Publisher: Penguin
Rating: WARTY!
This guy Faulks makes a game attempt to replicate Ian Fleming's writing, but the problem is that he goes too far - to the point of essentially cutting and pasting directly from Fleming's originals. We have a villain with a deformity; one of his hands has the appearance of an ape's, with hair and claws. Why a billionaire would not get this fixed (since we're told that it bothers him so much) is left unexplored.
He has an assistant who is a complete rip-off of Oddjob from Goldfinger, and who can feel no pain, like the villain Renard in the Bond movie The World is Not Enough, and all the Bond tropes are there, which is sad. The novel was intended as a continuation from The Man With the Golden Gun and as such is set in 1967, but Faulks could have done so much more. Fortunately, he's declared that he will write no more Bond novels. I have to ask why he wrote even this one.
"Devil May Care" is a chronically over-used title. You'd think the author or the publisher would check this stuff out to find a title that's a bit more original and distinctive. BN lists over 20 novels with this title on the first page, although some of those are other editions of Faulks's effort. It's not like the title has anything whatsoever to do with the novel's subject matter. It actually should have been called Doctor No, Not Again....
The villain, Dr Julius Gorner (named after Julius No, from the Fleming novel Dr. No, isn’t really a villain - he's just a drug lord when you get right down to it, who harbors the asinine delusion that he can bring the British empire (what empire?!) to its knees by flooding Britain with drugs! Why is Bond even needed? As if Faulks realizes how badly he's under-calculated the magnitude of his villain's villainy, he lards up the plot with two greasy dobs of villainous fat. On the one hand he depicts Gorner as having a plan to make it look like Britain has bombed the Soviet Union, like anyone - even the Soviets themselves - would swallow that. On the other hand, he also expects us to believe that the US is so pissed-off that Britain didn't go into Viet-Nam with it, that it's effectively complicit in this plan because it would finally get the Brits off their "arses". Really? This whole "plot" is a joke.
In this novel, released to mark the centenary of Ian Fleming's birth, most of the action centers on Persia - Iran before it became a fundamentalist nightmare. Gorner has factories which produce legitimate pharmaceuticals, but he also produces and sells heroin in large quantities on the black market. During the course of his snooping, Bond discovers Gorner's smuggling transport: a Soviet-made ekranoplan, supposedly some 300 feet long (the Soviets actually built a functioning test version which was over 200 feet long). The problem with this is that Bond has a golden opportunity right there and then to destroy it, but he runs away!
The Bond babe in this edition is Scarlett Papava who has a twin, Poppy (not to be confused with the opium poppy…), so we’re told, but it turns out that Papava is actually agent 004. The non-existent Poppy is supposedly being held captive by Gorner, hence Scarlett's involvement, so she tells Bond. How Papava can be a double-0 agent, and yet so useless is nothing short of a farce. How her Majesty's Secret Service would even put her into the field without informing Bond is even more ridiculous. Why Bond suspects nothing when this woman was quite obviously stalking him brings us completely into the absurd.
Faulks also includes the disposable assistant, in the form of an Iranian by the name of Darius (seriously?) Alizadeh, and he also hauls in both Mathis and Leiter, Bond's opposite numbers from France and the US. I’d always read that latter name as 'lighter', but the audio book reads it as 'liter'. I have no idea which is correct, not that it really matters. The audio book reader does a fairly decent job, and has the right voice for a Bond story, but I wasn't overly thrilled with him.
The biggest problem for me was that I really didn’t buy any of this story. It just wasn't Bond, despite Faulks' freely plagiarizing the canonical Fleming stories. There were also some writing issues. Faulks is supposedly a highly-regarded writer (I've read nothing else by him so I can't comment there), but when he writes that the Bond cannot control the plane he's flying, and then has Bond take that same plane up to sufficient a height to parachute out without any difficulty, I have to ask how good of a writer he is. In another instance, Faulks has Papava and Bond all-but-naked in a hotel room about to have sex (before they’re 'forced' into coitus interruptus!); later he has her turn her head modestly when Bond is changing into different clothes? Really? That struck me as so false it was inane. On the other side of that coin, I'm pretty sure that Faulks didn’t write the word 'new-cue-ler' so why the audio book reader pronounced nuclear like that is as much of a mystery as it is an annoyance.
In short this novel is warty! I've now read, I think, four 'post-Fleming' Bond novels over the last few years (the most recent one before this is reviewed here) and I've found none of them up to snuff, although I have to say that Kingsley Amis at least got close with his title! I think Colonel Sun was a cracking good title - one which Fleming might have come up with himself. That novel, unfortunately, sucked. So, I have to announce that I'm now done trying to find new novels that effectively capture Fleming's spirit! Time to move on to something different.
