Kim Sherwood's Bond novels
Napoleon Plural
LondonPosts: 10,467MI6 Agent
I've just finished reading Kim Sherwood's Bond novel Double Or Nothing - her second, A Spy Like Me, is currently out. A third and I believe final one is to come.
The idea is that James Bond is missing, possibly kidnapped, and life for the Double-O section has to go on. We get to meet the other agents with a licence to kill. Unlike most of the recent continuation novels, it's set in the here and now.
Ms Sherwood was recently seen on Twitter/X celebrating the launch of her recent book with account user Licence To Queer, who writes about the series from a gay perspective and often posts photos of himself and his husband in exotic locations like Gibraltar with a martini in the foreground. This time, he was with Kim Sherwood at London's Piccadilly Waterstones.
What did I make of the book?
Well, I liked the way it began. It grips, and Sherwood adopts a curt, cursory tone that befits a thriller. It's not a Fleming pastiche but a good Fleming approximation. The style it most resembled was that of Christopher Wood, and as I rate his two, James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me and James Bond And Moonraker as the best of the non-Fleming books, that's praise indeed. It starts off in (checks book) Syria with one of the double oh agents on a mission to track down a fellow agent, it has some nice stuff. What I liked about this book is that it has some of the observations about life that Fleming did and virtually no other Bond author seems to do. Some of the descriptions are spot on too - when Miss Moneypenny visits a retired agent who settled down in Bath, the city is described as 'a contradiction, grand yet somehow wistful, a monument to Roman and Georgian pleasures that never quite recaptured its purpose.' That does hit home for me, that said, it's been decades since I was at Bristol and I can't quite see how one could see the Clifton Suspension Bridge in the distance from near Bath, I mean it's a long way away. There's another nice description of Moneypenny driving around the Sussex Downs in her souped up classic car to see Bill Tanner in Lewes too.
Some of the dispatches from the front line of life work better in a modern novel, as Fleming's were in their day. They just don't make sense in a historical Bond novel, because you can't buy the idea that the author is thinking up a new slant on things going on decades ago, yet nor does he or she able to identify themselves as writing about the past from a today perspective, they almost have to play dumb. You can't have 'decades later, the Wall would come down but in 1965 it represented a different prospect...' etc etc
Tbc
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Comments
What about the author's tone. 'A woman!' as our man would exclaim.
The last three books I've read have been modern and by women. One of them was Argyll, which I still didn't get my head around, assuming the author isn't a complete pseudonym. The tone is lighter, different - less time it seems spent on descriptive paragraphs, less willy-waving you might say, like comparing Dickens and Austin. Apples and pears I suppose. It did seem that most of the dialogue takes the form of banter, and much of it not up to Top Gun standards either. One suspects the main qualification to join the CIA or MI6 must be to indulge in banter, sort of sub Dorothy Parker stuff, where the recipient replies 'Very funny' to point out to the reader that a joke has been made.
The way Bond or any man is seen via the female gaze is different, the emphasis not the same. Desired traits seem to be 'clean, financially viable, healthy, knows his way around a five-star mini bar, not weird, full head of hair, nice smile' etc. Sort of non-specific traits. (Bond is described in absentia.) I don't know if it's so different to Fleming's 'eyes like fierce slits', or the 'cruel mouth' or 'comma of hair' but you do sort of notice that women have a less specific set of traits and that men tend to lose by default rather than any great wonderful virtues. It's more about mood music with women. Fleming's hero was not unlike Cornwall's soldier Sharpe, and both are defined by their value as soldiers and as weapons of the State. Shooting skills, knife skills and so on are in demand for that reason but you don't quite get that sense with the heroes in Sherwood's book. Their hard side is not upfront.
Fleming's Bond was more of a loner and Wood had him down as a Scorpio - I don't like to follow star signs but he has a point, that Bond had a solitary, one-on-one wolfish sexuality and sex appeal that is not really in vogue any more but was a big hit in the 60s and 70s, I think. It would send a shiver up a woman, one of foreboding and imminent pleasure. The Bond in this is more a clubbable guy, he has taught other double Os and nothing about him seems as dark or dangerous as Fleming's Bond might from the outside perspective.
Tbc
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Unfortunately my interest in the book fell off a cliff at page 100 - a shame as there were another 300 pages to go at that point. Why? Firstly, I'd noticed about p50 that there wasn't much of a plot to speak of so it was all dressed up and nowhere to go. Not only that, there hadn't been a sinister or outlandish death or moment to catch the reader, a sort of calling card. Sadly the main thing I can think of is that poor bloke found dead in a holdall, supposedly a sex game gone wrong but just as likely a murder. Now, as a real event I don't want to make light of it, not least because one suspects he was got at by our own side, for being a whistleblower (welcome to modern Britain, folks) but something like that would throw down a gauntlet, something to make them think, right, what's the follow up, or wanting to see someone get their comeuppance, to see wrongs righted.
It all just paddles along.
