The Bookseller.com

1st December 2008

Neill Denny is editor-in-chief of The Bookseller. He will be blogging on the book business and on how the print magazine is produced each week.

Faulks delivers; Penguin expects

02.06.08

Does Sebastian Faulks pull off Devil May Care? The short answer is yes.

He delivers pace, energy, thrills and spills in a style close enough to Fleming to satisfy all but the most pernickety die-hards.

There are flaws and doubts, of course, and some jarring notes that Fleming would have never let through the net. In an outrageous coincidence, Bond happens to observe the main baddie in a chance sighting in Marseille before he has even been briefed by M. As he leaves London on his mission, he is the subject of an assassination attempt  - which he foils easily enough – but he proceeds with the mission despite the reader’s obvious conclusion that 007’s cover has been blown.

Later, during a gunfight in a commercial airliner, a window is shot out and the force of the decompression is enough  to drag a corpse across the cabin, which then jams in the window. Hmmn. And were Vulcan bombers based in the Gulf at a secret base in 1967? Could Bond have traversed half the Soviet Union under cover, robbing security vans and garages for money, with a beautiful woman in tow, and slipped over the heavily guarded Finnish border, without once coming up against Russian officialdom?

But all of this is to miss the point about a willing suspension of disbelief. Faulks has created a piece of zesty escapist fiction that is a real page-turner – and with a great, if in retrospect obvious, twist at the end. If anything, he has delivered action faster than Fleming himself did and Faulks seems to have been heavily, if unconsciously, influenced by the imagery and structure of the Bond films. Bond seems to drink, smoke and fornicate less than in the books, and the casual racism of the earlier books has almost completely disappeared. Some of the gunplay and violence has a cartoonish, Hollywood quality notably lacking from Fleming’s originals.

Penguin are hoping this will do 250,000 in hardback. I will put my neck on the line and say they should beat it. Why? Partly because Faulks has delivered a really readable mass-market escapist thriller, but also because the sheer power of the Bond brand will surprise all those involved. It wouldn’t surprise me if Faulks is asked back to do another one day, and if the cheque is big enough he just might agree.

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