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https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/with-a-mind-to-kill-by-anthony-horowitz-review-qq7mn6cg3
Full review for those who can't view:
Horowitz, the creator of Alex Rider and Foyle’s War for television, cleverly circumvented comparisons in his previous adventure, Forever and a Day, published in 2018, by imagining Bond at the start of his career in espionage. That gave him a relatively blank canvas with which to work and he amused himself establishing the character and the origin of his trademarks.
With a Mind to Kill has a similarly bold set-up, but this time we have old Bond rather than young Bond. It envisions a weary 007, the one from the end of Fleming’s final novel, The Man with the Golden Gun, which was published posthumously in 1965. That novel’s plot had the secret agent brainwashed by the Russians into trying to kill M, his boss, before redeeming himself by taking out Scaramanga.
Following straight on from this, Horowitz has Bond pretending that he succeeded in shooting M, for whom a fake funeral is staged. The plan is for 007 to “escape” to Moscow, like the real-life traitor George Blake. There he is to fool the psychiatrist who broke him, the ice-cold Colonel Boris, into thinking Bond is still under his control and discover the aims of Steel Claw, a successor organisation to Smersh.
Bond in the USSR is a neat conceit, but it’s not an escapist one. Although some of the quite short novel takes place in a swish hotel, shabby Moscow in the 1960s has little of the glamour that distinguishes the character (and not just in the films) from what George Lazenby might have termed “the other guys”. Instead, much of the action boils down to a duel between Boris and Bond, often taking place in the latter’s head, which is a different kind of thriller.
Horowitz is faithful to Fleming’s conception of 007, albeit pared of some of Bond’s toxic masculinity for modern sensibilities. The homages are all there — betrayal, a comely female psychologist, a brutal fight in a metro station. Horowitz, though, is more interested in contemplating an older Bond filling up with accidie, wondering what it’s all for. That moral equivalence is what led to the greater realism of ripostes to Bond such as John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, to which Horowitz gives a nod in a climax set in East Berlin. However, disillusioned, self-aware 007 isn’t that much fun. It’s a legitimate extension of the character of the novels, but it’s Horowitz’s misfortune as much as it was Fleming’s luck, in terms of his legacy, that the latter died before he could mature, and potentially wreck, his creation.
As with James Dean, Bond’s appeal is rooted in his not ageing, in a self-possession and self-regard that is not blunted by experience. He’s the eternally cool hero for eternal adolescents. Skilfully though Horowitz writes, and exciting as it often is to be in the company of his Bond, the version that remains inviolate is the one forged by our imaginations. The word is not enough.
It sort of sounds like a companion piece to NTTD in a way! Double Double-0 Debbie Downers :)
Yes, I want to stop short of outright saying he's a hack but he nonetheless does display traits of the general ignorance and laziness in research that seems to accompany many reviewers of Bond novels, be they reviewing the Fleming originals or continuation works. I understand that literary reviewers for national newspapers have a lot of books to get through and can't really be expected to be experts on every author, novel or genre of fiction. Still, one expects them not to make any major howlers or to oversimplify matters like a bad GCSE syllabus to the extent that the truth is extinguished. I think that's what's happened in this review.
I think it all comes down to that behemoth we all have to deal with as literary Bond fans: the highly successful and enduring Eon Bond film series. It's ironically the Frankenstein's Monster of our Founder's own creation. Of course as literary Bond fans we know that without the huge success of the films these continuations would probably still not be going on or ever entered into in the first place. So it's something of a Catch-22 situation. The lion's share of attention is understandably given to the Bond films over the Bond novels and as a result many of the iconic elements of the films tend to confuse even those with a working knowledge of the original novels. That is sadly inevitable in a series as internationally successful and trendsetting as the Bond films have been. Films are after all more easily digested than novels.
As @Revelator says, the reviewer seems to not be aware of Bond's and his villains's acquaintance with the ancient affliction of accidie. No doubt this is due to the Eon Bond films rarely, if ever, adapting the more interesting intellectual passages of the Bond novels where Fleming gives Bond a kind of stream of consciousness introspection about life and his chosen deadly profession as a Double-O agent. Think of how the accidie speech by Mr Big in LALD Is totally excised by the not-very-faithful film adaptation; of how Blofeld's interesting speech on accidie in YOLT is nowhere to be found in that totally unfaithful film either and so on and so forth. It's only really Goldfinger where many of the villain's best speeches are wisely carried over from the source novel. So it's little wonder such reviewers dismiss Fleming as merely being the modern dividing line in spy fiction between what's seen as disposable candyfloss spy fun and the more "serious" spy novels of Le Carré, Deighton and others who are lauded as the high tide of intellectual spy fiction that presents the human tragedy of the profession as it "really is". It's disappointing in this day and age of the Fleming revival (since the 2008 Centenary or so) that he and his Bond novels are still so unfairly misrepresented but there it is. As Fleming himself would no doubt have put it, one has to take the rough with the smooth.
Sounds great. Out of the 3 novels he has written, this sounds the most intriguing.
Anyway, waterstones.com lists the standard edition as 288 pages and the stencilled edition as 304 pages so I take that to mean there is additional content.
Apologies if this isn't news.
Thanks, @Chevron. It certainly is news if the addditional content turns out to be unused Fleming material. However, even if it isn't it's still good to know that there will be additional content in the Waterstones Special Edition.
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I'm expecting the same reaction @mybudgetbond. I recall content from Forever and a Day much more readily than most non-Fleming novels. For example it's easy to relate the replacement of a double-oh in FAAD (send a message, the next 007) with Bond at the other end of his tenure in The Man With the Golden Gun (send a message, 007 himself}. And new experiences like the acid. How the ending was handled. Horowitz makes smart choices that dovetail with 007's world.
I did a double take when I saw it, too. Couldn't find a good quality image, but I blew up the center so the detail is more clear.
And more on the Amazon page.
I really can’t wait for you all to read it so we can discuss it. I’m loving it so far. Very, very Cold War spy story.
I am currently working my way through The Executioner books, but will put them on hold while reading With A Mind To Kill.
Mine's on the way, signed copy of course!