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Many years ago now, some former South African Secret Service agent said that the apartheid South African government knew the identity of everyone who voted for the Communist Party of Great Britain because British intelligence used this method to trace votes and shared the intel. It's been going on a long time.
I really enjoyed the more dramatic, deep dive into Bond with A Mind To Kill, but there's a definite place for this sort of purely enjoyable Bond too. I would welcome more novellas.
I’ll keep an eye next time. That assumes they let me, my passport is very Bond like. As in it expired sometime in the pandemic, took a while for me to notice, and has yet to be renewed.
Agreed i wish we had more modern bond adventures
I guess you could put him in another period, even. I think Bond works quite well in the early/mid 80s, when Gardner did him, because the Cold War was still on and technology was moving on... I wouldn't be averse to that.
Anyone can just Google the thing with the same serial number being on the ballot paper that they give to you and on the counterfoil that they keep. And about them adding your voter registration number to the counterfoil. They don't hide it, they just do it so openly that no one thinks anything of it (or its implications).
The Electoral Reform Society tried and failed to get numbered ballot papers scrapped in 1997 and their use was reaffirmed under the 2006 Electoral Administration Act. It's too easy a way for GCHQ to identify who's voted for the nutters on either fringe, for one thing.
But, anyway, all this is one reason why we shouldn't think that Higson's description of the Bond in OHisMSS as a 'modern young man with modern views' is some kind of code for him being so-called 'woke' - it's not: he wouldn't have got past MI6's most basic preliminary background checks if he was. The British Establishment seems to me to be firmly centre-right and they'd have to be certain that Bond was 'one of them' before he was allowed into something like MI6. I brought up the voting thing just as an example of one way they'd have of finding these things out. So, no, I don't think Higson's description was meant to imply anything other than that the Bond of OHisMSS isn't racist, sexist, homophobic, etc - all of which are now, hopefully, mainstream positions.
I can understand Higson giving Bond more of a sense of humour for this modern age but I felt he went too far when he had Bond reply to M by saying, “Can’t help it, sir” when M told him he didn’t have to be such a know-it-all. Not with M.
I also felt that there was a lack of atmosphere when Bond was in Budapest.
The only other thing I wasn’t keen on was how Bond dressed but I keep reminding myself that he was undercover.
For me, he’s not up there with Horowitz who is my favourite continuation author (I can’t offer an accurate judgment though as it is a short book) along with Pearson, but overall I liked the book and would be keen on Higson writing another - a full length novel this time. I’d like to read a novel when Bond first joins the service. In Fleming’s timeline would be better but I can accept a contemporary setting.
Nearly done with the book now, and while (so far) it's 7/10, meaning quite good, there are some of these little line-by-line things that I also didn't like. I put this down to the short turn-around of the book. Stuff like Higson really hammering home twice on 009's relationship status is something that should be shortened to just one or two sentences leaving the reader to connect the dots if there was a longer editing process.
I did mostly like the Budapest sequence, though. The shadowing is well done spy-thriller stuff, with Higson leading the reader along just like the various players are leading each other along. I liked it. And I felt the description of the city and Bond's reaction to it felt very Fleming-esque. Of course Bond knows Budapest inside out, gives a little tourist guide to the reader while he's at it, but has a slightly nostalgia tinged view of what the city is now.
On the plus side I found the main girl interesting enough and loved how the reader, and Bond, is left in the dark as to whose side she is on. The mixed bunch of adversaries were introduced rather colourfully and I thought Higson did a good job of characterizing them as very differently motivated and being prone to conflict within the group. At the end Bond muses to himself that he feels like he has a couple of more assignments in him - I consider that good news and wonder if Higson will be allowed another go at adult Bond in the present time.
Things I did not like that much: I found the main girl's motivation too poorly spelled out and don't like it when I have to turn back the pages to look for an answer.
Also, as someone said, the reader should ideally know more than Bond, not less, therefore I was irritated that
I have mixed feelings about the frequent inclusion of current politics, but since the story circles around the actual real-world coronation, it is not wrong to paint a little context around it. Future readers will know more than we do about where all of this led to (Victor Orban in particular).
I can live with the 3-4 typos I found, but had to laugh out loud about the "Bong" instead of Bond in a certain scene.
Also, while the poison pen fight is a nice touch, the way they figure out who the attacker is is lazy. Basically every security organisation in the UK is trying to figure this out and it’s Ragnheidur‘s friends in the left-wing underground who figure this out while partying, because Aethelstan is dead?
I agree his takeover plan after that felt a little bolted-on and confused matters slightly.
I agree with your “painting the scene” comment. Horowitz created a better atmosphere than Higson did in OHisMSS.
When I went into Barnes & Noble’s a few years back, I was stunned to discover they didn’t carry ANY of the classic Fleming novels. Had to order online. Disgraceful on B&N’s part!
Waterstones haven't seemed to have them (or haven't had many copies if they do) here in the UK either. I know that my local branch certainly didn't have any copies anyway. I put that down to the rushed nature of the project and the fact that IFP is now publishing novels by itself for the first time. They may not have correctly estimated the level of interest or were unable to get a high enough first print run of the novel published in the limited time they had.
I know, they should respect the literary Bond as a whole more.
I thought it was pretty good. I especially liked the first half of the book, while the other half didn't seem to tie everything together well enough for me. So if you're bored already... 🤷
By the way,