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First Impressions: The Saturday Times Exclusive 'Carte Blanche' extract.
saunders
Living in a world of avarice and deceit
The Times Newspaper (Saturday May 14) has published two pages worth of extracts from the new 007 novel 'Carte Blanche' by Jeffrey Deaver with another extract to be published in times2 on Monday. The extracts titled 'The Red Danube, Chapter 1' and 'chapter 2' do little more than set the scene for the first chapter and Bond only appears in the second part with no dialogue. Has anyone read these and if so what are your first impressions on this admittedly scant sample of Deaver's work.
For me, while it's too little to really make a sound judgement I can't help but feel the prose sounds wrong for a Bond novel and sentences like <I>'He returned to the staging area, behind a decrepit garden shed that smelt of engine oil, petrol and piss, near the driveway to the restaurant'</I> hardly endear me to his style of writing. Clearly Deaver is not trying to mimic Fleming's prose, which may be a good or a bad thing considering your viewpoint on Sebastian Faulks attempt.
Still 12 days and we'll know for sure.
For me, while it's too little to really make a sound judgement I can't help but feel the prose sounds wrong for a Bond novel and sentences like <I>'He returned to the staging area, behind a decrepit garden shed that smelt of engine oil, petrol and piss, near the driveway to the restaurant'</I> hardly endear me to his style of writing. Clearly Deaver is not trying to mimic Fleming's prose, which may be a good or a bad thing considering your viewpoint on Sebastian Faulks attempt.
Still 12 days and we'll know for sure.
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Comments
Beyond the style of the writing I would have liked to been eased into the story a little bit. Perhaps a first chapter to set the scene, something happens, Bond is called in and briefed, etc. Here Bond is on site as th story starts. From reading the WHSmith booklet I know that Deaver likes to get right into the story so he probably wants Bond involved right from the start.
There's another bit of the story in Monday's paper so I may buy it.
If Deaver does a good job with this book I'm going to wish he would write all of the Bond books! I reckon Samantha Weinberg would be a good choice. Loved her Moneypenny Diaries.
"He returned to the staging area, behind a decrepit garden shed that smelt of engine oil, petrol and piss, near the driveway to the restaurant"
"Clearly Deaver is not trying to mimic Fleming's prose, which may be a good or a bad thing..."
Sounds alright to me. I really don't care if the writing style is different to our god Fleming. As long as the book conjures up that old Fleming/Bond spirit with all that character and location detail that we all know and love I'll be happy.
My main worry is that it will be too fast paced. I feel this might be my major critisicism.
You can't start reading it expecting it to sound like a Fleming book though because this will obviously never happen. John Pearson's excellent biography of Bond is a wonderful Bond book - almost as good as Fleming's yarns and he didn't write in Fleming's style and nor dis Amis with Colonel Sun.
It seemed OK to me; neither terrible nor great. But, frankly, from just that short extract it's too hard to tell. And I guess that's the point - it's supposed to be a teaser, after all... ;)
I just wanted to add on this discussion that whatever doubts I may have about Deaver's suitability for the job, it's still really heartwarming to see how much promotion and media attention both Carte Blanche and it's immediate predecessor Devil May Care have received. Especially when you consider how discreet Hodder & Stoughton seemed when releasing the latter Gardner and the Benson Bond novels, almost as if they were deeply ashamed of them!
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Okay, that's not what happens at all. But if you're too lazy or too tight to shell out the one pound that you need in order to read the extract, you honestly deserve stuff like this.
The extract begins with a diesel train driver on the Serbian Railway line heading north from Belgrade and approaching Novi Sad, among his trains cargo are some drums of MIC-methyl isocyanate, a substance that caused the death of eight thousand people in Bhopal India within a few days of a leak.
The setting next moves to James Bond who is waiting nearby on top of a hill spying on a Irishman in a restaurant near the rail line who is involved in a decrypted electronic message about a planned terrorist attack involving thousands of casualties and British interests being adversely affected.
