Recently, a well-known fictional franchise has undergone a bit of a nip and tuck to scrub off some of the trappings that have been part of it since the beginning. No, I don't mean the hullabaloo at DC Comics. I am, of course, referring to the release of Jeffery Deaver's Carte Blanche, the latest James Bond novel. While the film series already had a Continuity Upgrade or several, most notably with the advent of Daniel Craig in the role, the novels kept the character and his circumstances more or less the same, supposedly. But this is the first time it's happened in the novels, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.
Now, I don't consider myself a huge fan of the Bond franchise, but I have been known to stop and watch the films if I ever catch them on TV, and I have a few of the Ian Fleming novels, plus Thunderball on DVD. (One of these days I will upgrade my VHS copy of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, as well.) Admittedly, I haven't read any of the continuations by Martin Gardner or Raymond Benson, but I do have a hardback copy of the one-off Devil May Care, a Cold War-set novel by Sebastian Faulks meant to hearken back to the Fleming stories. In theory, I'm not opposed to this Temporal Re-adjustment of the novels, but one detail caught my eye. As of Carte Blanche, Bond was born in 1979. I am now older than James Bond.
Bad enough I'm older than current Doctor actor Matt Smith. That's okay; I'm in my early 30s and used to being older than actors now, and he's playing a 900-plus-year-old alien, but James Bond? Yes, I know it's just a fictional character, but I usually saw him as an older man anyway (the major plot impetus in the aforementioned Thunderball is that Bond has been getting on a bit and ordered to get a bit of R&R at a health spa). Add to that the fact that Bond (not to mention the whole super-spy genre he helped usher in) was firmly entrenched in the Cold War-era setting (see Sebastian Faulks, above), and it's enough to give a guy a complex.
On the other hand, maybe a younger protagonist is what the series needs. Comic books, after all, get away with a "sliding timescale" all the time these days (bar the occasional continuity hiccups; witness again the Storyline Reappraisal at DC), but that's supposedly to keep things fresh and attract new readers. Why try this with the Bond novels when the Fleming stories are still in print? I would figure a new reader would be likely to start with the Fleming "canon" first, then branch out looking for more. Personally, I would like to see more done like Devil May Care, but I will wait to reserve my final judgement until I've read the thing. Which probably won't be until it ends up in the second-hand bookstore, but still... Maybe I'll just re-read Casino Royale instead.
By the way, my favorite film Bond? Connery, with Dalton second. Moore was better as the Saint (but the radio version had Vincent Price, who wins that competition simply by virtue of being Vincent Price. But there's plenty of time to talk about Vincent Price later...)
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