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Devil May Care (James Bond) | 
 enlarge | Author: Sebastian Faulks
Publisher: Penguin
Category: Book
List Price: £18.99
Buy New: £8.47
You Save: £10.52 (55%)
New (38) Used (5) Collectible (22) from £8.47
Avg. Customer Rating:  54 reviews
Sales Rank: 39
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 0718153766
EAN: 9780718153762
ASIN: 0718153766
Publication Date: May 28, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New - Immediate Dispatch
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Amazon.co.uk Review
A variety of authors have written 007 novels since the death of Bond's creator, Ian Fleming -- and the results have been mixed, to say the least. As 'Robert Markham', Kingsley Amis penned the very first post-Fleming Bond, and this attempt by a novelist better known for his 'literary' work was judged a success. Now, after a decade of less successful entries by such writers as John Gardener, we have another serious writer, Sebastian Faulks (author of such acclaimed novels as Birdsong), taking up the challenge. Devil May Care has already collected a jaw-dropping amount of publicity, with even the Royal Navy helping to put the book firmly at the top of the best-seller charts (Bond is, of course, a naval commander), and few books have had such wind under their sails (the relaunch of the movie franchise with the re-make of Casino Royale and Daniel Craig's second Bond film, Quantum of Solace, is all part of the ever-accelerating momentum). Of course, this also gives the book farther to fall if it misses the mark. Faulks' author credit on the book ('Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming') is both revealing and encouraging - the author has reportedly said that he undertook the task with total seriousness, and he has tried to work within the parameters of the Ian Fleming formula (Faulks re-read all the extant Bond novels and stories) rather than the more glossy film incarnation. Among several very canny moves by the author is his decision to keep his 007 in the 1960s rather than catapulting him into the 21st century (as other ersatz Fleming novels - and, of course, the films -- have done. So how successful are the results? Fleming aficionados can relax - this is a sterling job of recreation, and a novel that functions with total authority in its own right. The evocation of time and place (or places, notably Paris and the Middle East) is impeccable, as are the plotting and detail (as colourful and violent as anything in Fleming); there is a satisfyingly unpleasant larger-than-life villain, Julius Gorner, with a grotesque deformity of the kind Fleming often gave such characters (the chapter 'The monkey's hand' gives this away) and grandiose, evil ambitions. Best of all, this is Ian Fleming's James Bond - not a superman -- worried about his health and his physical powers (which he fears may be on the wane). Delicious stuff in fact. Now... can Faulks be persuaded to write another such novel? --Barry Forshaw.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 49 more reviews...
 A Very Good Bond Novel! July 22, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I enjoyed this novel a great deal. I'd got a bit tired of the contrived Bond stories (particlarly Gardner's later efforts) but this was a refreshing tale. It had both a memorable villain and Bond Girl and the plot was not too shabby. I thought Faulks catured the character of Bond perfectly. If you enjoy James Bond and fancy reading a good adventure story then look no further than this book. A very good tribute!
Anyone for Monkey Tennis? July 21, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
It's the late 60s and after the tragic death of his new wife Bond has been forced on a 3 month sabbatical. M has informed Bond that he must decide whether to give his 00 status up or not. However, after only a few weeks R and R Bond's musings on aging and grief are put to one side as M needs his best man to look into a man called Dr Julius Gorner. Gorner is an extremely rich Russian who seems too involved in the illegal drugs market for Britain's liking. He is distinguishable by a genetic defect that makes one of his hands appear like a monkeys. With a young woman to protect Bond must set out to discover what Gorner's true motives are.
`Devil May Cry' is a joy to read as long as you appreciate it as a Fleming style Bond novel. Some of the action is ridiculous, the men chauvinistic and the attitudes archaic - but this is classic Bond after all. Scenes of a monkey handed man playing combative tennis would not work anywhere outside a Bond book. Sebastian Faulks has done an outstanding job of recreating Fleming's style and for that he should be congratulated. I did feel that the book took a little too long to really get going, but when it did the ride was great fun. Switch your brain to Bond and enjoy.
"He seemed to be beyond reach, locked in a world where ordinary human concerns couldn't touch or weaken him." July 19, 2008
Written in the tradition of Ian Fleming, Sebastian Faulks delves deep into Fleming's iconic secret agent and the mythology that surrounds him, meditating on darker-than-usual themes that have implications for the way we live now. In Faulk's Cold War mid-1960's world, Bond has been ravaged at the hands of his enemies and temporarily pensioned off by M, his life at best a double-edged sword where no triumph is likely to be anything but short-lived.
When a Frenchman of Algerian birth is savagely murdered on the outskirts of Paris, Detective Inspector Mathis is mystified as to who could have caused such a violent act: the boy's tongue had been severed and a single bullet has been fired up through the roof of the mouth. When drugs are thought to be the likely cause of the crime, Mathis comes to the realization that there is something far bigger going on than just young dissolute youths peddling heroin,
Meanwhile, James, tired of the South of France, has on the invitation of Felix Leiter, his old friend from the CIA, come to Rome, where in the middle of St. Peters Square he meets an extraordinarily beautiful woman by the name of Larissa Rossi, ostensibly in Rome with her husband, a director of one of the large insurance companies, but whose presence fills James with a strange mixture of unease and passion: she reeks of "breeding, youth, and expensive hosiery."
Intent to enjoy his time with Larissa, James can't quite believe it when he is called out of sabbatical and back to London by a cigar smoking M, after all, this is a tired and worn-down James, fresh from his encounter with Auric Goldfinger and his plans to raid Fort Knox and obliterate the world economy. James is beginning to show his battles with evil, on his torso and arms there's a network of scars, small and large, that trace a history of his violent life: "Your tired James, Your played out, Finished."
