Kingsley Amis on the James Bond Continuation Novels (1983-1995)?
Silhouette Man
The last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 9,317MI6 Agent
Is anyone here aware of any reviews/comments made by Kingsley Amis regarding the James Bond continuation novels 1983-1995, post-For Special Services by John Gardner - which he reviewed in 1982 for The Times Literary Supplement. I suspect there is nothing on this period in his archives and I am barking up the wrong tree, but in the hope that I may have been mistaken on this, I'd love to hear your replies on this one. I've checked his letters, biographies, memoirs, reviews...and nothing post-1982.
Did he simply stop caring after FSS (my own personal view) - was this broadside his last ever public review on the James Bond Continuation project that he was once a part of (Colonel Sun)?
It would be interesting if we could come to a definitive answer on this one though I kind of doubt that we ever will...
Did he simply stop caring after FSS (my own personal view) - was this broadside his last ever public review on the James Bond Continuation project that he was once a part of (Colonel Sun)?
It would be interesting if we could come to a definitive answer on this one though I kind of doubt that we ever will...
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Comments
Yes, but he attacked LR in letters to poet friend Philip Larkin (who reviewed the novel for the TLS), he then lambasted FSS in the TLS in 1982 - then nothing, seemingly.
I'm assuming he just moved on.
If anyone here knows differently, I'd love to hear from you... -{
Here is Amis's review of The Man From Barbarossa, courtesy of The British Newspaper Archive.
***
It’s not quite premium Bond
No tarantulas—and 007’s love life isn’t what it used to be
By Kingsley Amis (The Sunday Express, Aug. 11, 1991)
John Gardner’s The Man From Barbarossa (Hodder & Stoughton, £13.99) is his tenth novel about the further adventures of James Bond—the most famous spy in the world. The fabulous 007 was the original creation of Ian Fleming, whose first book about him was published as long ago as 1953. Fleming’s last was published in 1965, the year he died [sic].
And so far Bond has appeared in 23 novels altogether and 18 films. Gardner has carried off an extremely demanding task—having managed to write one of those 23 novels myself, back in 1968, I have some idea of just how demanding a task it is.
In The Man from Barbarossa echoes of the world of the original Bond are wisely played down—for one thing, the old chap would now be pushing 80 on a strict count. So this Bond is a senior agent of our Secret Service. M is still his boss, Bond is still guarded by Miss Moneypenny, and Bill Tanner is still the Chief of Staff.
That’s about it. And this M has slipped down a rung or two socially and shed enough years to take a full part in the operation instead of just growling from behind his desk.
Barbarossa was the actual code-name for the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941, and this operation concerns a mysterious present-day terrorist group in the USSR, Scales of Justice, who are bent on revenge.
Their aim is to force the trial of a Russian ex-officer for collaborating in a wartime massacre of the Jews, but something larger and more sinister is being plotted. The KGB call in British, French, and Israeli intelligence to give them a hand in crushing this threat to the new order in the USSR.
Bond, who has an easier ride than sometimes in the past (no sharks or giant tarantulas) foils the plot and frustrates the rocket attack on…sshh! He managed more or less without gadgetry too, and his sexual adventures are limited.
Stephanie Adore from Paris has a tinkling laugh and can even nod her head elegantly, and Natasha has legs “so long they seem to reach to her navel,” but they are given little scope.
If this sounds a bit lacking in sparkle, that goes for most of the book. The Russian scene is well described, but the flow of ideas is slack, as is the writing itself. The jacket material keeps the name of Ian Fleming almost out of sight, which is only too appropriate.
Of course, this book will help reprints of the earlier Bonds. And what’s wrong with that?
Nice review. Couldn't agree more to be fair.
Thanks for sharing…I’ve always quite liked that novel 🙂
Amis was interviewed by the James Bond British Fan Club, and the subject of Gardner came up, he called them pretty hopeless and the interviewer added that 'a lot of his description seems to be there for the sake of adding description if you know what I mean' to which Amis agreed, 'I do know what you mean!'
Roger Moore 1927-2017
That's right--and the interview was conducted by Raymond Benson.
Here's the relevant excerpt:
Benson: Have you seen the John Gardner book?
