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At the end of the last Fleming book The man with the Golden Gun we get the return of the oldish 007 more or less. The James Bond before he met his wife Teresa.
Forever and a Day is an explosive prequel to Casino Royale which promises to please Bond aficionados and a new legion of fans. Northern Insight **Book of the Month** The CIA were going through a selection process to find their top assassin, someone who must be obedient but ruthless. The three shortlisted candidates are given one final task, they are handed a gun and told to go into a room where they will find their wife, and to prove their absolute dedication to the CIA and the US they must kill her. With a stronger story than his previous two, this is easily Anthony Horowitz’s best Bond novel; making it, for me, the best of all the non-Fleming Bond’s that I've read. It flows logically and ends terrifically, better in fact than many of Fleming’s originals. I don’t think endings were his thing. One of my favourites, Dr No, was a wonderfully atmospheric book, but I think Fleming was laughing over a gin on the veranda of Goldeneye in coming up with the great Dr’s demise!
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The sense of well being come from not only not being harmed. The sense of wellbeing come from accepting the risk and the harm and feel it is all worth it. In addition to the flashes of psychological realism, Horowitz’s Bond is also more politically progressive by default, mostly because this version of Bond doesn’t only encounter homosexual villains, but instead has cool gay friends like the agent Charles Henry Duggan, introduced in Trigger Mortis. As Duggan says to Bond, “The trouble with you, James, is you’re basically a prude.” It's a smart inversion of our perception of the famous secret agent. It’s not that James Bond is this sex god, able to do whatever he wants. He’s actually kind of vanilla. This is why, at the end of Fleming’s Moonraker, Bond is super-sad that Gala Brand doesn’t want to be his girlfriend. In fact, the ending of Moonraker— “He touched her for the last time and then they turned away from each other and walked off into their different lives”—actually proves that Fleming nestled a sad version of Bond inside the more confident one we’re familiar with. But Horowitz is consistently better at making you believe that Bond is there; he removes the matryoshka doll lid more often, revealing the smaller Bond beneath. But not so often as to prevent the escapist adventure from happening.
Faking the Dead: M's death is faked to convince the Soviets that their plan to use a brainwashed Bond to assassinate M had succeeded. The objective is to maintain the illusion that Bond is still under the Soviet's control, so that he can return to Russia and infiltrate their new secret organization Stalnaya Ruska. By the time you read this review it may well be redundant. The publishers kindly sent me a review copy earlier in the year, but – thanks mainly, I suspect, to the Spanish postal service – it never arrived. They couriered a second copy, but the result is this review published almost a fortnight after the book was first released. Anthony Horowitz already published two previous Bond adventures. Trigger Mortis was set just after the events of Goldfinger; Forever and a Day was set prior to Casino Royale; and now With a Mind to Kill takes place after the events of The Man With The Golden Gun and is directly influenced by events that occur in Ian Fleming’s final Bond novel. The rest of the novel plays out at an uninteresting, plodding pace with an underwhelming finale. It reads so workmanlike, like Horowitz was fulfilling a contract obligation, not because he was inspired. Which is a shame as he seems to have a good handle on Bond as a character.It is M's funeral. One man is missing from the graveside: the traitor who pulled the trigger and who is now in custody, accused of M's murder - James Bond.
On the other hand there is some terrific action. Early on Bond is forced to flee after being captured. The writing is genuinely exciting. Later on there is more action, Bond forced to fight for his life and continue his mission. And the finale when he must return to the west. In these moments the book is hard to put down. But I don’t really buy Bond’s mission and all the mind control. It worked in The Man With The Golden Gun because Fleming didn’t elaborate too much. While Horowitz has researched mind control methods I just didn’t believe it. WaMtK is a sequel to Fleming's final original novel The Man With the Golden Gun (James Bond #13 - 1965) and can also be read as an imagined end to the canon. That is the reason for my Ambiguous Ending Alert™, about which it would be a spoiler to say anything more. As he ponders his own future, Bond is given his next assignment: discover what Stalnaya Ruska is planning and prevent it from happening. To do this, he will have to make the Russians believe he is a double agent and travel behind the Iron Curtain. It’s almost uncanny how well Mr. Horowitz summons Bond’s mindset . . . Yet this Bond also feels the winds of change: 'He had his licence to kill. But was it possible that in this new, more questioning age, that licence might have expired?' A drop of retro pleasures, a pinch of things to come; shaken, not stirred." — Wall Street Journal Exciting high drama. Horowitz stays loyal to the fabulous Fleming formula. And for that he surely deserves another mission guiding the fortunes of the world's favourite superspy. Daily ExpressAnthony Horowitz's second James Bond book will keep 007 obsessives happy with martinis, beautiful women and an enormously fat Corsican gangster. The Times *Best New Novels*
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