Bond. James Bond. Join me as I read all of the James Bond books in 007 Case Files, encompassing Ian Fleming and beyond. For Your Eyes Only: there’s spoilers ahead.
“I thought Christmas only comes once a year,” quipped Pierce Brosnan in The World is Not Enough. It’s one of the rare instances we hear 007 talk about the festive season, even if the present he was unwrapping was of a more suggestive variety. Then there’s WIN, LOSE OR DIE (1989), one of the few Bond books set at Christmas. While the focus is still on global terror, it’s the closest thing we get to a Bond holiday special.
In John Gardner’s eighth Bond novel, M gets word that a subtly named terrorist organisation known as the Brotherhood of Anarchy and Secret Terrorism (or BAST) is planning to subvert a summit being held on an aircraft carrier. Given that the participants are US President George H. W. Bush, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Russian Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, Bond is given a promotion from Commander to Captain and sent back to the Navy.
While retraining in preparation for the mission, BAST decides that Bond is a threat and sets out to eliminate him. The first attempt is made while he’s flying a Sea Harrier, but a more overt attempt is made while he is holidaying in Italy. When Bond is put in charge of security for the summit (known as Landsea ’89), he soon becomes embroiled in a murder investigation and a plot to extort the three countries for the lives of their leaders.
There is a certain amount of silliness when it comes to this era of Bond novels, despite the contemporary films starring Timothy Dalton becoming grittier. This is the book, as a critic once put it, where “Bond gets chummy with an unconvincing Maggie Thatcher.” The scene in question sees the trio of leaders meeting Bond on a boat, where it’s revealed that 007 has saved Thatcher’s life on more than one occasion. (In a footnote, Gardner adds that it’s likely Bond landed secretly in the Falklands to train civilians “before the real shooting war started.”)
It’s all part of of Gardner’s attempt to ground the narrative is something more real and concrete, although decades later it merely dates the material. Ian Fleming was always known for his attention to details, but Gardner almost drowns us in technical ephemera on the way the the action conclusion. The three Bond girls (Clover Pennington, Beatrice Maria da Ricci, and Nikki Ratnikov) are mostly forgettable, but not as much as the villain of the piece, who I genuinely had to look up the name of as I was writing this. There’s some sidebar attempt at injecting demonology into the plot, but even Gardner seems to tire of this.
“Without thinking, Bond whispered, ‘God bless us, every one.'”
While not strictly a Christmas novel, only one previous story (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) was overtly set during the festive season. Here we learn that there are long-standing in-universe traditions, such as the annual Quarterdeck ritual of M doing a dramatic reading of A Christmas Carol! Of course, when asked what his favourite memory of Christmas might be, Bond gives a rather maudlin response: “I think the last Christmas I spent with my parents.”
We don’t often get a lot of backstory into Bond’s childhood, and he tends to play his emotions pretty close to the chest when it comes to women. (As Gardner charmingly puts it, he “lived by the three Fs – Find, Fornicate and Forget.”) Yet here Bond recounts the winter he was recovering from chickenpox, shot tin cans with an air pistol, and ate Christmas dinner from trays with his parents. “A final taste of love. I’ll never forget it…My parents were killed, climbing, a few weeks later.” Merry Christmas, Mr. Bond.
While BAST, in Bond’s words, sound like “a poor man’s SPECTRE,” they continue Gardner’s theme of modern terrorism in a complex world. All of these little details add up to this being one of the stranger, but most enjoyable, of Gardner’s Bond books to this point. It’s a rapid read that’s light on character, but strong on moment to moment action.
James Bond will return…in Licence to Kill.
