Review: Zero Minus Ten, by Raymond Benson
With the choice of Raymond Benson as John Gardner’s successor the overseers of the James Bond continuation novels shifted course. Rather than a prominent literary figure who had had a rare chance to work with Fleming (not so easy a thing to find in the ‘90s), or an old hand at spy fiction who could be counted on to approach the work with a detachment and sense of irony that gave him a relatively free hand in updating and innovating (if with not always pleasing result), they picked a writer who, if undeniably a fan (a Vice-President of the American James Bond 007 Fan Club, in fact), had previously been known for work on games rather than novels.
Again one can see in this a recognition of changing times, as other media changed what people expected from their fiction. As Benson himself was to acknowledge in an interview, he did not write like Fleming, and did not try — Fleming’s obliquely literary approach unsalable in a market demanding easier-to-read fiction. One might add that between the endurance of the Bond films’ ability to generate hits at the box office (freshly reconfirmed with 1995’s GoldenEye), the remoteness of that day and that market in which Fleming met with such success, the softening market for spy fiction generally and the Bond novels particularly, this series that had originated as novels was now being produced for a market coming to James Bond with cinematically-defined expectations. The result was that one could picture the continuation novels being received less as sequels to the now-unmarketable originals, but rather “tie-ins” to the films now at the heart of the franchise.
So did it go with Benson. By comparison with Amis, who defined his Bond adventure in opposition to the gadget-packed movies of the ’60s, and Gardner, who may have been willing to go cinematic here and there but did not make a default mode of it, Benson’s books were from the first intended to appeal to an audience accustomed to the movies, and the movies of the late ’90s at that, as Zero Minus Ten demonstrates, down to its cast of characters. Not only does M happen to be a woman, as had become the case at the end of Gardner’s last, but at least in her clipped speech and overt disdain for some of the better-known aspects of Bond’s character “as a feminist,” strongly calls to mind the conception GoldenEye presented. Reading the scene of Bond’s visit to Q Branch — the banter between a flippant Bond and an irascible Major Boothroyd who regards him as irresponsible with the equipment he provides — I found it impossible not to hear the voices of Pierce Brosnan and Desmond Llewellyn speaking the dialogue on the page as I read it. (Benson’s Q actually says “Now pay attention 007.”) The tendency to give the reader the Bond of the films rather than of Fleming’s books is similarly evident in the writing itself. Even more than Gardner he goes for straightforward storytelling, while taking a minimum of interest in the minutiae of Bond’s daily life, or Bond’s propensity to ruminate. He was also more inclined than Gardner to write the Bond girls in cinematic fashion (with Sunny Pei coming across as the “Bond girliest” Bond girl the novels had presented in a long time).
Still, Benson is a Bond fan whose affection for the series extends beyond the movies to the books, and if his writing often feels like a Pierce Brosnan-era Bond movie on paper, there is plenty of Fleming as well in this first go. There is something of Fleming’s Live and Let Die in the mixing of Bond up with foreign gangsters in a great foreign metropolis and getting caught up with their women; and something of “Risico” too in the task Bond agrees to perform on behalf of one of them against his enemies. There is also something of Casino Royale, and other Bond novels, in two bits left out of the pre-reboot films that were all that existed in Benson’s day, namely an extended account of Bond’s playing a game with the enemy (mahjongg), and Bond’s enduring a bout of torture (in this case a caning, a practice which had then been recently drawn to wide public attention in the English-speaking world by the arrest of Michael Fay in Singapore). It might be added that while the pace is brisk and the action plentiful, the adventure is relatively grounded, rarely going over the top in the manner of Bond’s screen adventures (or the way Benson’s novels would soon be doing). The acknowledgment of what came before is also present in Bond’s physical appearance. The minute flecks of gray Gardner noted in Licence Renewed are now grayness at the temples — fudging the chronology (in 1997 Fleming’s Bond would have been seventy-nine years old), but not altogether denying that Bond is getting older.1
As all of this suggests Benson’s first book can seem a concoction of familiar ingredients, some of which I, for one, found more welcome than others. (As no fan of the long accounts of games and long torture scenes, I could have done without the long mahjongg game and the caning — and generally thought things worked best here when Benson was in his more cinematic mode.) However, it does have some more original elements. The most obvious is the extent to which the plot is tied to a contemporary event — the real-life handover of Hong Kong back to China (something Gardner only tried once, in quite a different way, in The Man From Barbarossa).2 While this seems rather obviously an attempt to make the old series’ new book appear topical it is connected with something more substantial, namely the book’s treatment of the politics of Empire. It was the Opium Wars that established British dominion over Hong Kong — a fact given some attention here. The return of the Crown Colony to China is, in fact, treated as the righting of a wrong, in spite of Bond’s distaste for the current form of the mainland government, while the villain is a British colonial furious over the event — the bad guy, a man angry over the end of Empire — and Bond’s task to stop him. Subsequently in Australia Bond has occasion to remember the mistreatment of the Aborigines, who end up saving his life. It is a remarkable inversion of the attitude to the Empire with which Fleming began, when anger and bitterness over the Empire’s decline, unashamed exploitation of the rest of what remained (as with African diamonds in Diamonds Are Forever), and defensiveness about Britain still having “what it takes” in spite of these losses, are the prevailing notes.
I did not get the impression that this was meant to be subversive of the franchise — certainly it did not have Bond reconsidering the interests he has been defending all his adult life — but even so it had me thinking again about how much the series belongs to another time.
As it happened, while the plots of Benson’s Bond novels were to raise the resentments over the imperial past time and again in his work — in Bond’s adventure on Cyprus in The Facts of Death, in the reference to the longstanding disagreement between Britain and Spain over Gibraltar in DoubleShot — Benson never raised such matters so squarely again.
1. The calculation is based on Bond having been specifically identified as eight years from the double-O section’s mandatory retirement age of forty-five in Moonraker, which was published in 1955 (and gave us no reason to think it was set earlier or later than the date of publication), implying that Bond was born in 1918.
2. Of course, Gardner, too, referenced that return — in his own Bond thriller,No Deals, Mr. Bond.
For the full listing of the James Bond continuation novels (and the reviews of them available on this blog), click here.
Originally published at https://raritania.blogspot.com.
