Reassuringly, Faulks never veers from convention
James bond lives. After Kingsley Amis, John Gardner and Raymond Benson’s stabs at resurrecting 007, now it is Sebastian Faulks’ turn to channel Ian Fleming. And Devil May Care is certainly a success, because it reads simply and transparently like a Bond plot.
The book’s opening hints at all sorts of unusual possibilities. Even as an informant is killed in Paris, his tongue yanked out with pliers, Bond is recovering from his last assignment, haunting Mediterranean cafes, staying off alcohol and telling his own reflection that he is “Tired. Played out. Finished”. But barely a page later, he has run into the seductive Larissa Rossi, her brown eyes aglow and her “full lips parted in an expression of modest excitement”, who invites him up to her suite. Despite Bond’s resignation to “a life of interdepartmental meetings and examining cables at his desk”, he is summoned to London, and told to track “potentially the most dangerous man the Service has ever encountered … a man who seems intent on destroying the lives of millions and undermining the influence of the West”. Reassuringly, the narrative never veers from convention, and the prose only occasionally lifts above.

Umberto Eco has famously laid bare the skeletal structure of the Bond narrative, from M’s first assignment to Bond’s final convalescing with the woman he later loses — but it’s a sequence all too familiar to anyone who has watched a couple of Bond movies. Like all seminal pop-culture achievements, James Bond references have a way of osmotically seeping in, so you can’t remember the first moment you heard “Bond. James Bond” or help the way the word “martini” calls up a faint answering echo of “shaken, not stirred” from your subconscious. Faulks doesn’t mess with the franchise — remarkably subduing his own “literariness” to the straight-shooting, pacy spirit of the thing. His Bond broods on past adventures with Le Chiffre and Hugo Drax, tangles with a very villainous villain called Julius Gorner (with a “monkey’s paw”, in an un-pc conflation of disability and malevolence), seduces the smouldering Scarlett Papava. M, Moneypenny, his French colleague Mathis all put in appearances. What’s more, Faulks makes no attempt to update his material — the setting is a pleasant throwback to 1967 Britain. Bond refers to The Rolling Stones as pop singers with “hair down to their shoulders”, the crime centres on heroin-trafficking, and he visits an Iran where he can cavort with naked women in communal baths. Except for a draggy tennis match between Bond and Gorner that takes up more than 10 pages, the book races along from Paris to London, Iran to Russia, bedroom to pleasure garden to torture chamber.

As an exercise in perfect parody, Devil May Care is a commendable achievement, even if Faulks didn’t intend any irreverence. And why should he? Bond send-ups constitute their own industry. Bond novels and spin-offs are the ultimate palimpsests — texts layered on top of each other, with remnants of erased writing still visible. For a novelist whose previous work includes a book of pastiche called Pistache, the genre must come easy. And he’s set a new Bond standard for the next person to try her hand at the thrilling business of “writing as Fleming”.