Channeling Gore Vidal in a James Bond Book
A surprisingly radical take on America and WW II
‘I have been thinking a great deal about my legacy and what I can do to change the way my country is heading,’ Wolfe went on. There was a rasp in his voice. ‘We are coming to the belief that we can solve all the problems in the world and, as we become ever more powerful, with ever greater weapons, we don’t see what’s happening. We don’t see that we risk becoming monsters!’
— From Anthony Horowitz’s James Bond book Forever and a Day
I’ve always been enamored of the writing of Anthony Horowitz. You may know him as the creator and main writer of Foyle’s War, a British TV series. He’s also a novelist, and quite a clever one. He’s written a Holmes series (House of Silk and Moriarty); two Susan Ryland books (Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders, both now TV mysteries); a series in which he appears as himself, Watson to a difficult Holmes (the Hawthorne books: The Word is Murder, etc.); plus quite a few others.
A hallmark of his later style is stories that twist back on themselves, or are contained inside themselves, something M.C. Escher does with his art. This style is most apparent in the Ryland books, which I highly recommend. To experience this type of story in film, watch Get Shorty or The Player. The subject of each film is the film you’re presently watching: Get Shorty is about Get Shorty. The Player is about The Player.
Which brings us to Horowitz’s James Bond novels. There are three so far — one in which Horowitz gets his feet wet using the form (Trigger Mortis); one that serves as a prequel to the Fleming series (Forever and a Day); and one that serves as a sequel to the last Fleming book (A Mind to Murder). Horowitz may write a fourth, but I doubt it. The Ryland and Hawthorne series are doing quite well and may keep him busy for some time.
Part of what interests me about these books, aside from their fun and literary delight, is the way they comment on politics, which is my point today. For instance, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels never depict the FBI as corrupt. Yet when Child’s brother Andrew starts writing Reacher books, they’re quite realistic in a political sense: in the latest, In Too Deep, the treacherous FBI is treacherous indeed, almost another villain.
Forever and a Day
Our subject today is Forever and a Day, the second of Horowitz’s Bond books. It has a couple of unique and delightful features. First, like Trigger Mortis, his first Bond book, it has masterful set pieces. (In Trigger Mortis, Bond is buried alive and must claw himself up from six feet under ground. If you’re claustrophobic at all, the sequence will drive you mad.)
Forever and a Day has three of these set piece scenes. In one, the heroine, a character named 16 and spelled Sixtine in the book, tells her story, tells how she became who she is. The action stops entirely while she talks. Great chapter; a tale within a tale. Another set piece near the end shows Bond captured and tortured (he’s always captured and tortured in the Fleming books). This time the torture involves a massive injection of heroine. How he escapes immediate incapacitation — and a life of slavish sexual dependency — is itself worth the price of the book.
The third set piece has one of the book’s two villains, a billionaire aptly name Wolfe, finally revealing what the story’s been about, the evil plan that has driven all of the action. That part is reprinted below. (The other Big Bad of the story, a master drug lord from Marseilles named Scipio, turns up in this excerpt in a minor role.)
As you read this, consider what motivates Wolfe to act: Both of his sons were killed in World War II (the year is 1950), dead in a war he’s convinced we never should have fought, and for which he blames Franklin Roosevelt. You’ve may have read this view of Roosevelt before, perhaps from Gore Vidal, but this is its first appearance in a mainstream novel.
Note that no character in the novel questions this view; their criticism is directed only at Wolfe’s response. I think you’ll find the scene below remarkable.
Why This Is Paid-Subscriber Post
As before when I excerpted a very large chunk of Ministry For the Future…
…so here, I’m excerpting so much that we’re well past “fair use.” My belief is that placing this section behind a paywall converts this post into a private newsletter, a missive between friends. The public website doesn’t contain the excerpt.