All the best tunes
Charles Cumming
DEVIL MAY CARE by Sebastian Faulks (writing as Ian Fleming) Penguin, £18.99, pp. 320, ISBN 9780718153762 On a damp spring evening in 1955, Ian Fleming returned home to find his wife, Ann, hosting a salon at their house in Victoria Square. Raucous laughter was emanating from the drawing-room downstairs. One by one, the cream of London’s literati — Cyril Connolly among them — were reading aloud passages from the Bond novels and collapsing in fits of giggles. As humiliations go, this is hard to top. Fleming may have been modest about his abilities as a writer (in a letter to Sir Winston Churchill he described Live and Let Die as ‘an unashamed thriller’ whose ‘only merit is that it makes no demands on the mind of the reader’), but that modesty was entirely false. In common with many commercially successful authors, he craved the sort of praise routinely doled out to lesser-known writers with a fraction of his sales.
The snobbery which has hampered Fleming’s literary reputation ever since was exemplified by Sebastian Faulks when he was approached to write a Bond novel to celebrate the centenary of Fleming’s birth. ‘It was like asking someone who writes complex symphonic music if they would like to write a three-minute pop song,’ Faulks responded, with magnificent hauteur. ‘I do inner lives, not underwater explosions.’ However, careful study of the Bond backlist, doubtless combined with a whopping cheque from Ian Fleming Publications, convinced the author of Birdsong that he would be wise to follow in the footsteps of another literary giant, Kingsley Amis, who had himself written a paean to 007, Colonel Sun, in 1968.
The result is Devil May Care, an almost faultless replica of Fleming’s Bond, right down to the Arnott supercharger in 007’s customised Bentley and the three gold rings on his Morland Specials. With an unnervingly accurate ear for Fleming’s bracing dialogue and taut, energetic prose, Faulks has given Bond fans a hugely enjoyable entertainment, expertly paced and cleverly imagined.
In several ways, Devil May Care marks an improvement on the original Bonds. Fleming wrote at terrific speed, churning out 007’s adventures at the rate of one a year to satisfy the demands of a ravenous reading public. Too often, it shows. Some of the books are inexpertly structured — think of the interminable game of bridge which clogs up the first half of Moonraker — and there are passages in The Spy Who Loved Me which would shame a pornographer.
Faulks has taken the sensible decision to set the book in the late 1960s, a few years after the events described in The Man with the Golden Gun. Devil May Care thus becomes a period piece which draws on all of the most successful elements in the Bond canon. At times, it’s as if you can see Faulks mentally ticking off a checklist of Bond tropes. The villain, for example, not only sports a bizarre physical deformity, but also cheats at games and invites Bond to his desert hideaway, where he helpfully explains the novel’s preposterous plot so that 007 can save the day. Miss Moneypenny makes an appearance, as does Felix Leiter, a leg and arm now missing following an unfortunate incident with a hammerhead shark in Thunderball. There’s also a marvellous description of M, ‘the old sailor, peering briefly out of the window, as though somewhere over Regent’s Park there might be enemy shipping’.
And then there’s Bond himself. Faulks has dutifully given his hero the celebrated ‘comma of black hair’ over the forehead and his dark eyes retain their ‘cold, slightly cruel sense of purpose’. The Bond of Devil May Care is also every inch the man of good taste and refined living. When he spots a character emerging from an open-topped car in Marseilles, he is immediately able to deduce that his ‘beige tropical suit’ was cut by Airey and Wheeler of Savile Row. I’m not sure that Faulks quite captures 007’s self-doubt and reluctance to act, but when the author tells you that Bond ‘could never feel enthusiastic about croissants’, you know that you’re in good hands.
The set-pieces are also first class. There’s a tennis match between Bond and his nemesis, Dr Julian Gorner, which is every bit as good as the celebrated round of golf in Goldfinger. No slouch when it comes to action sequences, Faulks puts together several gripping pursuits, the best of which is probably the short, sharp exchange between Bond’s Bentley and a motorbike on the outskirts of London. Bond fans also demand a healthy dose of violence and sadism and, again, the author doesn’t disappoint. Gorner’s henchman, a pitiless IndoChinese thug named Chagrin, has a habit of ripping people’s tongues out with pliers, and there’s some very nasty business involving eardrums and a set of chopsticks.
Did I mention the sex? It has sometimes been said of Faulks that he writes better about women than men, and that’s certainly the case here; Bond’s love interest, the intoxicating Scarlett Papava, is the most fully realised character in Devil May Care. There’s an authentic thump of sentimentality in Bond’s attitude towards her which Fleming would doubtless have applauded. Not that Faulks stints on the more politically incorrect elements of Fleming’s style. At one point, Britain’s most famous secret agent threatens Moneypenny with ‘a good spanking’ and there’s an anachronistic description of ‘the Arabs’ which may cause Faulks’s friends in Notting Hill to choke on their mochaccino lattes.
What Devil May Care lacks is a sprinkling of magic. There has probably never been a more erratic writer than Ian Fleming. On a bad day, he was very, very bad, but on top form he was capable of matching such giants of the literary thriller as Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. Nothing in Devil May Care, for example, comes close to Fleming’s description of Rosa Klebb in From Russia With Love, with her ‘wet trap of a mouth, that went on opening and shutting as if it was operated by wires under the chin’. Casino Royale, in particular, contains many passages of what Faulks might deign to call ‘complex symphonic music’, but he has proved incapable of repeating them.
Nevertheless, Ian Fleming Publications will be delighted that the centrepiece of the centenary year has been met with such widespread critical and commercial acclaim. Launched on the back of a global publicity campaign only fractionally less expensive than the cost of sending Sir Hugo Drax to the moon, Devil May Care could hardly have failed. In fact, in recent weeks I have begun to feel rather sorry for the many writers whose books have been left floundering in the wake of the Faulks juggernaut. Kate Westbrook, for example, has published the last instalment in her hugely enjoyable series of novels about Miss Moneypenny, Final Fling (John Murray, £17.99). Ben Macintyre, bestselling author of Agent Zigzag, has also written a marvellously entertaining and informative book, For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond (Bloomsbury, £20) to accompany the current exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. Both were endorsed by the Fleming estate and deserve to fly off the shelves every bit as quickly as Devil May Care.
With Sir Roger Moore’s memoirs still to come, and Quantum of Solace due in cinemas in the autumn, 2008 will unquestionably be the year of James Bond. Should anybody pass the headquarters of Ian Fleming Publications this summer and hear giggles emanating from within, it is likely to be the sound of the directors laughing (deservedly, it must be said) all the way to the bank.
Charles Cumming’s latest book, Typhoon, is published this month by Michael Joseph at £18.99.
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