Devil May Care From:Sebastian Faulks , Doubleday ,
| 
See larger picture. | | Amazon Sales Rank:# 56377 User Rating: Customer Reviews List Price:$24.95 Amazon.com's Price:$16.47 Prices subject to change. You Save:$8.48 (33.99%) Availability:Usually ships in 24 hours |
|
|
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780385524285
ISBN: 0385524285
Label: Doubleday
Manufacturer: Doubleday
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 278
Packaged Height: 120 hundredths-inches
Packaged Length: 930 hundredths-inches
Packaged Weight: 115 hundredths-pounds
Packaged Width: 640 hundredths-inches
Publication Date: 2008-05-28
Publisher: Doubleday
Release Date: 2008-05-28
Studio: Doubleday
Product Description:
Bond is back. With a vengeance.
Devil May Care is a masterful continuation of the James Bond legacy–an electrifying new chapter in the life of the most iconic spy of literature and film, written to celebrate the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth on May 28, 1908.
An Algerian drug runner is savagely executed in the desolate outskirts of Paris. This seemingly isolated event leads to the recall of Agent 007 from his sabbatical in Rome and his return to the world of intrigue and danger where he is most at home. The head of MI6, M, assigns him to shadow the mysterious Dr. Julius Gorner, a power-crazed pharmaceutical magnate, whose wealth is exceeded only by his greed. Gorner has lately taken a disquieting interest in opiate derivatives, both legal and illegal, and this urgently bears looking into.
Bond finds a willing accomplice in the shape of a glamorous Parisian named Scarlett Papava. He will need her help in a life-and-death struggle with his most dangerous adversary yet, as a chain of events threaten to lead to global catastrophe. A British airliner goes missing over Iraq. The thunder of a coming war echoes in the Middle East. And a tide of lethal narcotics threatens to engulf a Great Britain in the throes of the social upheavals of the late sixties.
Picking up where Fleming left off, Sebastian Faulks takes Bond back to the height of the Cold War in a story of almost unbearable pace and tension. Devil May Care not only captures the very essence of Fleming’s original novels but also shows Bond facing dangers with a powerful relevance to our own times.
Customer Reviews:
 A good attempt at a literary relaunch for 007., 2008-12-06
There is good and bad in the new Bond novel. It is great to see 007 back in print and back in his own era. The 1967 setting harkens back to the best of Bond, both in print and on screen. Fleming's novels of the 50's and 60's have never been surpassed by any of the continuation authors and the film series varies in quality after Thunderball, the fourth and final movie to adapt Fleming's work faithfully.
So what's good about Sabastian Faulk's novel? The story picks up after the evants of "The Man with the Golden Gun", which gives a sense of continuity which is present in the best of Fleming's books. We see that Bond is still recovering from the beatings he received in the last two novels, where he was humilated by being brainwashed by the Soviets and was almost responsible for the assasination of M.
The books final confrontation aboard an airliner is also handelled exteremly well by Faulks. He created the same sense of dread in the face of overwhelming odds that I felt reading Dr. No, Moonraker and Live and Let Die. Bond's foray through the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the show down with the bad guys is a fun read too; with Bond trying to remain undercover in hostile enemy territory.
As for the bad of the book?
Setting much of the story in Pre-revolutionary Iran may not have been such a great idea. The activities of the US and UK in that country during the reign of the Shah were villainous, no two ways about it. The UK was looting Iran's oil and the Shah, as their puppet, brutally kept the locals in check while they did so. Compared to this, it is hard to take fictional villain Dr. Gorner seriously. This also means that Bond is aiding his government in doing some very dirty and underhanded work, a common theme in some of the Fleming books, but never so overt.
I also found this book to be a little too long. I think the page count could have been kept under 200, rather than 300 pages. The story just doesn't warrant the length and the book sags in the middle as a result. Julius Gorner isn't much of a villian; he is a little flat and uninteresting, although Faulks gives him a good reason for being who he is.
Faulks also slips a few times; I found some of the references to Goldfinger and other Bond adventures unecessary and distracting, since they were only dropped to tie in better with the Fleming books, and served no purpose story wise, but that's a small gripe.
If Mr. Faulks or another author of quality choose to continue with this new series I would certainly be interested, but I hope that we can see something with a little more punch. Perhaps we can see Mr. Sabastian Faulks writing as Sabastian Faulks next time.
|
|
|
