Carte Blanche, Jeffery Deaver (New York and London: Simon and Schuster, 2011), ISBN-13: 978-1451620696.
One of the
many benefits of "the new" military and diplomatic history is that its practitioners get to study mass popular culture. Consequently,
every television show, movie, book, graphic novel, comic book, sound recording, and performance remotely related to warfare and/or to diplomacy counts as research.*
In
Carte Blanche, commissioned by the estate of Ian Fleming, Jeffrey Deaver re-imagines James Bond in post 9/11 and 7/7 England as an operative of the Overseas Development Group (ODG), a reboot of the SOE, tasked to "...protect the Realm...by any means necessary" (32).
While Deaver's Bond has most of the traits in Fleming's and Gardner's Bond novels (I've avoided Benson's contributions), missing (at least so far) are his misogyny, his emotional cruelty, and his borderline sadism. (At times, there is little difference between Gardner's Bond and Cormac McCarthy's Anton Chigurh.) From a geopolitical standpoint, Deaver treats Islamic terrorism as but one challenge among many facing Great Britain's intelligence community. While I understand many of the reasons for such choices, I would have preferred a riskier approach--and better writing.
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* It isn't all fun and games. I have to watch movies directed by Michael Bay.
