29 replies to this topic

[Jim]

Hello

Alongside the thread for our member reviews of Carte Blanche, probably neatest to put links to external and press reviews (and anything we may think about them) in here.

Odd that it's still referred to as "press"...

[Simon]

...as opposed to, Chips?

[Loomis]

It's great that there haven't been any reviews yet and that the plot remains - as far as I can see - pretty much totally unspoiled. Heck, we don't even know the names of the villain or the Bond girl.

It's great to be able to crack open CARTE BLANCHE tomorrow morning without reviewers having blithely blown its twists and turns.

I wonder whether the BBC News site will do another real time review tomorrow, as with DEVIL MAY CARE.

[007jamesbond]

Jeremy Jehu of The Telegraph reviews Jeffrey Deaver's 'Carte Blanche' the first James Bond novel to be written by an American author.

It was a bold move to invite Jeffrey Deaver to write another James Bond novel after he declared his childhood love of Fleming. There have been other Fleming impersonators, including Kingsley Amis and Sebastian Faulks, but the author of The Bone Collector is the biggest international name to take the job. He is also one of the world’s smoothest, most devious, thriller writers – a far better craftsman than Fleming, in fact.

So could he assume Fleming’s identity rather than write another Jeffery Deaver novel only with a hero called Bond? And could he, for that matter, resist thriller publishing’s current obsession with relentless action inspired by the success of the Bourne movie franchise – and indeed Quantum Of Solace?

The answers are emphatically “Yes”. He simply knocks five decades off the ages of 007’s old posse and presents them as they were introduced in the 1950s, their distinctive characters pleasingly intact.

Rebooted here as an Afghanistan veteran, Bond is more love-lorn metrosexual than opportunist seducer but he sports a Rolex, dresses flashily and drives a Bentley Continental GT – a footballer’s car but faithful to Fleming’s 007 whose Continental was pimped beyond recognition

Hopelessly addicted to his Q Branch smartphone (an “iQPhone”), this “rebooted” James Bond can barely cross a room without banging off an update to his “followers.” But for the Official Secrets Act, he’d be 007:Licensed To Tweet.

Yet Ian Fleming purists who agonise over each new incarnation of Bond can shake a celebratory martini and light up a Morland’s if they dare (Deaver’s Bond doesn’t: he can still drink his bodyweight, but the ciggies are history). The iQPhone’s starring role is one of mercifully few concessions to the book’s contemporary setting.

Deaver preserves his book’s timeless feel by largely ignoring modern geopolitics and pitting Bond against a traditionally barking villain, a necrophiliac billionaire with a silly name. The action trots the globe with the grubby intimacy – “it’s Cape Town, but it’s a rubbish tip in Cape Town” – of the books, not the films.

Deaver adds a series of twists that reveal a Bond with more Sherlockian intelligence than Fleming’s. But it’s his everlasting mobile battery rather than his brains that will leave many readers most envious.

Rating: * * * *

[Jim]

Jeremy Jehu of The Telegraph reviews Jeffrey Deaver's 'Carte Blanche' the first James Bond novel to be written by an American author.

It was a bold move to invite Jeffrey Deaver to write another James Bond novel after he declared his childhood love of Fleming. There have been other Fleming impersonators, including Kingsley Amis and Sebastian Faulks, but the author of The Bone Collector is the biggest international name to take the job. He is also one of the world’s smoothest, most devious, thriller writers – a far better craftsman than Fleming, in fact.

So could he assume Fleming’s identity rather than write another Jeffery Deaver novel only with a hero called Bond? And could he, for that matter, resist thriller publishing’s current obsession with relentless action inspired by the success of the Bourne movie franchise – and indeed Quantum Of Solace?

The answers are emphatically “Yes”. He simply knocks five decades off the ages of 007’s old posse and presents them as they were introduced in the 1950s, their distinctive characters pleasingly intact.

Rebooted here as an Afghanistan veteran, Bond is more love-lorn metrosexual than opportunist seducer but he sports a Rolex, dresses flashily and drives a Bentley Continental GT – a footballer’s car but faithful to Fleming’s 007 whose Continental was pimped beyond recognition

Hopelessly addicted to his Q Branch smartphone (an “iQPhone”), this “rebooted” James Bond can barely cross a room without banging off an update to his “followers.” But for the Official Secrets Act, he’d be 007:Licensed To Tweet.

Yet Ian Fleming purists who agonise over each new incarnation of Bond can shake a celebratory martini and light up a Morland’s if they dare (Deaver’s Bond doesn’t: he can still drink his bodyweight, but the ciggies are history). The iQPhone’s starring role is one of mercifully few concessions to the book’s contemporary setting.

