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Carte Blanche, the newest James Bond thriller, and the first penned by Jeffery Deaver, should be a cause for celebration. After all, Deaver is no stranger to suspense, and in interviews speaks very highly of Ian Fleming’s oeuvre, so the average thriller reader and the literary Bond fan know going in that Bond is in good hands in terms of plot and situation. Deaver’s professionalism means he spins a good yarn;and be assured, the yarn of Carte Blanche is of quality wool;while his own love of the world of James Bond promises much of what we come to expect when reading, as opposed to viewing, 007’s exploits. Moreover, Deaver takes a page from Eon Production’s' 2006 production of Casino Royale by making this modern-day tale a reboot, eschewing almost everything from the series’ previous installments (not just Fleming, but also all of the post-Fleming writers, from Kingsley Amis to One wonders, then, why Carte Blanche never fully satisfies. It has all of the right apparatus: from the villainous Severan Hydt to the potential love interest Ophelia “Philly” Maidenstone to the Serbian-created weapon known as “the Cutter,” Deaver captures some of the trappings of a Bond novel while updating;and, alas, streamlining;some of its elements. Gone, for example, are the titled chapters that, in the age of the modern bestseller, seem more and more out of place, but Deaver keeps one of Fleming’s standard literary tropes: beginning the novel in media res in the first chapter, spending the following in flashback, thus establishing continuity with Fleming’s best novels (Casino Royale, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service). And in some ways, Deaver improves on Fleming, specifically in plot. Bond, a thirtysomething former officer of the Royal Navy and Afghanistan veteran, is recruited to the Covert Overseas Development Group (so long to Universal Exports and the Transworld Consortium), and given an assignment that takes him to Novi Sad, Serbia, Dubai, and Cape Town. At the novel’s opening he stops a planned derailment of a train carrying methyl isocyanate before brutal enforcer Niall Dunn can dump the contents into the Danube. Dunne leads Bond back to London, where he must continue his investigation with obtuse domestic agent Percy Osborne-Smith. By having Osborne-Smith chase red herrings, Bond can focus on his own leads, where he investigates the waste disposal company Green Way International, its enigmatic leader Severan Hydt, and his plan to detonate a fragmentation bomb (a "Cutter") at a university in York...which in turn leads Bond to the National Organization Against Hunger, and its leader Felicity Willing. If this seems like a lot, well, it is, and Deaver, to his credit, manages to keep the myriad details from collapsing into an inchoate mess by endowing Bond with the same deductive powers as the George Smiley of Call for the Dead or A Murder of Quality, or P.D. James's Inspector Penderghast -- or even his own Lincoln Rhyme. Bond always possessed a certain amount of brain--remember how he could deduce Miss Taro worked for Doctor No? -- though never the encyclopedic knowledge of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes or, for that matter, his cinematic counterpart. With an intricate conspiracy comes the
And that’s all to the good. Taken on its own, Carte Blanche is a smooth, efficient popcorn thriller, one that moves far more efficiently than the witless events in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code or the pretentious air of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, even if it lacks the poetic ennui of Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon novels. But one can't take Carte Blanche on its own. One brings certain expectations to a Bond novel, and it is is here where Deaver, for all of his professionalism, fails. The purest Bondian pleasures come not from the ticking-clock Doomsday scenarios or from chasing smugglers through the American desert (though burying Julius No in a ton of bird guano, for the literary fan, comes awfully close), but from Bond’s drinking and dining either when on assignment or holiday. One can read Goldfinger or You Only Live Twice for the cross-continent adventure or macabre escapes, but the Flemingesque touches shine brightest when Bond shares a butter-drenched crab dinner with a chemical magnate or over sake and Kobe beef with Dikko Henderson or Tiger Tanaka. The tales come alive when Fleming describes the locales;Leiter driving Bond through Las Vegas in his Studillac in Diamonds Are Forever; or from Bond’s ruminations on death and duty; look at his flight to Jamaica in Live and Let Die to see how Bond understands the precariousness of life. Though always enjoyable as thrillers, the thrills in a Fleming novel seem almost beside the point. Deaver falls into the trap of too many post-Fleming authors and most of the Bond movies. Yes, he showpieces the exciting elements with a great deal of skill and plenty of energy. But his misdirections and plot reversals, which really put Deaver in his element, are oddly forced, especially when paired with Bond’s quieter moments. Fleming, too, also had a specific style and imagination that, crowded though the spy world became in the 1950s and 1960s, never quite had an equal. Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm cruised and bruised his way through a dozen adventures since 1960, but always looked to Dashiell Hammett for style, while Adam Hall and Len Deighton appeared to revel in the anonymity of their heroes;with Deighton even leaving the narrator of The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin nameless. These writers allowed some imaginative play, though none ever quite matched the audacity of Auric Goldfinger’s plan to rob Fort Knox or Dr. Shatterhand’s enticing Garden of Death. (Indeed, only Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise novels seem, in retrospect, to be Bond’s equal.) By contrast, Hydt’s long, yellowing fingernails and death fetish, while creepy, are far more pathetic than menacing. And it's obvious that, in making Hydt a death fetishist, Deaver appears to understand just how kinky Fleming's novels were. Reading those original stories today, one sees how subliminally tied (no pun intended) Bond's exploits were to a de Sadian worldview, especially in Le Chiffre's interrogation of Bond in the novel Casino Royale...a worldview absent from most of the the non-Fleming novels, even the good ones. Deaver understands it, yes (and so, likely, did the others), but he fails to merge it with the action, or even Bond's daily life. For all of Bond's good looks and appeal to women, Carte Blanche stands as one of the most sexless of all of his adventures. And then there is Bond himself. In rebooting Bond for the twenty-first century, Jeffery Deaver did what was necessary to make Bond far more palatable to modern audiences. And in rebooting the series, he eliminates the age problem that hampered even Fleming as the series progressed. Yet this creates a jarring flaw in that it strips Bond of much of what makes him so interesting as a character. The self-destructive habits and mortality-obsessed individual has been turned into a somewhat soul-searching professional. Deaver's Bond spends a good deal of time musing on his parents, especially his mother--more relevant to a modern audience, perhaps, but wrong for the literary Bond, especially because the subtext in most of Fleming's work is the absence, and in many cases, severing, of family lines. To reconnect Bond with his parents in this way misses the point of the world he inhabits. It is a problem the movies never had; because the cinematic interpretation of the character (Kingsley Amis termed him a "rakish nonentity" in his introduction to the 1994 edition of Colonel Sun) always depended on the actor portraying him, Eon Productions could reboot the series in 2006 with little real change to the character. But in rebooting literary Bond, who had a past, who had vulnerabilities, who was far more than a "man who was only a silhouette," as Fleming termed him in Moonraker, Deaver's Bond ceases to be, well, James Bond. And that's the real shame. Like Fleming, Deaver believes in telling swift tales elegantly, but does not possess the same imagination that made the original books so memorable. Carte Blanche wants to retool Bond for the modern age, but in doing so, bleeds him of his vitality. Deaver's 007 is, perhaps, the most realized of any iteration since Fleming's death, but the tale, despite its strong points, is a hollow shell. In Carte Blanche, Bond is not a silhouette...but the novel is.
© 2011 Derek Austin Johnson |
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Sebastian Faulks) while retaining a few characters; Mary Goodnight remains Bond’s secretary; May, Bond’s Scottish housekeeper, still washes his sheets; Felix Leiter makes an appearance; and of course Admiral Sir Miles Messervy peevishly assigns Bond the task of investigating NOAH;under the assumption that by starting fresh, his Bond will avoid much of the history and expectation that would weigh down his adventure. Less carte blanche, more tabula rasa.
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