Then this happens:
The Rear-Admiral stopped in front of Bond. "Prime Minister," he said to the almost regally dressed Mrs Margaret Hilda Thatcher. "I'd like to present Captain James Bond, who is in total charge of security for Steward's Meeting."
And at that point, the James Bond novels went shit, and never recovered.
It gets worse. George Bush (senior version) turns up. Then Gorbachev. Obviously they all end up getting kidnapped, and obviously, Bond rescues them. But they shouldn't be there at all. For Your Eyes Only (the film) ends with Margaret Thatcher talking to a parrot; it's high camp, ridiculous and sort of brilliant. It works in a film because it's so ludicrous.
It doesn't work in a book, and it definitely doesn't work in a James Bond book. Up until this point the Bond books were doing pretty well. The Fleming books are, of course, unimpeachable, even the crappy ones. Kingsley Amis a.k.a Robert Markham had a decent stab with Colonel Sun. And John Gardner was doing pretty well with his Bond novels of the Eighties; they were fun, and they were interesting, and they were easily digested. They didn't stay with you the same way, say, You Only Live Twice does, but they weren't bad.
Page 162 of Win, Lose or Die destroys all that. Having Mrs Thatcher turn up is uncomfortable and awkward. Win, Lose or Die is not a camp Bond novel; it's fairly serious, and has a lot of stuff with aeroplanes and aircraft carriers that's presented as being very important and realistic. It's not Moonraker, with its space shuttles and midgets falling in love with Jaws. It's not an environment you can put real people in.
Gardner had flirted with this situation in his previous novel, Scorpius; Bond manages to save the Prime Minister and the US President from assassination (Thatcher even mentions it when she meets 007). They're only referred to by their titles there, however, and Bond doesn't actually meet them. That's ok - that's the fantasy world of Bond.
The real world and Bond's world shouldn't mix. There's a beautiful Russian spy named Nikki Ratnikov in Win, Lose or Die - I'm fine with that. I'm less fine with her being in charge of protecting Mikhail Gorbachev. It jars.
After this, things went bad pretty quickly. Win, Lose or Die ends with the usual Gardner double/triple/quadruple crosses, and then a bit of a chase inside Gibraltar. His next few novels either saw him desperately trying to get away from the formula (Brokenclaw, The Man from Barbarossa) or simply turning out a terrible, terrible book that features a character named James Bond.
Death is Forever ends with a battle to save John Major in the Channel Tunnel. Seafire has neo-Nazis, the laziest villains possible (and a plot device Gardner had already used in Icebreaker). Cold takes a load of characters you thought you liked and makes them horrible. And Never Send Flowers features a magician trying to kill Princess Diana, William and Harry at EuroDisney. It is worse than cholera.
After Gardner gave up, they handed the keys to the Bond franchise to Raymond Benson, a lovely man and an acknowledged Bond expert who unfortunately couldn't write for toffee. Even when Gardner was at his nadir, he could still construct a couple of interesting chapters or characters or sentences. Benson couldn't do any of that. He was awful.
The regular James Bond continuation novels have finished now, and instead we get a well-known writer knocking out a one-off. Sebastian Faulks churned out Devil May Care, bragging that he wrote it in a fortnight or so and practically chucking it at the reader. Jeffrey Deaver tried to write an up to date Bond novel, all hi-tech and gleaming, but Carte Blanche is charmless and tedious; I still haven't finished it. And I've owned William Boyd's Solo since Christmas, and I still haven't cracked it open yet. I'm afraid. The Bond novels haven't been good since 1989. Perhaps we should just let them die.
No comments:
Post a Comment