The cover blurb reads 'The World is in chaos... And James Bond Has Vanished.' Okay, the world is in chaos given that Putin has invaded Ukraine and Israel is bombing Gaza after a terrorist attack but none of that is mentioned here. There's no real sense of chaos and Bond isn't missing for the same reason as in the films.
When the plot does kick in, well, it's the one about controlling the weather, as seen in those box office turkeys The Avengers and Die Another Day - there's even a thing called Icarus. The villain is Sir Bertram Paradise, he seems modelled on Brian Cox in Succession, though he would be younger, it doesn't quite work. It's also introduced with a page of monologue from a character that really doesn't ring true. There is another villain in the background, but we don't meet them for this one.
There have been allegations of woke - well, I wouldn't mind but there is a lack of sauce and spice. I didn't quite pick up on the idea that one agent Dryden is black and felt a bit silly as he's introduced talking about his Mum's cooking of a Caribbean dish. So I went for 50 pages thinking he's white and had to change tack - then again, why should I assume he's white? Just because I'm reading from the perspective of a white guy. Should I assume Moneypenny is white - after all, she's black in the recent films. It gets you thinking, then you say, okay, how do you convey a character's skin colour, and if you do that, must you do it with a white character too?
For all that, I would have liked some 'sex, sadism and snobbery' of a kind and Sherwood makes a point of not having much of any of this, now I know we didn't just read the Fleming novels for that, but even so... A bit of sexual spice or know how between Dryden and his former lover, then again with Joanna Harcourt, 003, she has sex with her agent lover like a long married couple, it doesn't set the pulse racing. It's like, you can have swearing, you can have violence but in an era when the respectable tabloid press runs features on swinging parties with an approving tone, the sex in a modern Bond novel has to be reserved.
Then again... while most blokes do not return to their hotel to find a naked Russian woman in bed with a ribbon around her neck (if they do, it's a FSB honeytrap - still, it was for Bond too - it's worth pointing out that in all his films and novels Bond has never got a blow job whereas most modern blokes I daresay have, so who should be envying whom? Likewise, most of us have not driven a lovely Aston Martin DB5 but most modern cars probably offer a superior driving experience anyway. The old perks of yesteryear are superseded by the new and Bond and his ilk don't seem to lead such an enviable life.
By page 100 I didn't feel I liked the characters very much. It seems they can be woman, man, gay, black, Muslim, traitor or mole but none of them must every get annoyed at anyone else, they all seem to get along fine. No 'Moneypenny admired Joanna, but couldn't help be irritated by the supercilious tone that often crept into her voice...' The characterisation seems like the kind you get on a CV or LinkedIn profile - or on social media, the way we sort of know each other as a thumbnail sketch but mostly haven't ever met, It's a twice removed impression, not inaccurate but not really lifelike either. The characters in these kind of books are like that, everything is kept kind of light. There's no depressive tone, or sense of escaping from a depressive tone into light or danger or sensuousness.
The action chops back and forth between the different agents per chapter. It's not a page turner, it started to feel like eating your greens. Some passages I couldn't really figure what was going on. Sherwood never quite reconciles the world of Fleming with her new modern universe. Miss Moneypenny seems to be the boss here, but she's working for M who is in just two or so scenes and seems to be the 1960s Bond grown older, not the seafaring Sir Miles we knew before. Some characters have got older or died, others seem to be the same age roughly - Moneypenny, Bill Tanner, Bond is about 45 in this.
Prospective writers have to submit chapters before being picked up by the Ian Fleming Foundation and I suspect Sherwood's chapters were fine individually but as a string of pearls, they don't run together it seems to me, it's a bit stop and start. As with other novels, there is a whiff of commission and a whiff of censorship, there is also too much going on at the expense of characterisation.
That all said, I wouldn't mind trying out Sherwood's new novel. I do feel she bit off more than she could chew with this one. It annoys me because I couldn't begin to do better than this, some of the writing is very good, but I found more to nitpick as I went on. Maybe the new one has more of a straightforwrd plot and the paperback of Double or Nothing has a preview of it at its end.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
thanks for the detailed report, agent Plural
there was lots of speculation on this book before it was published, but this is the very first review I've seen since it came out
I've never noticed it in any store or I probably wouldve read it myself by now
I wonder if it will read better as a finished trilogy? first sections of a larger work have to spend more time introducing characters and concepts than developing plot
Thanks for the review. I may purchase it, I don't know, I never read the Moneypenny Diaries. It sounds terrible to say this, but I just can't weather a woman writing Bond.
You make some interesting points about the "feel" of the book, how it is Twitter-friendly as it were, and I have noticed this as a developing trend. Ruth Ware, for instance, is very popular, but I didn't get any depth of character, place or circumstance when I read a couple of her novels. Isn't one of the criticisms of the TV personality author [Osman, Norton, De Beurk, and now Jeremy Vine, etc] exactly the same?
Oh, I didn't buy Double or Nothing - I picked it up off the shelf in Epsom Library. Maybe you could put an order in at your local library.
I have noticed, putting out CVs for the first time in a looooong time how you almost get discouraged from putting interests down in case it alienates somebody somewhere, it all has to be bland, upbeat, vague.
Roger Moore 1927-2017