Devil May Care book review
The embargo has lifted and we are now seeing reviews for Devil May Care, the new James Bond novel. According to Mark Lawson on The Guardian, Sebastian Faulks has done his best to channel the Ian Fleming’s style through his own pen.
Developments frequently follow the famous template. Faulks’s Bond encounters an enemy who uses a scientific honorific and wears a glove at all times: not Fleming’s Dr No, but Faulks’s Dr Julius Gorner, a chemist.
The reason Gorner hides his hand, however, is different and striking - a birth abnormality gave him a monkey’s paw in place of fingers and opposable thumb. A tense tennis game against Gorner is deliberately twinned to Bond’s golf with Auric Goldfinger. There is even a sinister Asian manservant - Chagrin, nodding across literary time to Oddjob - who helps his boss to cheat.
The thug’s name, which leads to Bond getting an elegant lesson in the two French meanings of the word “chagrin”, is an example of Faulks’s cleverness in keeping the book as close as possible to the comfort zone of his own work, which includes several novels set in France. Apart from a diversion to the Middle East, the key locations in Devil May Care are Paris and, in flashback, French Indochina.
