Book review: Trigger Mortis - the James Bond conundrum remains
Anthony Horowitz is the fourth author to step into Ian Fleming's shoes. He incorporates unpublished work by the Bond creator, but the novel doesn’t succeed in creating a 007 for our times
Since the death of Ian Fleming in 1964, Bond has passed through the hands of numerous authors – four of them since 2008. Sebastian Faulks, Jeffery Deaver and William Boyd wrote a single novel each, and now we get Trigger Mortis, Anthony Horowitz’s attempt at reviving the cold war relic. The truth is that, payday aside, stepping into Fleming’s shoes seems a thankless business. It’s not that Fleming is exactly inimitable, but the parts of his style that are easy to pastiche are also obnoxious, while the things that are worth copying are as elusive as they are distinctive.
It’s a literary cliché to acknowledge that Fleming was a sadist, a racist and a misogynist, and there is nothing covert about the viciousness that infuses Bond’s world. Women are bitches, anyone non-white and non-anglophone is definitively subhuman, and torture is lingering and explicitly erotic. A modern Bond-chronicler could copy these things and create a distinctively Flemingish fiction, but also one that would repulse almost everyone. Yet even with all his brutishness, Fleming was a gifted and striking prose stylist. Within the first three pages of Casino Royale, you know everything you need to know about Bond and his universe of smoke and sleaze and ambiguity.
This Bond is uncharacteristically cultured: he has a habit of literary allusion that suggests a sudden personality change
Horowitz’s job, then, is both simple and borderline impossible: do Bond exactly the same, and make it different. There are two things that give Trigger Mortis a leg-up. First, Horowitz has already proved his feel for Fleming with the Alex Rider series, which consciously updates the Bond mythos for the 21st century. Second, Trigger Mortis makes use of previously unpublished material by Fleming – a treatment for an episode of a Bond TV series that was never made – and follows on directly from Goldfinger, so we get a continuation of Bond’s relationship with Pussy Galore.