Deaver preserves his book’s timeless feel by largely ignoring modern geopolitics and pitting Bond against a traditionally barking villain, a necrophiliac billionaire with a silly name. The action trots the globe with the grubby intimacy – “it’s Cape Town, but it’s a rubbish tip in Cape Town” – of the books, not the films.

Deaver adds a series of twists that reveal a Bond with more Sherlockian intelligence than Fleming’s. But it’s his everlasting mobile battery rather than his brains that will leave many readers most envious.

Rating: * * * *

http://www.telegraph...ver-review.html

[Jim]

http://www.bbc.co.uk...t-arts-13540943

[quantumofsolace]

http://www.guardian....y-deaver-review

[chrisno1]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/26/carte-blanche-jeffery-deaver-review

seeems as though he doesn't like it very much, Deaver's eggs have all curdled, as it were...

[marktmurphy]

http://www.thisislon...mr-bond-yarn.do

[Jim]

http://www.express.c...-Jeffery-Deaver

[Jump James]

They keep saying that Jeffery is the first American to pen a James Bond novel. I’d always had Raymond down as an American who wrote James Bond novels. You would think a quick Google search would have not been too hard for the journalists. Also all this talk of Aston Martins being scrapped for a Bentley, they never read the books also then? Ok, below is not a review but even so, you would think they might have fact checked before hand…

http://www.dailymail...Martin-car.html

[Jim]

It's the Daily Mail - what can one really expect except massive inaccuracy?

[marktmurphy]

They keep saying that Jeffery is the first American to pen a James Bond novel. I’d always had Raymond down as an American who wrote James Bond novels.

I suppose you could say that Deaver is the first American novelist to write one

[Jump James]

It's the Daily Mail - what can one really expect except massive inaccuracy?

Well thats a very good point, of course. Cant class the Mail as "Press" can we.

[marktmurphy]

They're terrible, although I can't help but still admire that little trick they pulled to get Daniel Craig's mum to admit that he'd been cast as Bond!

[Loomis]

They keep saying that Jeffery is the first American to pen a James Bond novel.

Not surprising. I seem to recall some press reviews of DEVIL MAY CARE that proclaimed it to be the very first post-Fleming Bond continuation novel that had ever been written.

[Dustin]

Hopelessly addicted to his Q Branch smartphone (an “iQPhone”), this “rebooted” James Bond can barely cross a room without banging off an update to his “followers.” But for the Official Secrets Act, he’d be 007:Licensed To Tweet.

Shame it's not a QiPhone. Fry would have been amused.

[Loomis]

A new, glowing review courtesy of The Guardian:

http://www.guardian....y-deaver-review

[marktmurphy]

So the Guardian have sat on the fence with one bad review and one good one? That's not very helpful!

[Jim]

That's probably the review from The Observer - different print, same website, as I understand it.

[marktmurphy]

Oh yes; good point.

[Jim]

Private Eye - "Judging by some of the explanatory glosses (Sappers were combat engineers, the soldiers who built bridges, airports and bomb shelters for the troops...), the specimen reader is conceived as a not-over-bright teenager from the American Midwest"

Lordy.

The review does appear to confuse South Africa with South America - not-over-bright snobbery from Carlisle Street, it seems.

[Dell Deaton]

LINK

[Jim]

http://www.countryli...te-Blanche.html

[Dustin]

How ironic, Country Life doing a review of a Bond novel. One almost expects Bond to pick up this copy next time he's waiting for the return of a billionaire after he searched the man's house.

[Jim]

I do enjoy a good Country Life - at least 30 pages of solid house pørn every week.

[Dustin]

Tend to be more a Horse & Hound kind of guy myself, for much the same reasons though.

Small chance they will ever do a Bond review, Carte Blanche or otherwise...

Edited by Dustin, 20 July 2011 - 10:25 AM.

[Jim]

Tend to be more a Horse & Hound kind of guy myself, for much the same reasons though.

Small chance they will ever do a Bond review, Carte Blanche or otherwise...

Horse and Hound pørn? The very definition of too much information, old freckle.

On the second point, if one takes that hard-hitting documentary Notting Hill as fact - which it is - they have a most charming film reviewer; when his 'phone's not being hacked, anyway.

[Dustin]

On the second point, if one takes that hard-hitting documentary Notting Hill as fact - which it is - they have a most charming film reviewer; when his 'phone's not being hacked, anyway.

Seldom enough these days, wonder what he's chatting about that's so awfully interesting? Any public sex adventures seem a bit trite and old hat. Must have hoped to uncover an affair with a lesbian tennis player or something like.

Oh, glorious days of the information age. Somebody once said TV was the thinking man's masturbation. What is a tabloid then, a constipated man's laxative?

[Jim]

What is a tabloid then, a constipated man's laxative?

If you happen to appear in one, yes.