New York Review of Books Review

JAMES BOND IS a synchronic spy. From the day that the first Bond thriller, "Casino Royale," was published in 1953, all the way through to this year's forthcoming "Spectre" movie, Bond has always been thoroughly modern, with all the latest toys. In "Trigger Mortis: A James Bond Novel," however, Bond ventures somewhere Ian Fleming, or the movie producer Albert Broccoli, would never go: back, into the past. "Trigger Mortis" is a sequel, of sorts, to 1959's "Goldfinger," which means that it too is set in the late 1950s. The author, Anthony Horowitz, commissioned by the Fleming estate to write a book "that could have come from Ian's own typewriter," says that he tried to write "the most authentic James Bond novel anyone could have written," while also admitting that "trying to capture Fleming's style was not easy." In truth, the task is impossible. The Bond of "Goldfinger" isn't only a sexist drunk who dismisses women by saying things like "There's no point in being a suffragette about this"; he's also an unapologetic racist who looks out from his hotel room at gardeners "picking up leaves with the lethargic slow motion of colored help" and sees Koreans as being "rather lower than apes in the mammalian hierarchy." So although "Trigger Mortis" begins two weeks after the end of "Goldfinger," its protagonist isn't - could never be - the same Bond. The new Bond is friends with a gay man, chivalrously sleeps on the couch when a woman doesn't want to have sex with him and even, at one point, drinks a bottle of water at lunch. What's more, where before there were only Bond "girls," now we find strong, independent Bond "women." One of them shows little interest in him and goes off with a woman instead; another, Jeopardy Lane, is a bona fide action hero in her own right. Setting a new Bond novel in the past has other problems too. While it's easy for thriller writers to get excited about today's state-of-the-art gadgets, it's much harder to realistically convey how a spy would have felt about the toys of 55 years ago. "Trigger Mortis" is clearly underpinned by a large amount of diligent research, but the recitation of the horsepower of a V-2 rocket, or the muzzle velocity of an M60 machine gun, feels somehow dutiful. And Horowitz's research sometimes comes up puzzlingly short: Rail sheds were at no time illuminated by "neon lights hung on chains." More glaringly, New Yorkers could have told him that there aren't two stations between Jay Street and York Street on the F line. Still, the heart of any thriller is the plot, and here Horowitz doesn't disappoint. The action moves with high velocity from Britain to Germany to the United States and back to Britain, the odds are always in the bad guys' favor, and the villain is a dastardly millionaire straight out of central casting. A mysterious mogul with a dark history and no regard for human life, he also has, naturally, a weakness for delaying the execution of spies by explaining to them, in detail, the cunning and despicable plot they were sent to discover. He should have killed Bond when he had the chance. Horowitz also stays true to the Bond of Fleming's books rather than the Bond of the movies. His hero is human, self-doubting, weak, in a way that is hard for a movie star to be in the context of a decades-long franchise and Monty Norman's immortal James Bond theme. And while Horowitz's loving pastiche lacks Fleming's flashes of brilliance, it should be more than good enough for the fans. The only real question is why anybody felt the need for this book to be written in the first place. Much of the excitement of Bond comes from his contemporaneity. Instead of trying to rehabilitate the bigoted Bond of the 1950s, we should keep our dapper spy in the movies of the present, where he belongs. FEUX SALMON is a senior editor at Fusion.