermind when he was happy for his daughter to lead a life away from crime and, eventually he hoped, to escape it with Bond, seems contradictory to his nature. Benson also seems to have completely forgotten how cleverly he was developing the character of Le Gerant, a blind soothsayer of the highest degree, and his solution to the conundrum he created is sloppy and, frankly, cheap.
That all of this is wrapped up in turgid, plain prose and even duller dialogue doesn’t make me want for anything.
There are a few glimmers of excitement. The first two Union novels, High Time to Kill and Double Shot, offer a little more intrigue, either through unique settings or through investing a bit more time in the characters (the latter features probably Benson’s most astute understanding of 007 and of the villains). Meanwhile The Man with the Red Tattoo recalls the travelogue style of You Only Live Twice and we are at last immersed in a locale rather than skimming the surface of it. It’s disappointing the madcap plot of this one lets it down.
Benson’s women are as robotic as James Bond. Energetic lovers one and all, there is not a single woman who doesn’t flirt with our hero. Even the ugly ones seem to notice his devilish good looks. These routine love affairs, with their sort of slap and tickle seduction technique, are boring beyond belief. It says something when Benson’s most interesting female character is Wai Lin from the movie adaptation Tomorrow Never Dies.
Indeed the people who populate this novel seem much more real and defined than most of Benson’s output. The less said about his other tie-ins the better; he shows little interest in them and they are nothing but a cheap and quick reminder of expensive and long films.
The slightly disconcerting thing about Raymond Benson is that he fails to elaborate on a series of very good ideas. He genuinely wants to create a worthwhile story, with all the prerequisite ingredients of Bond-like derring-do, but he gets so caught up in the latter he forgets all about the former. He is influenced for the worse by the movie franchise and by other modern heroes, often cinematic ones.
His novels bear little relation to the literary James Bond, who rarely engaged in three page fist fights or extended car chases and whose supporting cast was capable but never so physically involved. Perhaps the most telling observation is in High Time to Kill, when Bond and his nemesis Roland Marquis, having both been horribly injured, still manage to summit a 27000ft mountain. It stinks of Die Hard all round.
These are not books I would recommend.
It’s hard to know if the casual reader or the dedicated fan is best served here. I fear neither would finish one of Benson’s opus very satisfied.
For what it’s worth, my personal order, 'from best to worst':
1. Double Shot
2. High Time to Kill
3. The Man with the Red Tattoo
4. Zero Minus Ten
5. Tomorrow Never Dies
6. The Facts of Death
7. The World is Not Enough
8. Die Another Day
9. Never Dream of Dying
SILVERFIN
18/4/2011
2005
Charlie Higson’s first novel to feature a school age James Bond was very well received when first published. Retrospectively, and in the context of children’s novels, Silverfin just about does all right. In the context of James Bond it’s very rough and ready. Other than providing new questions and answering old ones about Bond’s upbringing, there’s very little to interest an adult reader.
Perhaps the most curious aspect of the book is its fantastical Frankenstein-like plot. With overtures of Arian supremacy and genetic engineering, it is much more science fiction than espionage thriller. Kids will no doubt love it.
The fantastic events only take root in the final third of the book, when Bond and his new best mate Red Kelly decide to investigate the goings on at Loch Silverfin, where Kelly’s cousin mysteriously disappeared – this latter event covered in a well described opening chapter. The eventual denouement is a mix of tree climbing, Dr Moreau style experiments, cave swimming, devilish drugs, arson and horses. Add into the mix a power mad villain, Randolph Hellebore, who is the father of the school bully, and a crazy scientist, Perseus Frend, and all the traditional bases are pretty much covered.
The problem with the novel isn’t the finale, but what comes before it. The first two thirds of the novel are ordinary beyond belief, a ‘rites of passage’ sequence, as Bond learns about Eton, wins a triathlon, learns to drive a car, learns about his parents and discovers a father figure in his Uncle Max, who handily turns out to have been a spy during the war.
There’s nothing original in this. Cleverly, Higson dresses up some of this extended prologue as an educational exercise for his readers: he describes Eton and its traditions, breathing techniques for athletes, how to shoot a rifle and the workings of the internal combustion engine. Oh, and there are a few mean scrapes for our young hero to endure, but it’s nothing compared to Tom Brown’s roasting, and when Bond finally decides to “lose his temper” it hardly seems worth his effort.
Higson improves dramatically towards the climax. Captured in a horrific laboratory, the young James Bond is forcefully injected with a steroid serum while Hellebore regales him with his nefarious schemes. This well-constructed episode has the stamp of Fleming all over it, intertwining torture, revenge and ambition with a healthy dose of idealistic politics. Hellebore’s obsession with creating a master race stems from the Great War and this tallies neatly with the onset of Fascism: “We are living in a new age, forged in the horrors of war, and your ideas about right and wrong, good and bad, no longer have value. Now there are only weak and strong, quick and slow, the living and the dead, the rich and the poor… Which would you rather be?”
Higson’s Bond, unfortunately, is only a boy, and his reply “I’d rather be anything than a stinking cheat” takes the edge off what is probably the best constructed scene in the whole novel. And that’s the major issue with Silverfin. It isn’t badly written, but it is written for children and young teenagers.
Higson is hamstrung by the need to stay succinct and elementary in his prose. I sense he wants to do more, but recognizes the restrictions of his genre. A good children’s author should be more ingenious, both with language and narrative. Higson, sadly, is pedestrian at best. For the most part the tale is told in a straightforward uninvolving manner and with the barest glimpse of authorial technique. The occasional simile brings a smile, but they are tempered by the blandness of “expression of pure murder” and its ilk.
It’s a recurring problem and subsequently the story lacks depth of description and insight. The contradiction between Uncle Max’s abhorrence and Hellebore’s adoration of war remains the sole hint of any conscience in the story, which is hopelessly impassive. Later, in attempt to bring some emotion to the proceedings, Higson resorts to a Jedi-inspired ghostly portend which is simply unbelievable.
Like his continuation predecessors, Higson also tries to introduce us to 007 folklore. He fills in the perceived gaps in Bond’s life, which might please or agitate seasoned fans depending on how familiar they are with Fleming’s original work and John Pearson’s The Authorized Biography.
Unlike Raymond Benson, who seemed to alter history for spurious reasons, Higson seems to be gently poking fun at the legacy. He even paraphrases the opening lines from Casino Royale. I found Higson’s technique as mystifying and disagreeable as Benson’s.
For all that I can understand why children would be enthralled by the novel as it has most of their prerequisite expectations: growing up fast, a pretty girl, cheerful pals, a nice cozy old couple, a couple of big bullies, monstrous goings on and a few monsters to boot. For adults it is best left well alone.
3 from 10