Two James Bond books on The Times Christmas recommendations
06-Dec-2008 • Literary
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Also a story of our times - but only just - is Sebastian Faulks's ridiculously enjoyable reincarnation as Ian Fleming in Devil May Care (Penguin, £18.99/£17.09) a new James Bond book turned out to give the franchise a further lease on seeming immortality. Faulks gives us all the old favourite ingredients: an evil villain with a congenital deformity - main de singe: a hand like a monkey's - car chases, brutally competitive sports - tennis here - and steamy sex with almost identical twins. Faulks dishes up our spies the way we wish they were, sugar-coated, as opposed to le Carré's bitter reality.
As well as giving Faulks a favourable review, The Times put one of its own authors, Ben Macintyre in the spotlight:
Ben Macintyre is Antonia Fraser to Muir's Pinter; he does the family's nonfiction. This year he might have taken a break after Agent Zigzag, but instead he squeezed out For Your Eyes Only (Bloomsbury, £20/£18), a handsome and quasi-official history of James Bond. It features pictures of harpoons and Halle Berry's bikini and tells you, among other things, that Bond was actually quite abstemious. He liked his martinis long and strong, but one at a time.
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