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Summary
Summary
Bond is back. With a vengeance. Devil May Careis a masterful continuation of the James Bond legacyan 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 Carenot only captures the very essence of Fleming's original novels but also shows Bond facing dangers with a powerful relevance to our own times.
Author Notes
Sebastian Faulks is the author of Where My Heart Used to Beat, which made the New Zealand Best Seller List 2015.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With a delivery as cool and dry as a vodka martini, Tristan Layton brings numerous international locals and characters to life in Faulks' homage to Ian Fleming's greatest creation, James Bond. It's 1967 and agent 007 is on a forced rest leave, but it isn't long before a new threat to the British Empire and the world has M dragging him back into action. Evil genius Dr. Julius Gorner is out to destroy Britain by flooding England with heroin. He also has an even more diabolical plan waiting in the wings. Faulks follows Fleming's traditional framework, but it's Layton's performance that keeps the rather slow storyline moving. His reading nicely enhances Faulks's prose and his proper English intonation provides the perfect stage from which his rich, multi-accented characters can project. It is a smooth, easy performance that elevates the material. A Doubleday hardcover (reviewed online). (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
BEFORE Jason Bourne, before Jack Ryan, there was Bond, James Bond, the original two-dimensional, world-saving secret agent. Ian Fleming, Bond's creator, died in 1964. But Bond is far too cagey a spy, and too lucrative a franchise, to suffer the same fate. In the decades since his creator's death, three authors - not to mention some 20 movies - have kept him alive. Now, just in time for the centenary of Fleming's birth, his estate has commissioned a new Bond novel, "Devil May Care," by Sebastian Faulks, a British author whose best-known previous book, "Birdsong," is a historical drama set during World War I. Taking over another author's creation four decades after his death is tricky under any circumstances. And Bond is not just any character. He is suave and witty, a master seducer, drinker and gambler who always wins - and has a license to kill. When he first appeared in "Casino Royale" in 1953, Bond was a one-man tonic for an England reeling from its post-World War II loss of power and influence. Since then, his fame has spread worldwide, and in 1997 he won the ultimate pop culture trophy, a full-on screen parody, the sophomoric and sometimes hilarious "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery," which imagined a British secret agent thrust from the louche 1960s into the politically correct 1990s. So Faulks faces the difficult task of staying true to Bond's history while giving readers a fresh adventure. He has simplified his job by setting "Devil May Care" in the 1960s. Not much has changed since "The Man With the Golden Gun," Fleming's final novel, published after his death. Everyone smokes, the Soviet Union is the ultimate enemy, and not even Q has discovered cellphones. Faulks's style, too, ... a reasonable facsimile of Fleming's: simple, direct and clean. "Devil May Care" centers on Bond's effort to capture Julius Gorner, a pharmaceutical magnate and drug smuggler who wants to draw Britain and the Soviet Union into war. Bond moves from Rome to London to Tehran to the Iranian desert, drinking more than his share of Scotch and ice-cold martinis but otherwise behaving like a perfect gentleman, with a conspicuous lack of libido. He even turns down an early chance to bed the luscious Scarlett Papava. ("He heard himself utter three words that in all his adult life had never, in such a situation, left his mouth before. 'No, thank you.'") Awkward sentence structure aside, Bond's response is ... travesty. No, thank you? No, Bond, no! What's next? "It's not you, it's me"? Bond does get another chance - several, actually - at Scarlett, who follows him across continents like a star-struck groupie, for reasons that are not fully revealed until the novel's final scene. Faulks has told interviewers that he held back on the romps and one-liners to avoid veering into Austin Powers-style parody. But Bond's unflappability and his insatiable sexual hunger make up much of his charm, and trying to humanize him seems silly when much of the rest of "Devil May Care" is patently, almost proudly, absurd. The villains are a B-movie writer's dream. The first baddie to appear is Chagrin, a Vietnamese gangster with a penchant for tearing out his victims' tongues with pliers. Gorner, Chagrin's boss, runs a heroin manufacturing plant staffed by addicts who work themselves literally to death but who are allowed to feast on prostitutes whom Gorner has kidnapped for their pleasure. Gorner does everything but laugh "Bwah-hah-hah!" as he explains to Bond his plan to destroy England. Worst of all, he cheats at tennis. Yet the scenery-chewing bad guys are among the highlights of "Devil May Care," harking back to the equally over-the-top villains who've appeared in the Bond movies over the decades. In comparison, Bond sometimes barely registers on the page. THE ending is another disappointment. A well-plotted pulp thriller should ratchet the tension page by page as hero and villain close in on each other. But "Devil May Care" climaxes with Bond and Scarlett parachuting out of a crippled plane over the Soviet Union - almost three chapters before the end of the novel. They spend much of the next two chapters on a road trip across western Russia, apparently untroubled by the fact that their archenemy is still alive. Gorner does reappear in the final chapter to make one last run at Bond (bwah-hah-hah!), but the greatest tension in "Devil May Care" comes from the question of when Bond will sleep with Scarlett and what wine they will drink to celebrate the occasion. "Devil May Care" is not without its pleasures. Early in the book, on his way to the airport, Bond dispatches a couple of would-be motorcycle assassins with his Bentley - and doesn't miss his flight. A set piece in the Iranian desert that culminates with Bond fighting for his life in an underground aquifer is neatly plotted and tense. And Bond does finally have his way with Scarlett, in true 007 style: "roughly, quickly, with the pent-up urgency of their long and chaste association." Yes, thank you. Better late than never. Alex Berenson is a reporter for The Times. His most recent novel is "The Ghost War."
Library Journal Review
For Fleming's centenary, Faulks pretends to be the creator of 007 and revisits the Cold War. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.