Amis: Yes.
B: The second one is out in America. I feel it’s a little better than the first one.
A: I thought the first one wasn’t good. And I think the second one…is even worse! I’m reading it now. I’m at the point where they're about to arrive at this fellow’s private...
B: Ranch.
A: Yes. And what has happened in between their point of arrival in New York and this point is nonsense! He arrives armed with this cover, with the prints, and all that had to happen was for some very well-dressed chap to say, “Oh, my principal would very much like you to accompany us to Texas and show him your prints with no obligation. He would put you and your lovely wife up as guests.” And they go and hide in that hotel, disguising themselves, then taking the disguises off—it does no good—and is SPECTRE trying to kill him, but at the same time not trying to kill him? It’s hopelessly muddled. Isn’t it?
B: It works itself out. I felt the first one drew more on the films.
A: Yes. You know, it’s the motives—what exactly is SPECTRE trying to do?—and all that business between New York and Texas—yes, it would go quite well in a film. Because you’re not asking questions. “Oh, look, now they’re in an elevator and the elevator's crashing—what fun!” You don’t worry about why or who’s doing it or what effect it’s going to have.
B: The films do that a lot.
A: The films do that a lot. And the girl…
B: Cedar?
A: No, in the Armoury…
B: Oh. (Laughs.) Q’ute!
A: (Grimaces.) That’s…terrible! The idea that Bond would have anything to do with a liberated woman is…and the idea that he would ever take a woman on as a partner is ridiculous!
B: And it’s his best friend’s daughter!
A: Of course! And the idea too that the President of the United States has so little confidence in his own intelligence agents that he would overrule them and say, “No, get someone from Great Britain—somebody who's an expert on SPECTRE—”
B: James Bond!
A: Or whatever that is! “And we’ll let him have the daughter of one of our best CIA men.” Anyway, it’s interesting to me to…I only read Octopussy once. I happened to find it on the shelf the other day, and I had forgotten what happens in it. I read it again, and it’s definitely a different literary world. The straightforward way that story is told…every sentence is absolutely firm and clear. The Gardner book, by contrast, is very hesitant and obscure.
B: Much of the detail seems to be put in for the sake of putting in detail. You know what I mean?
A: Yes, I do know what you mean. That’s what I think myself. The description of that house in the Everglades or wherever it is…it’s hopeless!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The whole interview is at https://www.mi6community.com/discussion/18619/a-bondian-dialogue-with-kingsley-amis-the-bondage-interview
Thanks for typing this review up, @Revelator. I actually found it on the British Newspaper Archive myself a while back after they added the Express newspapers. I just hadn't gotten around to typing it up yet. The British Newspaper Archive is a great resource by the way.
This review of TMFB proves that Kingsley Amis was still reading the Gardner Bond novels into the 1990s. So that disproves my theory above in the OP back in 2012 that he lost interest in the Gardner novels after the first few books. I wonder what Amis made of one of my favourites from Gardner, Never Send Flowers, if he ever read it? I'm sure he'd have thought it was mad! Sadly we'll probably never know.
As an aside, here's a link to an article I wrote on the rather rocky relationship between Amis and Gardner back in 2007:
I think Amis was in a position to criticise; Benson is perhaps on shakier ground.
In life it's always easier to criticise than offer anything constructive or simply say something nice. It takes more guts to be nice, actually. Surely, like the curate's egg, at least parts of a literary work are good as well as bad? So why not mention some of the good parts too to even out the review? As a hackish writer of sorts myself (though not of fiction) I know how difficult it must be to create stories from scratch and to a tight deadline. Therefore I feel uneasy criticising John Gardner or any other author as I couldn't begin to do what they do, whether good or bad. Plus in my interactions with Mr Gardner by email I always found him to be a perfect gentleman, as others have stated. He was the sort of hero you'd have been glad to meet.
I try to find the positive and the good in all things Bond related. Certainly there are plenty of things to criticise but if I can say a good word about someone or something I always try to say that first. Wall to wall negatively in a review reads badly and often says as much about the critic as it does about the criticised. It moves things from a straight review into the realm of the polemic and the axe-grinder. Sadly I think Amis sometimes sailed a bit too close to that type of thing in some of his reviews. Amis also became quite personal at times (see the irrelevant reference to Gardner's appearance in the TLS review of For Special Services for instance). And I say that all as a big Amis fan and defender.
