James Bond Poem by gershon hepner

James Bond

Rating: 5.0


Without an inner life, James Bond
enjoys the ladies, riding herd
as sexual as a magic wand
that’s rarely shaken, never stirred.

Sometimes humming, never hemming,
Bond is never insecure,
guaranteeing Ian Fleming
an 007 sinecure.

Charles McGrath writes about the new James Bond novel, “Devil May Care, ” written by Sebastian Faulkes (“That Licene to Kill is Still Unexpired, ” NYT, June 1,2008) :
One key to a successful knockoff, he decided, was finding the right story, and eventually he came up with one that involved both the catastrophic cold war ominousness that Fleming so loved and the kind of specific crime plot that energizes the best of the Bond novels. In “Devil May Care” the villain is trying to undermine Western civilization by addicting everyone to cheap drugs. A subplot involves a rogue C.I.A. operative who wants to drag Britain into Vietnam.“Mostly I just had fun, ” Mr. Faulks said. “I wrote the book the way Fleming did — 2,000 words a day, except I left out the cocktails and the snorkeling.” “Tuning into the style was the difficult thing, ” he continued. “You have to hear the tone. That applies to your own book as well as to anyone else’s. And so finding that style, that pitch, was all-important. With Fleming, once I’d got his voice I developed a sentence structure that was about 20 percent mine and 80 percent his — plenty of verbs, not many adverbs or adjectives. The real danger was getting too close and then winding up in parody territory.” He added: “I didn’t anguish, and I didn’t feel Fleming looking over my shoulder. The only difficulty I had was when I wanted to slow the story down, to allow a page or two for something significant to sink in. I thought that I could draw a little on Bond’s inner life, but I found that Bond doesn’t really have an inner life.”

6/1/08

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