Book Review: Double or Nothing
Shaking up the Fleming formula, Sherwood serves up an intensely refreshing cocktail of all of our favourite ingredients with plenty of surprises. From the first sip to the last, Sherwood thrills us, sates our thirst for new Bond stories and makes us crave whatever comes next.
This review does not contain plot spoilers beyond the first 50 pages but does refer to specific action set pieces out of context, so if you want to go in completely fresh, read the book first.
How do you make one of the greatest Bond stories ever?
Simple: remove James Bond.
Well, calling what Kim Sherwood has done here ‘simple’ would be doing her a massive disservice. She deftly treads numerous tightropes: writing in a way that is reminiscent of Fleming without ever slipping into pastiche; setting up threads, Marvel Cinematic Universe-style, for the next two books while making Double or Nothing a satisfying read in its own right; making us miss Bond just enough but not too much.
Fleming kept Bond offstage for large chunks of two books: From Russia, With Love and The Spy Who Loved Me, both successful experiments in my mind. Sherwood agrees: they are two of her favourite Flemings.
It’s telling that the first Bond novel that Sherwood read was From Russia, With Love, the book where Bond doesn’t appear until over a third of the way through. Sherwood told me it was “very much an influence on writing his absence.” The first third of From Russia, With Love is still very much about Bond however, with the SMERSH agents plotting his downfall. Similarly, in Double or Nothing, the characters either have had relationships with Bond or are aware of his legend. He may be off stage but he’s frequently on the page, and rarely far from characters’ thoughts.
Fleming’s genius with From Russia, With Love is to make us anticipate Bond’s entry into the story. Sherwood has to pull off something even trickier however: making us care for her three new Double 0s without us pining too much for 007’s return, which we know won’t be happening anytime soon.
The 007-shaped vacuum has had to be filled by someone, or rather some people: three eminently capable new Double-0s. That doesn’t mean that, individually, Harwood, Dryden and Bashir wouldn’t be up to doing the job of one Bond. These aren’t diluted 007s. They are all rounders when it comes to espionage but, like Bond, have their specialisms. 003 Johanna Harwood outdoes 007 in the adaptability stakes. 009 Sid Bashir is more strategic than everyone’s favourite blunt instrument. And 004 Joseph Dryden would outmatch 007 for sheer strength, mental fortitude, resilience and downright hard-as-nailsness…
You must excuse me here. Whenever I describe Dryden I find my grasp on Standard English slipping. The character thrills me to the extent that even the most super of superlatives don’t seem up to the task of conveying how I feel about him. Dryden is gay, black and disabled. But don’t let that list of protected characteristics lead you into thinking that Dryden is here to tick diversity boxes. He would be a fascinating character without these labels, so well-developed is inner life. Sherwood takes us inside her characters’ heads more than Fleming does, who himself was not averse to passages of introspection. She gets the balance just right: solipsism never creeps in, despite the characters having ample reasons to wallow in their neuroses. The most thrilling parts of Dryden’s narrative have him pushing past his limits, displaying Bond-like fortitude as he overcomes challenges. And what challenges! Although Harwood and Bashir have their fair share of the action, Dryden arguably gets the most cinematic set pieces: a showdown in a relic-of-the-Cold War spaceport; a boxing match in a crumbling building; a thrilling car chase across the world’s longest sea bridge; a cat and mouse rescue mission through Hong Kong’s infamous Chungking Mansions; the final confrontation with the ‘big bad’ on a luxury yacht. Along the way, Dryden also breaks through the barriers that are inevitably faced by someone at the intersection of sexual orientation, race and disability. Sherwood doesn’t shy away from depicting the bigotry he faces (a bar fight off the back of a homophobic attack is gloriously empowering) but ensures that Dryden is never ashamed of who he is.
