Devil May Care

What fun! A reinvented James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks "writing as Ian Fleming." (hunh?) This has got everything the old books had: Monkey paw disease! A Rube Goldberg-rigged tennis match to the death! Exotic locales! Weird "futuristic" machines! The obsession with fine clothes, lots of cigarettes, though, strangely, not much sex.
I don't know if Austin Powers ruined or saved the whole Villain Monologue of Great Plans while hero is being slooooowly killed by yet another Rube Goldberg inspired contraption, but the Death Monologue is back in this outing. Perfect. Gorner, the villain, does say: I'm not one of those idiots who looks for a protracted or picturesque death for their arch-enemy. A single bullet is good enough for British scum like you. But then doesn't follow through! Yay!
His own death, however, is, um, picturesque. There is some pretty gory stuff, more so than what I remember being in the original novels. Sure, I remember Tee-hee slowly breaking Bond's pinky back then and some other vicious stuff happened in the old books, but I had to avert my eyes (or at least skim) several passages in this one. Then again, I'm a wimp about violence.

Bond races off to Tehran, Paris, Moscow (at the height of the Cold War, mind you, which is so quaint now). His mission? Um, to save British youth from the dangers of marijuana. Well, there's more to it, but Bond is vaguely out of touch and old in this book. He's a bit surprised by the "hippies" in London. Yep, this Bond is a bit tired, a bit worn, and getting a little old and scarred.
The villain he faces is typically maniacal, has a huge ego and a weird affliction (monkey paw in this case! Does that really exist?). He doesn't want to take over the world so much as he wants to destroy England. He's got a typically convoluted plan that naturally involves Bond. There's a "girl" of course. Twins, actually. Every man's fantasy, as Scarlett says herself. There are dank cells, derring-do, and skin-of your teeth escapes. Underwater scenes that will hurt your lungs. Torture, death, and lots and lots of alcohol. I'm talking pitchers (!) of martinis. It's a wonder, Bond can save the world, half in the sauce as he must be.

One weird thing was the obsession with mentioning the washroom. The author was forever having the bad guys take Bond off to the "washroom." I kept thinking they wanted him clean (some villains don't like dirt), but remembered that means "bathroom" in England, so then it just seemed like a weird thing to keep bringing up. I mean, no one goes to the bathroom in novels unless it advances the plot, which Bond's frequent trips never did. Perhaps the evil henchmen felt sorry for his bladder due to his level of alcoholic intake.

It took a bit to get used to M being a man (as he always was in the books) because I've grown so accustomed to Judy Dench in that role in the movies. Oh well. Scarlett, the love interest is fairly modern and holds her own, so that balances things. This Bond is no Daniel Craig, but still worth rooting for. After all, he has to save England.