Solo by William Boyd – review

A Bond book is a tough gig, but Boyd's authentically written attempt entertains more than it exasperates

• 
• • Richard Williams
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 2 October 2013 07.00 BST

Ticking the right boxes … Daniel Craig as James Bond. Photograph: Francois Duhamel/AP

Several unusual incidents occur during the course of Solo, the latest attempt to prolong the literary existence of James Bond. The secret agent pays his first recorded visit to the cinema, to see Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (this is 1969), although he gets bored and leaves before the end. He considers changing his hairstyle, for aesthetic reasons rather than as a disguise, and wonders whether the short fringe favoured by a television presenter (he can't remember his name, but it sounds like David Frost) might suit him. During a long car journey he stops to relieve himself in a wood, which will come as a shock to those who believe that 007, like the Queen, exists in a realm above such crude bodily functions. Perhaps most disturbing of all, while getting dressed for the final scene he selects a knitted silk tie in pale blue rather than his customary black or navy.

There would be no fun in writing a James Bond book without heading off-piste every now and then, risking the aficionado's wrath. These are William Boyd's gestures of independence as he follows in the tracks of Ian Fleming, but he is also careful to comfort the 007 fan by ticking a few hallowed boxes: the knitted ties, the vintage wines. Someone's crew-cut is described using Fleming's preferred phrase: en brosse. There is an obsession with breakfast exceeding even that of the original Bond, who was finicky about his eggcups and his marmalade. And within the first half-dozen pages the hero has met a fine-bodied woman wearing a zippered catsuit and a dab of Guerlain's Shalimar (his own mother's favourite, Bond rather sweetly observes).

Solo treads a path already negotiated by Kingsley Amis, writing as Robert Markham (Colonel Sun, 1968), John Gardner (14 books between 1981 and 1996, starting with Licence Renewed), Sebastian Faulks (Devil May Care, 2008), and Jeffery Deaver (Carte Blanche, 2011). However genuine the enthusiasm of those authors, and however much in thrall to an adolescent infatuation with the myth of Bond they may have been, they write in the knowledge that the result of their labours will never share the pantheon with Fleming's own 12 novels and half a dozen short stories. Perhaps the best they can hope for is that their Bond story – even just the title – will be taken up as the basis of the next movie.
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