Amis sometimes wrote reviews that were unfair, ill-informed, and more vituperative than critical, especially as he got older and more reactionary. But I think most of his comments on Gardner had underlying merit. Benson, in his James Bond Bedside Companion, once remarked that if reading Fleming was like a meal at Sardi's, then Gardner was like one at McDonalds. Of course Benson's own Bond novels turned out to be fast food of no better quality, but that doesn't invalidate his critical remarks, harsh as they were. If we really believed that we couldn't criticize a book or film unless we had made a better one ourselves, then we wouldn't be on message boards like this one. It is indeed very hard to make a good book or film, which is why most creators fail in the attempt. But as consumers we cannot help having our opinions on the quality of what we read and watch, regardless of our creative abilities.
Indeed, that is all very true and I never intended to imply otherwise. We're all critics of one thing or another in Bond. I just think that sometimes Amis resorted to irrelevant matters (such as Gardner's appearance on the author photo on the back of the book) which left a nasty impression and only served to undermine the valid points he'd already made. One can criticise writing without being personal about the author's appearance or their political beliefs or whatever. The text should really be the be all and end all when writing a review. I think that is the point that I was trying to make above, after a fashion. Not all criticism is equally valid.
Yes, I agree. For an example of Amis at his worst, I can nominate his review of Ambrose Bierce, found in the Amis Collection, Selected Non-Fiction, 1954-1990. As he grew older Amis grew to reflexively dislike American writers (especially since they were often acclaimed by other British reviewers) and became crudely dismissive of them. That was certainly his attitude toward Bierce, whose Devil's Dictionary he ignorantly dismissed as nothing more than cracker-barrel humor. Actually, Bierce was actually the opposite of a cracker-barrel humorist; the Devil's Dictionary is a work of lapidary prose that contains some of the finest aphorisms in English. But in his dotage Amis would have rather gouged out his eyes than praise an American writer.
To complete the trio here are the two Kingsley Amis reviews of Christopher Wood’s James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and John Gardner’s For Special Services (1982). Hope you all enjoy the read.
Shaken, but Not Stirred
Ian Fleming’s ninth novel, The Spy Who Loved Me, was published in 1962. Except perhaps for one short episode, it is not a spy story but a mildly touching thrillerish romance, recounted in the first person by the “me” of the title, a nice French-Canadian girl with an unfortunate sexual history. And a nasty current predicament in an Adirondacks motel. A kindly, capable English policeman called James Bond turns up just over half-way through and sorts everything out. Some male reviewers, though no female ones, assailed the book as “unpleasant” and “pornographic” (we’ve come a long way in fifteen years) while in fact disliking the naively patriotic and anti-Soviet attitudes of author and hero without quite caring to put it that way.
Always sensitive to criticism couched in moral terms, Fleming stipulated that this story of his should never be filmed; the title alone might be used. So it has been. A plot in which the baddies’ grand design is burning down the motel for the insurance (admittedly with the heroine thrown in) would in any case hardly have done for a Bond film of the later 1970s: space stations, laser bombs and global takeovers are de rigueur here. There is plenty of that sort of thing in James Bond, The Spy Who Loved Me, which is the book of the film The Spy Who Loved Me, out soon.
Christopher Wood is part-author of the screenplay of this film. His Bond is largely unreconstructed, still drinking shaken dry martinis and still alive in spite of being unable to draw and fire his Walther PPK in under three-fifths of a second (even FBI men are expected to manage in one-quarter). M has gone soft, allowing his desk-top to be specially prepared for a briefing demonstration and looking at Bond not without affection. The new “me” is Major Anya Amasova of SMERSH, a sad come-down from her archetype, Corporal Tatiana Romanova in From Russia, with Love. And the chief heavy, one Sigmund Stromberg, an insane pelagiophilic ex-undertaker endearingly bent on sparking off the Third World War, lacks the presence of Goldfinger or Mr Big.
