Devil May Care

By Sebastian Faulks, writing as Ian Fleming. Doubleday Canada, 278 pp, $29.95, hardcover

Ah, Mr. Bond, we’ve been expecting you.

To mark the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth, Sebastian Faulks—best known for his haunting tales of love and war in Charlotte Gray and Birdsong—has written this latest caper starring the world’s most famous secret agent. In doing so, he’s the most “literary” novelist since Kingsley Amis to carry on the Bond tradition.

Faulks follows the familiar template: an opening sequence in which someone meets a grisly end, titillating women, a villain with a crazed master plan and a tough-as-teak sidekick, and the bangs and flashes of the action sequences. Yet that familiarity deprives the tale of the edge a good thriller needs.

In Devil May Care, we first meet Bond in Barbados in 1967, at the start of his three-month sabbatical. “You’re tired,” he says, looking in the mirror. “You’re played out. Finished.”

Faulks uses a pantomime trick to establish the callousness of Bond’s enemies, Dr. Julius Gorner and Chagrin: they flatten a dog under the front wheel of their Mercedes (boo! hiss! German car!) and then simply drive off (how un-British!). But the baddies are the best part, and here Faulks has clearly been thumbing his Goldfinger and Dr. No. Gorner is heavily involved in the heroin trade, and he conceals in a white glove an extremely rare congenital deformity called main de singe.

His henchman, Chagrin, has no sensation of pain as a result of secret Nazi and Soviet experiments on psychopaths. His idea of fun once included using pliers to tear out the tongues of Christian preachers in Indochina, a practice he has continued to apply to those talking out of turn in Gorner’s organization. And Oddjob just had a bowler hat and a way with golf balls.

There’s glamour in Paris, Rome, and decadent Tehran. And femmes fatales? Of course, Commander Bond. The tantalizing Scarlett Papava (a heavy-handed opium reference) holds centre stage throughout. Yet no gadgets this time, unfortunately, for those who like their Bond with Q rations.

Faulks has been careful to stick faithfully to Fleming’s formula, but that ultimately makes for a dull read. The twists are marked by big signposts, and even the sex is confined to the last pages.

Shaken? Barely. And certainly not stirred. It’s time for Bond to hand in his double-O licence.