Bond intends to get his two colleagues dressed as policemen but who are really members of the Serbian Security Information Agency to stop the Irishman and remove him from his car while giving Bond enough time to secretly check out the car and contents for any further Intel.
The plan goes wrong when rather than drive onto the road, the Irishman drives his Mercedes over to the railway and waits.
Bond watches and notices that the oncoming train has the hazardous -materials...
That's as far as the two days worth of extracts go until tomorrow.
Despite my first reservations I must admit the story has started to pick up and it's starting to feel very much like an Andy McNab novel, maybe Deaver's style is going to mimic Daniel Craig's tougher and more realistic Bond in the same way that Benson's Bond was very much modelled on Brosnan.
I feel that the book will have a lot of suspense and I liked the ending of this extract a lot (the train which is approaching and Bond has to figure out quickly what to do)
However two things felt wrong to me:
1) he doesn't smoke (we knew this before), but instead of just never giving a cigarette to Bond, I almost expected a moral sermon against smoking from Deaver by the way it was formulated
2) he devised a plan with two local agents. It looks like Bond is now working alone and no government agency is setting up contacts for him. Did Bond just ring the doorbell of the foreign secret agency to find some men for his plan??? To me Bond should indeed have "carte blanche", however only in minor variations and cunning escapes or plans to conquer the enemy. This however sounded like all Mi6 was reunited in one person.
what do you think?
Apart from these two remarks it was a fun read and I look forward for tomorrows edition.
1) Bonds objection to his colleagues smoking (and drinking) was for operational reasons, just as Fleming's Bond had to cut out his nicotine intake while preparing for certain operations but I concede there was a slightly preachy undertone to his views.
2) To be fair in the first Times extract from Saturdays paper it's made clear that after speaking to his chief of staff, Bond is sent on MI6's orders to Serbia and working with local Government agencies is fairly standard operational procedure, for instance think Fleming's Bond with Mathis in CR.
A last, something new that is Bond related coming out!
This last section has action and great suspense, it makes me excited to read the entire book!
Or, better yet, stop being lazy or tight (or whatever it is that keeps you from buying it) and shell out the one pound per section and read it yourself. From the sounds of things, Bond doesn't actually have carte blanche. Not yet. I'm willing to bet the job in Serbia goes awry, but foreshadows an even greater attack. Bond is then authorised to have carte blanche in order to stop it.
Secondly, why shouldn't he have his pick of agents for the job? For all we know, they were sent by the Serbian government to aid Bond (even if it is implied they are barely competent) as a condition of his operation.
Extracts do sound promising though. The book is out next month. I will buy it first day. Its going to cost me about 30 bucks anyway by the look of it, but it will display nicely with the other Bond hardcovers.
I would like Bond to be young and very lethal.
That said, I'm definitely excited to read this book. While I do admit some of the details of updating Bond into the modern world are notes for caution, I give Deaver props to being bold enough to do so and am hopeful that he delivers. And on a side-note, Bond kinda HAD to be updated for this book (unless Deaver had decided to go down the route Faulks did by having it set during the Cold War); Bond would be in his 80s or 90s at this point if it were still set in the modern world and was the original details for Bond.
Part of why I only read one or two of the Benson books (the other reason being they came across as being shoddy attempts of blending the Brosnan films with the classic Bond and failing miserably at the attempt) was that it just seemed really off. The last Bond book or two by Benson was Post-9/11 and I remember thinking to myself when I read that book, "If this is the same Bond as Fleming, he would've been retired or dead by this point." And by the time I finished reading the book, the Bond I was seeing in my mind wasn't Hoagy Charmicheal or even Brosnan (which was the closest movies I could compare in 'feel' to the Benson books I read); no, the Bond I was seeing was a nightmarish vision of what it would probably be like if EON still had Roger Moore casted as Bond at this point. *shudders at recalling the image*
So while the update on Bond is a risky move, it's one I'm personally more than willing to welcome with open arms at this point, so long as it's executed well.
That said, what did you think of the most recent sample?