Enough of comparisons: Mr Wood has bravely tackled his formidable task, that of turning a typical late Bond film, which must be basically facetious, into a novel after Ian Fleming, which must be basically serious. To this end he has, by my count, left out nine silly gadgets and sixteen silly cracks which were in the script. He has also left out, to my surprise, a marvellous fight on a train that challenges comparison with the one in From Russia, with Love. The heavy concerned, a seven-and-a-half-footer with steel teeth, name of Jaws, is the best thing in both book and film. Mr Wood is not always exact: Bond, out skiing, muses that you “can lay for a long time in the bottom of a crevasse”-I doubt if even Bond could manage more than a brief lay in such circumstances. But the descriptions are adequate and the action writing excellent.
What nobody could have cut out is the element of second-sight contingency planning (or negligence) that gets by in a film, indeed is very much part of the style of these films, but obtrudes in a book. Your enemy has an explosive motorbike sidecar ready to launch at your car in case he’s forgotten to kill you for certain and in secret a few minutes before. In case that misses, he has already aloft a helicopter fitted with jets and [sic] canon. Your car is submersible in case you meet such a helicopter while driving on a coast road. In case you submerge your car he has a midget submarine waiting. In case he has you have underwater rocket-launchers.
Later, in his super tanker, which is really a giant submarine-trap, your enemy has a revolving gun-emplacement and four inch armoured shutters with machine-gun slits over his control-room in case the submarine crews he’s taken prisoner and forgotten to kill break out of the “brig” and start trying to take over with spare weapons they find in the magazine, where there’s also enough stuff just lying around to build a bomb that’ll blast through the armour-plate. Second-sight sportsmanship?
And earlier - but forget it. You safely can.
The New Statesman, 1 July 1977
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Double-low-tar 7, Licence to Underkill
Ian Fleming’s last novel, The Man With The Golden Gun, appeared in 1965, a year after its author’s death. I published Colonel Sun: a James Bond Adventure under the pseudonym of Robert Markham in 1968. The next Bond novel, Licence Renewed, by John Gardner, did not come along till 1981. Here now is For Special Services, by the same author.
Quite likely it ill becomes a man placed as I am to say that, whereas its predecessor was bad enough by any reasonable standard, the present offering is an unrelieved disaster all the way from its aptly forgettable title to the photograph of the author-surely an unflattering likeness-on the back of the jacket. If so that is just my bad luck. On the other hand, perhaps I can claim the privilege of at least a momentary venting of indignation at the disrepute into which this publication brings the name and works of Ian Fleming. Let me get something like that said before I have to start being funny and clever and risk letting the thing escape through underkill.
Over the last dozen years the Bond of the books must have been largely overlaid by the Bond of the films, a comic character with lots of gadgets and witty remarks at his disposal. The temptation to let this Bond go the same way must have been considerable, but it has been resisted. Only once is he called upon to round off an action sequence with a yobbo-tickling throwaway of the sort that Sean Connery used to be so good at dropping out of the side of his mouth. No ridiculous feats are required of him. His personal armament seems plausible, his car seems capable of neither flight nor underwater locomotion, his cigarettes in the gunmetal case have the three gold rings and M calls him 007.
Nobody else does, though. The designation is a pure honorific like Warden of the Cinque Ports; some ruling from Brussels or The Hague has put paid to the pristine Double-0 Section and its licence to kill long ago. Even the cigarettes are low-tar. But these and similar changes would hardly show if he had been allowed go keep some other interests and bits of himself, or find new ones. Does he still drink champagne with scrambled eggs and sausages. Wear a lightweight black-and-white dog-tooth check suit in the country? Do twenty slow press-ups each morning? Read Country Life? Ski, play baccarat and golf for high stakes, dive in scuba gear? What happened to that elegant international scene with its grand hotels and yachts? No information.