When Moneypenny asks Dryden to rekindle his relationship with the man he once loved for the sake of the mission, his hesitance has nothing to do with homophobia. The problem is: he still loves him - deeply. This is not like Bond “pimping for England,” as Fleming describes it in From Russia, With Love. It’s not even Bond being commanded to pump Paris Carver for information in Tomorrow Never Dies, although Sherwood is keen to acknowledge this was an inspiration for the setup. The relationship between Dryden and ‘Lucky Luke’ is taken more seriously than that, as are all the romances. That doesn’t preclude a healthy amount of flirtatious banter being the order of the day from practically everybody. Sherwood’s iteration of the Bond universe is even less sexually inhibited than Fleming’s.
Fleming once said: “Bond has no gift for personal relationships. He gets the girls - beautiful girls - but I make him suffer for it.” And crikey do these Double-0s suffer for love. One of the girls Bond ‘got’ is Harwood (or was it Harwood ‘got’ Bond?). She then got with Bashir but he then dropped her over the guilt of losing Bond. Talk about a love triangle! These are not the only polyamorous possibilities in play: the circumstances surrounding Bond’s disappearance open up possibilities which may be developed in future books. As Tanner rather matter-of-factly puts it in a flashback to the briefing for the mission that leads to Bond going missing: “Mikhail, Russia’s foremost climate scientist, wants you to wine, dine and f*ck him. If you’re not too busy doing the same to his wife.” Well, quite! Bond replies that when Mikhail found out about Bond’s relationship with his wife “he wasn’t angry. Had the idea it brought us closer.”
Sherwood herself uses a star analogy to describe the relationships her new characters have with Bond, some in his immediate orbit, others barely visible to the naked eye. Stars radiate brilliance but they can also collapse in on themselves. Is Bond actually a black hole, dragging everyone down with him? Only time - and two more books - will tell.
To stick with the gambling metaphor Sherwood threads through the whole book, from the title onwards, all bets would appear to be off. There were around a dozen or more occasions while reading Double or Nothing where I did a double take, flicking my eyes backwards over the sentence I had just reached the end of, not quite believing what I had read. Some of these would be considered superficial, at least outside the hardcore Bond fandom. Think: distinctive costume choices, vehicles, drinks. Others are likely to cause a ruckus amongst even the most casual fans. At least a couple were so ‘out there’ that I was practically giddy with joy that Sherwood had ‘gone there’. I was outright shocked by the ending.
There will inevitably be a (hopefully very small) group of people who resist pushing the boundaries of Bond. These will probably be the same people who use ‘woke’ in a pejorative sense, rather than viewing being alert to injustice as positive. To these people, I would say: don’t forget that Bond was always an outsider. It’s right there in Fleming.
The real test of any Bond book is how quickly I read it. Despite having very limited time due to work commitments, I finished this in three evenings. If it had been the weekend, I would have read it in one sitting. I then went back and savoured it a second time, finding even more to love, especially some of the deeper cuts from Fleming: returning characters, both major and minor; the ‘hurricane room’ from From Russia, With Love; a cheeky homage to Thrilling Cities. Sherwood doesn’t emulate Fleming’s style but she has his knack for ‘uncanny’ imagery that sticks in the memory. When Sherwood goes inside Dryden’s head to reflect on how the King’s Cross area of London has changed since his delinquent youth, he thinks of the roads, alleys and railway tracks as “suturing” the nearby districts of Camden and Bloomsbury. It’s a very Dryden word: only someone with his unique set of experiences would think of transport routes as surgical stitches holding everything together. Fleming’s most memorable imagery always occurs on the fly, rather than in extended paragraphs of description. He only waxes lyrical when it comes to the Bond lifestyle: food, drinks, clothes, cars. And it’s the same here. Sherwood follows suit.
As with all aspects of Bond, Sherwood quite simply gets it. She’s one of us: an über fan. And no one could possibly doubt Sherwood’s talent as a writer. There’s a sentence summarising Bond’s personal tragedies that left me breathless with admiration at its poetic concision.
Removing 007 turns out to be one of the best creative decisions Sherwood could have made. Double or Nothing provides a way into the Bond universe to more people than ever before. Even more importantly, it’s also one of the most thrilling Bond stories of all time.
