A Review of Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming

by Contributing Reviewer, Tony Russell

In July 2007, Ian Fleming Publications commissioned British novelist Sebastian Faulks to write an all-new James Bond novel. The new volume, Devil May Care, was released May 28, 2008 to commemorate the centennial celebration of Ian Fleming’s birth. (Fleming died in 1964 at the age of 56.) Faulks is the fifth writer after Fleming to write for the series and begins where Fleming left off in The Man with the Golden Gun.

Devil May Care is an enjoyable read, but for fans, it holds few surprises. The plot is the standard Bond formula (reconnaissance, girl, capture, victory) and feels like a cross between Dr. No and Casino Royale. It also reads like an index of previous Bond adventures, which will lose casual readers, but will challenge Bond connoisseurs to match up Faulks’s clues with Fleming’s novels and short stories. For example, Faulks mentions a name like Tracy di Vicenzo or that “whole Japanese night”, which avid fans will recognize as the name of Bond’s tragically-murdered wife in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and a reference to his amnesia in Japan in You Only Live Twice, respectively. Bond’s own body in Devil May Care documents his perilous existence:

His torso and arms bore a network of scars, small and large, that traced a history of his violent life. There was the slight displacement of his spine to the left where he had fallen from a train in Hungary, the skin graft on the back of the left hand. Every square inch of trunk and limb seemed to contribute to the story.

The novel’s plot centers around shutting down an opium-processing plant in Iran. (Bond stops a smaller, but quite similar operation in the Fleming short story “Risico” in For Your Eyes Only). The principal villain, Dr. Julius Gorner, suffers from a rare physical deformity, main de singe, or Ape Hand, where the thumb of his left hand is not opposable. But what makes Gorner even more sinister, M explains to Bond, is that his “whole hand is completely that of an ape. With hair up to the wrist and beyond”. Gorner, sensitive about the deformity, hides the hand under a white glove.

Gorner’s deformity is a bit over the top, but no more than Dr. No’s dual prosthetic hooks. Still, there is a disturbing quality at how deformity and psychosis go together so often in the series. In all, Faulks’s verisimilitude overly depends upon Fleming’s previous body of work, despite the fact that the novel’s byline declares that Faulks is “writing as Ian Fleming.” Still, Devil May Care is a quick read that Bond fans will enjoy, even if Faulks’s allusions and Gorner’s long soliloquies sometimes slow down the action. Devil May Care is available in hardback from Doubleday for $24.95, but fans with indiscriminate loads of cash may take a look at the leather, hand-stitched, limited edition offered by Bentley for $1500, although the rest of us may have to hatch our own world-domination blackmail scheme to get our hands on one.

Cam Terwilliger, from issue 20.1, has a new story forthcoming in Mid-American Review, and he recently won a fellowship from the Somerville Arts Council, which you can read about here. Congratulations to Cam.

Issue 20.2 is currently at the printers, and I've heard a rumor that Amina Gautier, whose story "Brooklyn Bridge" was one of our contest finalists, is a finalist for a story collection prize. I'm sure we'll keep you posted as more news comes in. Meanwhile, we'd love to hear from other former contributors on recent successes.

I know that this is very early, but we at Sycamore Review are very excited to announce that Poet Laureate, Billy Collins will be judging our Wabash Prize in Poetry this fall. The deadline is October 17th and while we won't begin accepting submissions until August 1st, you might want to get a head start in polishing up those manuscripts.

I'd like to congratulate Matthew Simmons, whose story, "Saxophone Lung Explodes" was chosen by Richard Bausch as the winner of the this year's contest. There were many exceptional entries and as a staff, we had a very difficult time selecting the stories that we forwarded to Mr. Bausch. However, "Saxophone Lung Explodes" won the contest because of (in Mr. Bausch's words) "its exquisite strangeness and for its grief." Congratulations to Matthew Simmons and thank you to everyone who submitted to this years contest. You can read Matthew's story along with interviews with Pulitzer Prize winning writer, Michael Chabon, and novelist, Peter Ho Davies. If you'd like to purchase a copy, please write us and be sure to include a check for $7 made payable to Sycamore Review.

As Mehdi noted, the reading period is closed, and our spring content has been decided. All the acceptance letters and rejection slips have been sent, so now we're in the process of laying out and copy editing the magazine. I think the issue will be out around early July, and the reading period will open again August 1 with a nearly new staff.

by Erin Blakeslee, Editorial Assistant

The adage warns us not to judge a book by its cover, though it is hard not to be attracted to Brock Clarke's most recent novel, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, what with its tongue-in-cheek title and burning orange background, the color of a Fire Lane warning sign.