One thing Bond still does is have girls. There are three in this book, not counting a glimpse of Miss Moneypenny outside M’s door. The first is there just for local colour, around at the start, to be dropped as soon as the wheels start turning. She is called Q'ute because she comes from Q Branch. (Q himself is never mentioned, lives only in the films, belongs body and soul to Cubby Broccoli, the producer). Q’ute is liberated and a champion of feminism. Luckily she has only two lines, but one of these contains a jovial mild obscenity, and a moment later there comes a terrifically subtle reference to the famous moment in the film of Dr No when Bond said, “Something big’s coming up” [sic, actually TSWLM film] in ambiguous circumstances and got the hoped-for laugh from the first audiences, thus, legend says, turning the subsequent films on to their giggly course. When you consider how much the original Bond would have hated these small manifestations of what the world has become since 1960 or so, you might be led to suspect a furtive taking of the piss, but nothing like it occurs again, as if Gardner, not the most self-assured of writers, had repented of his daring.
Bond’s second girl has the cacophonous and uncertainly suggestive name of Cedar Leiter-yes, kin to that Felix Leiter of the CIA whom sharks deprived of an arm and half a leg in Live and Let Die (1954). Cedar is his daughter, a superfluous and unprofitable device that raises the thorniest of all questions, Bond’s age in 1982. Bond keeps his hands off her throughout, perhaps out of scruple but more likely because only a satyromaniac [sic] would find her appealing. She is described as short - a deadly word. An attractive girl may be small, tiny, petite, pocket-sized and such, but never short. Poor Cedar has no style of presence, no skills or accessories, no colour, no shape. And it is this wan creature whom Bond instantly accepts as his partner for the whole of the enterprise. In a Fleming novel - I nearly wrote “in real life” - Bond would have outrun sound getting away from her. To be accurate, of course, he would have done that even if she had been Pussy Galore or Domino Vitali all over again. He knew all about the way women “hang on to your gun-arm” and “fog things up with sex and hurt feelings”. But then that was 1953.
Bond scores all right with the third of the present trio, Nena Bismaquer, née Blofeld and the revengeful daughter of his old enemy, a detail meant to be a stunning revelation near the end but you guess it instantly. Nena-let me find the place-Nena looks fantastic and has incredible black eyes. Her voice is low and clear, with a tantalising trace of accent. She wears exceptionally well-cut jeans and has that special poise which combines all the attributes Bond most admires in a woman. When she sees him first she gives him a smile calculated to make even the most misogynistic male buckle at the knees. As she comes closer, he feels a charge, an unmistakeable chemistry passing between them. From expressions like these you can estimate the amount of trouble Gardner has taken with the figure of Nena and indeed the general level of his performance. It remains to be said about her that she has a long, slender nose and-by nature, not surgery-only one breast, an arresting combination of defects. Nobody really cares when she gets thrown among the pythons of the bayou. Well, there are pythons on this bayou.
There are two other villains round the place about whose villainy no bones are made from the beginning, Nena’s husband Markus and his boyfriend Walter Luxor. One is fat and cherubic, the other of corpse-like appearance, but neither exudes a particle of menace or looks for a moment as if he would be any trouble to kill, and Nena casually knocks them off one after the other on a late page. The three had schemed to steal the computer tapes governing America’s space-satellites, having fed drugged ice-cream to the personnel in charge of them. Bond, brainwashed by other drugs into believing himself to be a US general, is at the head of the party of infiltrators, but a third set of drugs, administered by a suddenly renegade Bismaquer, brings him to himself just in time. This sounds, I know, like a renewed and more radical bid to take the piss, but seen in the context of the whole book and its genesis the absurdity, however gross, is contingent, mere blundering.
I have suggested that For Special Services has little to do with the Bond films. In one sense this is a misfortune. Those films cover up any old implausibility or inconsistency by piling one outrage on another. You start to stay to yourself. “But he wouldn’t”- or “But they couldn’t”- and before you can finish Bond is crossing the sunward side of the planet Mercury in a tropical suit or sinking a Soviet aircraft-carrier with his teeth. Hardly a page in the book would not have gone smoother for a diversion of this sort. Why, for instance, does the New York gang boss set his hoods on Bond when all he has to do is ask him nicely? The reader is offered no relief from this bafflement.
