But we also get the prose of Mr Boyd, which is frankly superior to that of Mr Fleming.īut he has not attempted to write "as" Fleming.
All faithful, down to the guns, and the nipples, to Fleming's obsession with detail. So we get, set in 1969, all the trademark worsted suits, and thin dark knitted ties, and the Dorchester (where Bond has been celebrating his 45th birthday, purposefully alone, lost in vague memories and specific cocktails) and the cars, but also the sordid Pimlico flat where Bond has to finagle a (believably) pilfered passport, and the whoosh of early cappuccino steam in the Cafe Picasso on the King's Road, and most viscerally the humid poisoned heat of west Africa (to which neither Boyd nor his fictions are strangers). This book is more true to Fleming's intentions than some of the less good (and frankly padded) originals. Not only lifted it but drained it, then licked those lips. Whether, when older, he similarly revered the creator, Ian Fleming, is dubious – the two writers (as was Bond) were privately educated and with strong Scottish connections, but Fleming had a cruel streak – possibly a necessary legacy of the war – but also a streak of undisguised snobbery, whereas Boyd has a softly spoken dry donnish humour to him and his only streak is that of writerly success.Īnd he has succeeded indubitably in lifting to his lips the poisoned chalice of the Bond books franchise where so many, from Kingsley Amis on, have to a lesser (Amis) and greater ( Sebastian Faulks) degree failed. He obviously remembers the very smell of those 1960s/70s paperbacks, with their tiny type, and page corners folded down with impatient grubby fingers on every monstrous interruption, as we learned the meanings of "cordite" "gunmetal-gray" and, for late developers, "nipple" he obviously quietly revered the excitement of the creation.
It is, in mitigation, a faintly understandable confusion, the films having become down the decades such a lash-up of stylistic tics, fashion anachronisms, "humour", believable gunplay, cartoon violence and casual sexism that it's a wonder anyone can remember the Bond of the books as opposed to the brand Bond. That of trying to judge his book against the James Bond films. T he (rare) critics of this book in the past 10 days have fallen into the very trap against which Boyd gently cautioned.
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