But what of a first sentence?  Can we judge by that?  I find I often do, and it was Clarke's juicy, dramatic, hilarious first line that sold me when I first pulled his late 2007 novel off the bookstore shelf:

I, Sam Pulsifer, am the man who accidentally burned down the Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, Massachusetts, and who in the process killed two people, for which I spent ten years in prison and, as letters from scholars of American literature tell me, for which I will continue to pay a hgh price long into the not-so-sweet hereafter.

Thus begins Sam's tragicomic tale, which, true to the novel's title, sees the accidental arsonist's life events intersecting with the homes of Dickinson (whose house, in real life, still stands, lest fans read Clarke and fret), Twain, Frost, and others.

No scribe is safe in Sam's world.  He introduces us to a bitter literature professor who refers to Willa Cather as a c***, because, well, she "thinks all writers are c***s."  He recalls that his mother would never let him read Uncle Tom's Cabin and To Kill a Mockingbird in the house "because they were so full of pity."  Sam even makes fun of his own author, Brock Clarke, when he comes across Clarke's earlier novel The Ordinary White Boy in a bookstore:

On the back it said that the author was a newspaper reporter from upstate New York.  I opened the novel, which began, "I was working as a newspaper reporter in upstate New York," and then I closed the book and put it back on the fiction shelf, which maybe wasn't all that different from the memoir shelf after all [...]

So apparently, Clarke allows his characters to judge by covers and first sentences, too!

Highly recommended, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is silly-yet-subversive beach reading for the type of well-read literary nerd that is more likely to spend her summer vacation touring writers' homes than actually going anywhere near a beach.       

August Kleinzahler has a new book of poems reviewed at the NY Times. It looks pretty good.

While I still have a blog ID, I'm going to embarrass and offer public congratulations to some members of our staff. First to our editor, Mehdi Okasi, who recently won a statewide National Society of Letters contest and gave a reading down in Bloomington Sunday. Also congratulations to our rising Assistant Director of Creative Writing, Christopher Feliciano Arnold, who recently won Playboy's college fiction contest and will have a story out in Playboy's October issue. Finally congratulations to Mindy Gutowski, whose poem "Affinity" recently won in the AWP intro awards, and is due to be published soon in Artful Dodge.

In an effort to find the name of some writing contests that people at Purdue have done well in, I stumbled onto this blog that lists upcoming contest deadlines. Sycamore's own Wabash Prize was featured there a few weeks ago. It's resources like this that still make me stand in wonder at what the internet can do.

I just got the spring issue of The Southern Review in the mail, and, though they don't have it on their web page as of today, it's quite an issue, Bret Lott's last as editor. I haven't digested it all yet, but there's a good essay by Charles Baxter about why you don't see a lot of happy literature, and all of the fiction consists of novel excerpts--notably from CofC (my alma mater) alum, Elizabeth Weld, Ron Rash's Serena (to be released this fall), and Lott's own Ancient Highway (to be released this summer).

I'm certainly behind on this, but I just recently came across Toni Morrison's letter endorsing Obama.  As Ms. Morrison claims, this is a first for her.  You can read her letter here. 

Congratulations to Junot Diaz who has won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The prizes were announced today.

Often, a writer is discouraged from writing a sex scene because, well, it often comes across as trite, clichéd, or just plain bad writing. However, I can think of a number of great sex scenes in literature (i.e. the carriage scene in Madame Bovary...albeit the technique there was more implication than anything else), Steve Yarbrough has a great sex scene in The End of California. There are, certainly, many others. But I came across this article in the Guardian in which the author uses the work of novelist Michael Houellebecq to make his point. The author also cites Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach as an example of why using literary posturing to describe sex scenes is a turn-off; he argues, they just plain don't get it. 

I haven't had the time to mosey on down to the local bookstore and just walk around to glimpse the new titles (this, before I started graduate school, was one of my favorite pastimes).  It seems these days I only read what is recommended to me by the incredibly well read faculty of our MFA program (the list, I'm afraid, is only getting longer).  I still, however, like to check out the NY Times book review, scouting for debut novels, just to see what my contemporaries are publishing.  I recently came across "Last Last Chance" by Fiona Mazzel and I'm struck by the conceit, even though it seems a little gimicky and sensationalist.  It does, however, strike me as quite a marketable book: drugs and terrorism!  If anyone's read this, I would appreciate a recommendation.  The NY Times review isn't exactly glowing. 

Thank you to everyone who has submitted to our journal. Our reading period is now closed and we will not be accepting any submissions until August 1st. If we plan on accepting your piece for issue 20.2, you will be hearing from us within the next 2-3 weeks. We will also be announcing the winner and finalists for the 2008 Wabash Prize in fiction by the end of this month at the latest. Thank you again to all those who have submitted work to us. Keep writing.