What makes Mr Gardner’s book so hard to read is not so much its endlessly silly story as its desolateness, its lack of the slightest human interest or warmth. Ian Fleming himself would have conceded that he was not the greatest delineator of character; even so his people have genuine life and substance and many of them both experience and inspire feeling. So far from being “the man who is only a silhouette” Bond is shown to be fully capable of indignation, compunction, remorse, tenderness and a protective instinct towards defenceless creatures. His girls have a liveliness, a tenacity and sometimes a claim on affection beyond the requirements of formula. Most of the Fleming books also have a more or less flamboyant figure assisting Bond and acting as a foil to him, such as Darko Kerim, the Turkish agent in From Russia, with Love, and Enrico Colombo, the virtuous black-marketeer and smuggler in ‘Risico’. By a kind of tradition, however, perhaps started by Buchan with Dominck Medina in The Three Hostages, the main character-interest in this type of novel attaches to the villain. Mr Big, Hugo Drax, Dr No and their like are persons of some size and power. They are made to seem to exist in their own right, to have been operating since long before Bond crossed their paths, rather than to have been run up on the spot for him to practise on. But then to do anything like that the writer must be genuinely interested in his material.
The Times Literary Supplement, 17 September 1982
I think it’s fair to say that one shouldn’t have to prove you can do better in order to criticise, but for my tastes Benson’s efforts are barely professional, the prose being so substandard, that I think it really does seem pretty rich. Gardner has his flaws, but he could write and I would call him a novelist a long time before I’d use that term for Benson.
Thanks for that back-and-forth @Revelator and @Silhouette Man quite reminded me of those arty debates they used to have on The Late Review before the BBC cut its art funding budget and did away with genuine evaluation of the arts and replaced it with pop culture crassness.
I pretty much agree. Benson's prose was indeed substandard compared to that of Gardner, who was a skilled thriller writer long before he took up Bond (and at his best outside of Bond). I read Benson's first book and didn't bother with the rest, whereas I read all of Gardner's, despite their decline in quality. Gardner wasn't on Fleming's wavelength, so I think Benson was accurate in finding something blandly mass-market about his Bond books. But Gardner had basic strengths as a fiction writer that Benson was sorely lacking. For me Benson's best contribution to Bondiana remains his Bedside Companion. I much prefer him as a fan-critic than a fan-novelist.
Many thanks, everyone, for this eye-widening thread.
Thank you @chrisno1. That's very kind of you to say. This is the sort of stuff I love to debate most. It always makes for an interesting discussion.
Excellent thread.
I’ve always disliked authors denigrating other authors, I find it bad form, even though I agree with Amis’s sentiments, I still find his outpourings distasteful. It’s even worse when lesser authors sound off about the inadequacies of plot and prose about other authors who have sometimes outsold them by millions of copies (I have one particular horror author in mind when writing this).
That's how I feel about it too to be honest. I remember when I first read the Amis review of For Special Services in 2002 or so. It came as a bit of a shock as I'd read Amis and Gardner growing up and had just blissfully assumed that all was well between the Bond continuation authors and heirs of Ian Fleming. How wrong I was! I mean I didn't expect them to be big buddies necessarily but I expected them to at least be civil with each other. I was conflicted too as I was an Amis fan as well as a Gardner fan. I could see some of what Amis was saying was sadly correct but the wall to wall negativity in the review was distasteful as well. I couldn't see Gardner ever doing the same with Amis in a review or an interview.
I know that Gardner had a low opinion of Jeffrey Archer as an author and he couldn't understand how he ever got published, but then so do many other people. And he didn't take time out of his day to write a negative review of one of Archer's books. He got on with his own writing. I'm sure he had to criticise at times too and was for a time the theatre reviewer on the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald. He in fact disliked the word "critic" and didn't use it to describe what he did. However, I don't believe he was ever as vitriolic and personal as Amis was in his review of For Special Services and he was gentlemanly enough to keep his powder dry and not respond in print with any defence or criticism of Amis's review. Gardner's successor as Bond continuation author Raymond Benson no longer reviews other Bond continuation authors' work and has also refused to update The James Bond Beside Companion from its 1988 second edition for this very reason. Perhaps Amis could've taken a leaf out of Benson's book in this regard and refrained from reviewing the work of his successor as Bond continuation author. But then Amis the curmudgeon could never resist what he must've perceived as a wide open goal. He clearly saw himself as the true and worthy successor to Ian Fleming with Gardner just being an interloper.