But perhaps it is only James that can battle "the master-of-all-trades the psychopathic Dr. Julius Gorner who is most likely responsible for this recent influx of drugs, infiltrating both Europe and England with pharmaceuticals in the form of heroin. Changing sides during the 2nd World War, fighting for the Nazis initially and then for the Russians at the battle of Stalingrad, Gorner has become a soldier of fortune, contemptuous of England because he feels as though the country had laughed at him.
So Bond must embark on a mission to doggedly pursue Gorner across Europe to Persia, hot on the trail to shut down the operation of a twisted individual with a demonic sense of purpose. Gorner seems to be beyond reach, locked in a world where ordinary human concerns couldn't touch or weaken him; he's bent on world destruction and domination and has made himself a key figure in the drug world. His only vulnerability is his physicality, marked by a rare deformity, a hair covered wrist shaped like a monkey, and a white glove that hides it.
Surprisingly it is Larissa who also has a connection to Gorner, soon revealing herself as Scarlett Papava, a lonely housewife, busy banker, and lady of the night who wants to enlist James' help to get Poppy, her heroin addicted sister back from the evil clutches of Gorner: "He just won't let her go, he's slowly killing her and loving every moment of it." But there's something about Scarlett that gets right under James' defenses, something about her that makes him feel profoundly uneasy.
With Scarlett determined to find her sister, and James delving deeper into Gorner's criminal enterprises, both are blindsided by the extent of this madman's plans for world domination that eventually plays out deep within the city of Tehran and the vast surrounds of the Caspian Sea.
From London to Paris, to Tehran, and then onto Leningrad and Helsinki, Bond is faced with a world mostly ruled by protection and influence, arms and dollars. In a novel that is filled with misfits and vagabonds, stoolpigeons, agents and secret police, Gorner and Bond must battle it out against a background of the cold war where America is fighting a lonely war for "freedom" in Vietnam and where the threat of the West being overrun by communism is ever present. Formulaic to the last, Faulks doesn't shy away from giving us a series of spectacular set pieces involving a giant ship-sea plane, loaded with nuclear bombs and with a British flag on it and a stolen a Vickers VC10 British airliner, painted with BOAC livery that is heading towards a fiery crash landing in the Soviet Union. Although this novel certainly doesn't reinvent the legend of our favorite secret agent, Bond's adventures are still harrowing in his journey from the known to the unknown with Faulks propelling his story along at break-neck speed, riding the apex to its violent conclusion, with Bond ultimately saving the world and getting his girl. Mike Leonard July 08.
 Good evening, Mr Faulks July 18, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The name's Faulks, Sebastian Faulks. I have just written an awfully exciting James Bond book under the name of Ian Fleming. All my friends who write reviews in the London papers tell me it is fabulous darling and -
Insert the gag, Oddjob. Permit me to disagree, Mr Faulks. What you have achieved in this book Devil May Care is a no-pace, no-action, no-rhythm clunker. It seems to me that this is not so much a book as a cheque, which is to say a document of small intrinsic interest guaranteeing that you will collect a great deal of money. Not so, Mr Faulks? I have a memory of Ian Fleming. I must tell you, Mr Faulks, that next to him you are a wet and a weed.
When Fleming wrote a thriller he knew what he was talking about. He spent a fair amount of WWII in a camouflaged hole in the ground, waiting to give the Germans a hard time should they and their tanks arrive in Kent. In the post-war years he was a dedicated consumer of wine, women and cigs, passing his time in Jamaica and the casinos of Europe. His literary method involved lying in the bath smoking the Morlands with the triple gold band through a holder, dictating his deathless prose to a stenographer called Wednesday, or maybe Vespa.
And unlike your little exercise in pastiche, Mr Faulks, Fleming's books were serious. Casino Royale hit the world like a seven-litre Bentley in the solar plexus. It contained no exploding cigarette lighters or laser guided hatbands. Its tough, bleak existentialism might have come from the pen of Graham Greene, if Graham Greene had decided to write a Cold War thriller.
It is true that as Fleming wrote more Bond books, they became more far-fetched. In the splendid times when Stalin ruled the free world, we at Smersh frowned on golden guns and moon-rockets, and suspected organizations like Spectre of bourgeois deviationism. The films? Nothing to do with Fleming. Comics, made by silly Americans called after a green vegetable admired by few. No, I will not speak of the films.
Now, then. Let us speak of death, Mr Faulks. The death of Fleming led to various sequels, commissioned by publishers wishing to keep the torrent of Bond money flowing. And eventually to you, Mr Faulks.
Frankly, Mr Faulks, you have done a rotten job. Fleming's Bond plays Baccarat. Your Bond plays tennis. Fleming's Bond thinks like a citizen of the Empire. Your Bond thinks like a citizen of north London. Thanks to Fleming's Bond, I currently reside under a landslide on Crab Key. Even by my standards, Mr Faulks, your horizons seem limited.
So we have organized something special for you, Mr Faulks. As you whimper in your restraints you will no doubt be wondering whether it will be the shark pool or the laser beam up the jacksy. Well, Mr Faulks, it will be neither. And there will be no escape in the nick of time. I am sorry, Mr Faulks? Your fate? Ah, yes. For Ian Fleming, the world's bookshelves. For you, Mr Faulks, the wastepaper basket.
Ahahahaahahahahaha.
Ernst Stavro No Goldfinger (Dr)
 Not at All Good July 16, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
A typical story by a follow on author, Mr Faulks has not grasped the character of James Bond and tries too hard to replicate Ian Flemming.
In my opinion this book does not do justice to either Ian Flemming or James Bond
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