Book Review: With A Mind To Kill by Anthony Horowitz
Horowitz’s title is more than a snappy, idiomatic-sounding, Fleming-esque selection: it signals his intent to lay bare the mental workings of Bond. Will we like what we find?
While this does not contain any plot spoilers, it does comment on the overall feeling and tone of the book and the general shape of its narrative. Some may consider these spoilers.
007’s ideological loyalty is never in doubt in With A Time To Kill but Horowitz skifully causes us to call into question who we think James Bond is; a not unimpressive feat for a character often referred to as a ‘blank slate’ for the projection of our desires and fantasies.
With A Mind To Kill is a direct continuation of Fleming’s final, more introspective novels You Only Live Twice and The Man With The Golden Gun, not just in terms of plot and character, but also theme and feel.
I make no secret of my predilection for these two Fleming books in particular, and not just because they’re the underdogs in many people’s rankings (a quality I always find endearing in both books and people). Both You Only Live Twice and The Man With The Golden Gun are more concerned with psychology than most of the other books, perhaps because they were written by someone confronting their own mortality and the Big Questions that attend life’s closure. The answers to these questions that Fleming puts forward are widely read as bleak: in You Only Live Twice, it’s clear that Bond’s simple, happy life as a fisherman, partner and father will soon come to an end as fragments of his memory dredge him back to Cold War duty. The Man With The Golden Gun ends with Bond being presented with a glimpse of a settled, domestic life - but all he can do is look away.
As a gay teenager reading these novels for the first time, I found these endings confirmatory. With no alternative narratives to suggest otherwise, I was convinced that I was destined to live life perpetually unsatisfied. These books’ endings resonated far more than any ending where a man and woman ended up living happily ever after. Bleak as Fleming’s endings were, they were also reassuring. Although Bond was perpetually restless, he still kept moving and didn’t let depression - or accidie - overwhelm him.
From the relatively safe distance of adulthood, I can’t help thinking what teenage me would have made of With A Mind To Kill. I think I would have found Bond’s dissatisfaction with his life very satisfying. While much of the appeal of Bond is his apparent unchangeability, there is a definite progression here, or at least a questioning of past certainties.
Bond’s liminality extends to the world Horowitz has created, or rather recreated. This is a period piece but not a time capsule. Far from inert, Horowitz’s book brings back to life the social and political shifts of the period which continue to shape our world today, while avoiding the nudge-nudge-wink-winkery inherent in writing with hindsight. The passage about Russian Intelligence blackmailing ministers “who cheated on their wives with girls or with boys” could have been lifted wholesale from Fleming (specifically From Russia, With Love) or news headlines from the time. But Horowitz’s treatment of a queer character, who appears only briefly but is sympathetically drawn before his horrifying demise, reveals him treading a fine line between sensibilities of the past and present.
Gender is as non-binary as it ever was in Fleming, perhaps even more so. Consistent with many of Fleming’s most memorable female characters, a girl here has a “sense of androgny” with masculine facial features and a desirably “boyish” body. Although it’s unlikely that Fleming ever read Susan Sontag’s seminal Notes On Camp (published only a few months before his death), he would have probably agreed with her that “what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine”.
With A Mind To Kill also straddles the boundaries of several genres. While Fleming provided us with several notable action set pieces which took us out of the realm of spy thriller, the stunner which closes out the first part of Horowitz’s book is more like something out of a Hitchcock film, complete with landmark location, or even a modern action movie. The climax also has echoes of Hitchcock before segueing into a le Carre-redolent denouement.
While nothing could (and probably should) compete with the nihilism of Fleming’s final paragraphs to The Man With The Golden Gun, the final section of With A Mind To Kill is devastating in its own way, closing off possibilities while also keeping the door open. Horowitz manages to make it feel fresh and alarming while also being a natural and inevitable extension of what has come before. Things have stayed the same, but they have also - at least in the mind - changed.
We each bring to Bond our own perspectives and life experiences. For me, With A Mind To Kill reaffirmed that Bond is less of a static Rorschach test and more of a walking contradiction, and one we can all relate to.
If you enjoyed this, you may be interested in this, one of the first pieces I wrote after starting Licence To Queer: what The Man With The Golden Gun meant - and still means - to me as a gay man:
https://www.licencetoqueer.com/blog/the-gay-with-the-golden-gun
