About Flagpole. (Athens, Ga.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (July 27, 2011)
007 2.0 Among the many breeds of geek to be found in the wild—World of Warcraft play ers, fantasy baseball stat-nerds, "True Blood" devotees, people who watch "Glee" for some reason—one of the more aggressive ani mals is the James Bond fan. Having endured the peaks and valleys of the book and film franchises for over half a century, 007 geeks obsess endlessly over such problems as whether a British Secret Service agent would be caught dead driving a Saab (as author John Gardner had him do), or how arguably the best Bond movie (On Her Majesty's Secret Service) could star arguably the worst Bond (George Lazenby). Best car: the Aston-Martin DB3 with the machine guns or the Lotus Esprit that becomes a sub marine? And if Bond is such a great spy, how come the vil lains always seem to know who he is? In 2006's Casino Royale, without question the best Bond film to come along in decades, there is nonetheless an incongruity that bugs a lot of fans. The film is set at the beginning of Bond's career, just after he receives the double-0 desig nation that allows him to kill people on the British gov ernment's tab, yet Daniel Craig's Bond reports to his boss * M, played by Judi Dench and established in Goldeneye (1995) as a replacement for a previous M, who was played for over 30 years by Bernard Lee. How could that be? There are two solutions to the "new Bond/ old M" conundrum. One is to concede that Bernard Lee is dead, Judi Dench is under con tract, and it's just a frigging movie. The other, in true geek fashion, is a fan theory that goes like this: rather than six actors playing one guy named James Bond, "James Bond" is actu ally an alias given to whatever agent becomes 007, thus, there are actually a number of James Bonds and Daniel Craig's "Bond" has succeeded Pierce Brosnan's "Bond" in the gig. It's actually kind of a cool theory when you ponder it. Not as cool as the theory that Ferris Bueller's Day Offtakes place entirely inside Cameron's mind, but still pretty nifty. This theory springs to mind when reading the new James Bond novel, Carte Blanche (Simon & Schuster, 2011) by Jeffery Deaver. Deaver, a prolific author of thrillers, most notably the Lincoln Rhyme/ Amanda Sachs series (one of which, The Bone Collector, was filmed starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie), is the fourth author to take a run at Bond since Ian Fleming's death. Rather than simply continue Bond's adventures as the others have done, however, Deaver presides over a total reboot of the series. In Deaver's hands, James Bond is three years into his career, after covert military service in Afghanistan, as an operative of the Overseas Development Group (ODG), a black-ops agency designed to act beyond the limitations of MI6. For an agent of an outfit so spooky it shouldn't even exist, Bond's license to kill—now referred to as "carte blanche," hence the title—is as much a liability as an asset. It forces him to be more circumspect with his rampant killing than ear lier incarnations have been. In other words, this Bond acts like a spy rather than like the Terminator in a tux. After foiling an attempt to sabotage a train carrying hazmat in Serbia, Bond is in hot pursuit of the plot's author, a coldly efficient operative called "The Irishman." Bond's inves tigations lead him to a self-made billionaire named Severan Hydt, a magnate in refuse and recycling—and a raving necro philiac—known as "The Rag-and- Bone Man," who is engineering a mysterious scheme to cause the deaths of thousands of innocent people. The nature and location of the attack are unclear, and so Bond must find the answers in a very large world, under a very loud ticking clock, before the villains unleash untold horrors. Bond's pursuit takes him from rural England to the bustling streets of Dubai and the shan ties of Cape Town, South Africa, where he pairs up with the requisite Bond Girls, a beautiful but distant police captain and a passionate activist with the Fleming-esque name of Felicity Willing. Along the way, there are enough car chases, death traps and near-misses to satisfy 007 fans, and the plot, when it's revealed, proves to be dire indeed. Deaver is a decent writer with a fine command of the gearhead fetishism and label-dropping that are SOP for Bond adven tures—by the end you will want to drive the Bentley Continental GT so badly you'll have to pee—but he's primarily a suspense writer using a suspense writer's toolbox, which some times undercuts the action. About halfway through the novel, Deaver begins to employ a device wherein we believe something horrible has happened only to find it was an illusion, to be explained in flashback. After the third appearance of this parlor trick, it becomes a real distraction. On the other hand, Deaver is a master at devising very creepy pathologies for his bad guys, as exemplified in the garbage tycoon Hydt, whose psychosexual fixation on death and decay is lovingly, flesh-crawlingly detailed. The Bond books haven't had an antagonist this icky in years, so Deaver comes as a mixed blessing to the series. Carte Blanche ends up being about half of the best James Bond novel in a long time, and since Jeffery Deaver lays the groundwork for the next adventure in this one, we'll see at least one more stab at 007 from him. My advice? Less cleverness, more ick. John G. 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