Devil May Care | Sebastian Faulks | At Long Last, the Real James Bond is Back

Devil May Care | Sebastian Faulks | So far so good

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Devil May Care

	Devil May Care Sebastian Faulks Doubleday, 2008 - 278 pages average customer review:based on 70 reviews view larger image
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Bond is back. With a vengeance.

Devil May Care is a masterful continuation of the James Bond legacy?an electrifying new chapter in the life of the most iconic spy of literature and film, written to celebrate the centenary of Ian Fleming?s birth on May 28, 1908.

An Algerian drug runner is savagely executed in the desolate outskirts of Paris. This seemingly isolated event leads to the recall of Agent 007 from his sabbatical in Rome and his return to the world of intrigue and danger where he is most at home. The head of MI6, M, assigns him to shadow the mysterious Dr. Julius Gorner, a power-crazed pharmaceutical magnate, whose wealth is exceeded only by his greed. Gorner has lately taken a disquieting interest in opiate derivatives, both legal and illegal, and this urgently bears looking into.

Bond finds a willing accomplice in the shape of a glamorous Parisian named Scarlett Papava. He will need her help in a life-and-death struggle with his most dangerous adversary yet, as a chain of events threaten to lead to global catastrophe. A British airliner goes missing over Iraq. The thunder of a coming war echoes in the Middle East. And a tide of lethal narcotics threatens to engulf a Great Britain in the throes of the social upheavals of the late sixties.

Picking up where Fleming left off, Sebastian Faulks takes Bond back to the height of the Cold War in a story of almost unbearable pace and tension. Devil May Care not only captures the very essence of Fleming?s original novels but also shows Bond facing dangers with a powerful relevance to our own times.

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At Long Last, the Real James Bond is Back

If Ian Fleming were alive today, he'd've just turned 100 and I like to think he'd be pretty bloody pleased with the Bond franchise he'd spawned. As a lover of everything Bond from Fleming, though Gardner and Connery through Craig (okay, I was a little disappointed in George Lazerby), I like to think I'm qualified to muse a bit about the latest of the Bond writers. First off I have to say:

Well done, Mr. Faulks.

Fleming wasn't always politically correct, of course he died before it was fashionable, and Faulks follows in the non PC tradition. I loved Fleming's Bond, read him when I was in high school, saw Goldfinger the day after it opened at Gruman's Chinese Theater.

I mourned Ian Fleming's passing and thought I'd seen the last of James Bond, then in 1968 came Colonial Sun, written by Robert Markham (which belongs back in print), who was really the excellent writer Kingsley Amis, who joined Ian Fleming in 1995. That was a great book.

Then in the Eighties came the Gardner books. Lord I loved his Bond, loved those books, all fourteen of 'em, but I especially liked his first one, License Renewed. But good things don't last forever and in the late Nineties John Gardner's health forced him to quit doing Bond and sadly last year Mr. Gardner went away and joined Messers Fleming and Kingsley.

However, right on the heels of the last Gardner book came the Benson Bond and I liked all six of those as well, read his shorter Bond stories, liked them too. But through it all, Gardner's Bond was not Fleming's Bond, nor was Amis' or Benson's. They'd changed him, some for the better, some for worse. They'd humanized him, grew him up, gave him good stories, great adventurers.

But now I feel as if I'm young again, not yet twenty, standing in line with the man I was going to marry at Grauman's, waiting to see Goldfinger. God we loved Bond back then. There was a man.

He's back.

Thank you, Mr. Faulks.

Reviewed by Vesta Irene

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So far so good

I am three quarters into the book and so far it is engaging enough to keep me interested. I cannot say that it is as if Fleming is writing, but it is good enough for me to want more. I look forward to more books in the future.

Bond. James Bond.

This is a new novel featuring 007- and the third author to write a Bond novel since Fleming passed away.

In some ways I would say this was an astonishingly good emulation of the originals. The author quite understood whose style he was emulating, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me he'd written this one with a stack of the Fleming Bond novels cracked open with sentences diagrammed and plot elements carefully analyzed on every page.

On the other hand, though, Mr. Faulks' attention to the stylistic and plot specifics of the earlier Bond novels has created one problem: this one wouldn't translate forward of the late 60s at all easily, as the plot revolves around situations present in that era, which no longer exist in our world. The world of Fleming's Bond is very specific to the era of their publication- the Cold War was unfolding in a very particular way based on the geopolitics of the time.

Overall, though, I found this book a fun read, and a more than fitting 100th birthday present for Mr. Fleming.

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