BOOK REVIEW: Carte Blanche

Every few years, the estate of Ian Fleming authorizes a new James Bond novel to be written by a leading mystery or thriller author of the time. Carte Blanche is the fifth in this series, penned by Jeffrey Deaver, bestselling thriller author and editor of the Best American Mystery Stories 2009.

Between 1951 and his death in 1964, Ian Fleming wrote 9 novels and 12 short stories featuring super spy James Bond. For anyone whose knowledge of Bond comes exclusively from the popular movies, the character that appears in the books may be something of a surprise. Yes, Fleming's Bond is a bon vivant who regularly indulges his taste for cars, women, and liquor. But the literary Bond is thoughtful, often brooding, and sometimes melancholy. He is apparently looking for true love out of his flings with beautiful women, and he daydreams about leaving the service to settle down. He likes nice things, yes, but his Bentley is 20 years old, and he also has a charming taste for simplicity. This complex personality rarely, if ever, comes through in the more purely hedonistic movie character. (Sean Connery in the early movies, and especially Daniel Craig in Casino Royale, come closest to conveying the complex character of the book Bond.)

Fleming's writing style was admirably efficient, with few needless words and generally a snappy narrative flow. His attention to detail gives the books much of their cultural cachet: he freely sprinkled brand names of watches, and liquor, and clothes in the story, a sort of product placement guru before his time. This adds immensely to the plausibility of the tales, as well as their desirability.

Deaver is not as efficient with his words as Fleming, and perhaps overdoes it on details in some places, but overall his story is a faithful imitation of the Fleming style. Deaver places his Bond squarely in the 21st century, with a bewildering alphabet soup of bureaucratic agencies for Bond to navigate (and a helpful glossary in the back for the reader to follow), current hip locations like Dubai and Cape Town, and very cool technology, including a few iPhone apps that would certainly be the hit of any cocktail party. (The eavesdropping app could make for some quite mischievous fun at a party.) Deaver's Bond Girls are also much more modern, in some cases proving indispensable to his success (rather than just serving as decorative accents).

The plot involves Bond trying to decipher the meaning behind various pieces of intelligence that seem to point to an unspecified act of violence and destruction to be carried out by Severan Hydt, the founder of a large, British-based waste management firm known as Green Way. Like all the Bond novels, what happens isn't so important as how it happens: Bond travels in style around the world, dodging shadowy characters, feuding with competing government agents, and enjoying the company of beautiful women, some of whom help and some who hinder his progress. Deaver even proves equal to the task of matching Fleming's knack for double-entendre female names by introducing us to the vivacious Felicity Willing (or Felicity Willful, as we are told she is sometimes called).

While the action is exciting, as is typical in this genre things get wrapped up just a little too conveniently to be believable. But in the end, who cares? It is a wild ride along the way, and Deaver successfully captures that feeling of slight envy at the glamorous life of Bond that Fleming was so good at inducing. Sure, it is ridiculous to think that a government agent can afford a new Bentley Continental GT, or that a supposedly secret agent would drive a car designed to capture attention. But if I WERE a secret agent, I would certainly try to get one too!

Like Fleming often did, Deaver creates a bad guy that is fascinatingly repulsive because he is not only criminal, but also creepy. In this case, the villain is obsessed with decay--in objects, in nature, and in people. Even his female companion is forced to eschew the glamorous hair and make-up jobs that are typical for villain consorts, in favor of unkempt locks and obvious wrinkles. This creepiness, and the criminal activity it inspires, makes Carte Blanche a worthy addition to the Bond bookshelf.