Ian Fleming`s nephew James publishes new novel

James Fleming takes some tips from his famous uncle with a novel that straddles Britain and Russia, and an aristocratic hero who smacks of an early James Bond - reports The Moscow Times.

To whom does James Fleming owe his literary allegiance? Bloodlines link Fleming to a noted writer: Ian Fleming, creator of that deathless adventurer on the high seas of governmental espionage, James Bond. On the basis of his latest novel, though, Fleming appears to share less with his Uncle Ian than with another notable: Vladimir Nabokov. Like Nabokov (in "Speak, Memory" and other works), Fleming concerns himself with Russia just before the Bolshevik Revolution, and with the cataclysm that cast the old way of life forever into the abyss. Echoing Nabokov's interests, he also focuses on the natural world, with a protagonist who tracks down new species of insects and butterflies like a hunter stalks big game.

In that regard, perhaps, one can see the influence of Ian on James, for Charlie Doig, the Anglo-Russian warrior-scientist who narrates "White Blood," owes a debt to old 007 himself. Doig may not be that interested in matters of national security, but in his indomitable self-assurance and his territorial possessiveness toward his women, he is a Bond before the fact, roaming the estates and snow-dappled streets of pre-Soviet Russia with a cocky swagger. Born in Moscow to a British father and a Russian mother in the waning years of the 19th century, Doig trains as a naturalist in Britain and earns his stripes on grueling journeys through remote Burma and Turkestan. While in Burma, he traps and kills a rare beetle, which is named the Chrysochroa birmanensis var. doigii in his honor. Fame and adulation follow, and Doig becomes a world-renowned naturalist -- at least by his telling.


The issue of Doig's trustworthiness as a narrator lurks behind much of the book, for though fantasy outstrips fact when it comes to getting a leg up in the He-Man sweepstakes, Doig seems less a fabulator than a chronic exaggerator, prone to overstating his own notoriety, physical endurance and sexual virility. The whole of "White Blood" is suffused with questions of its narrative legitimacy: Have we fallen victim to a storyteller who settles scores by re-editing history in his favor? Fleming is clearly in on the joke, but wisely keeps a straight face throughout.

After his Burmese triumph, Doig returns to Russia, where he reconnects with his cousins and childhood companions Elizaveta and Nicholas. Elizaveta, now a mature beauty, has attracted the attention of a wealthy Polish nobleman and war hero, Count Andrej Potocki, a match which promises to save her proud but increasingly impoverished family. Doig quickly grows entranced by Elizaveta's charms, and plots to displace Potocki in her affections. He is confident that his cousin will see his innate superiority and shift her affections accordingly, but Elizaveta is not so easily swayed.

Meanwhile, Doig is slow to recognize the changes sweeping across his country. It is not until Potocki is brutally assassinated by persons unknown that Doig, a true representative of the moneyed, privileged classes despite his own meager supply of both, understands that Russia's powerful must fight for their lives against a tidal wave of murderous sentiment a millennium in the making. Doig is a brutally blunt pragmatist, an unappetizing trait in a companion but pleasingly bracing in a narrator. Witness his reaction to Potocki's disappearance: "Andrej was no use to me as a missing person. I wanted him in the ledger of the dead. If he got into the history books as a victim of the terrorists, well and good. He'd have his footnote and I his woman, which was the better trade by ten million roubles times ten."

Doig cleverly worms his way into Elizaveta's affections, displacing Potocki with hardly a ripple. For him, Elizaveta is the prime jewel in his collection of objects, a beautiful animal that, like a horse, must be tended to in order to receive maximum return on his investment. As Doig muses, "a woman and a horse are equal in the estimation of man and to witness either on their honeymoon with him is to truly understand the romance of history." Possession of Elizaveta is both self-justification and apotheosis, a status symbol reflective of Doig's newfound prominence and a public acknowledgement of his superiority: "I was dripping with happiness. We would conquer the world! We would live to a combined age of 180 years and die simultaneously, a multitude of bold deeds behind us, in the presence of an untold number of spawn and underspawn."

Doig and Elizaveta's paradise of sensual and emotional bliss is short-lived, however, buffeted by the onslaught of Bolshevik violence. The couple's confrontation with the ascendant masses comes in the form of Glebov, a wily soldier who may or may not be a Bolshevik agitator. Doig's cousin Nicholas, a symbol of the old guard's privilege and grace, deftly grapples with Glebov in a battle of wits, but ultimately the young firebrand is interested in grappling of a more physical brand. Doig is eventually reduced to brute force (a reduction he hardly seems to mind) to protect his family from Glebov and from the disorder and mania that the latter brings.

Between the strange figure of Doig and Fleming's conflicted attitude toward the period he represents, "White Blood" is a difficult book to pin down. If it is intended as a historical novel with a straightforward swashbuckling hero, Doig's grosser instincts sully his heroic qualities. And if Fleming means it to be read as a character study of the White tsarist mentality in the era of the Revolution, he fails to make his message clear. The novel falls into the gap between the historical and the psychological narrative, emerging as an energetic but imperfectly formed work.

Fleming is at his best when dramatizing Doig's realization that the world he has always known -- that seemingly impermeable reality of tsar, nobles and peasants -- is gone and never to return. Past and future Russias face off in Doig's pas de deux with the scheming Glebov, as the hero who so prided himself on his brutal manliness is reduced by his bloodthirsty opponent to little more than a vengeful, violent schoolboy. Yet it is Doig's cousin Nicholas who provides the most fitting epitaph for the White plight. "I've bred the best cattle in the province, satisfied several women deeply, and made a home for my chickens," he tells Glebov. "As a young man I trained some first-class dogs. I've given amusement to many. And since people remember a good joke or a happy event for months, sometimes for years, I think that should count double. My tailor is most grateful to me. I've never killed anyone, or had a man beaten. So mark me, Glebov. What would I score in your regime?" Glebov's response, succinct in its scientific detachment, is indication enough of the horrors to come: "You are a superfluous man in any progressive society."

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