Bond's back just where he belongs

POOR old 007. M’s slightly premature obituary in You Only Live Twice reveals that James Bond was born in 1924, which would make him 84 years old today. And they still won’t let him lie down.

At least Sebastian Faulks has the decency to set the latest Bond thriller back in 1967, when piggy-back parachute jumping, extreme free diving and the casual butchering of various opponents and psychopaths might have been run-of-the-mill pastimes for a spry 43-year-old.

But at the beginning of this latest thriller, the warning signs are there – Bond is off the booze and even struggling with

a touch of mid-life lost libido.

There’s no lack of drive in the story itself, though; the plot reads as if it’s had a shot of literary Viagra, pumped up so there’s no danger of mistaking it for reality.

But then, that was always true of the Bond books – it’s just that, back in the Sixties, people were a bit more ready to swallow all the hooey about mysterious aircraft, high-tech bases and malevolent multi-millionaires desperate to plunge the world into war just to settle their private grudges.

Faulks has certainly done his homework – not just in copying Ian Fleming’s laconic, spare style but in reworking some of his most famous scenes, such as Oddjob sucked ignominiously out of an aeroplane window.

Once Bond played Goldfinger at golf for high stakes; this time he demonstrates his prowess at tennis. Sometimes it all seems a little familiar – there will certainly be arguments for Bond bores for years to come over which bits of this book were culled from which of the originals.

Which isn’t to say that Devil May Care itself isn’t good fun.

Dr Julius Gorner, a Bond villain in the mould of Auric Goldfinger or Dr No – the monkey-like left hand, usually concealed in a white glove, is a master touch – plots to flood the West with drugs.

Some cynics might say he seems to have succeeded in the past 30 years but Bond’s pursuit of him from Paris to Iran has enough twists to keep you turning the pages.

Those fans who, like Faulks, first read the Bond books as adolescents will be pleased to know that there are Bond girls – identical twins, in fact, with a surprise for him. “Every man’s fantasy,” one of them says coyly.

If they don’t seem quite as sexy as Honeychile Rider in Dr No, or Tatiana Romanova in From Russia With Love, that’s not their fault.

We’ve probably just grown up a bit. It’s a relief, too, that Bond doesn’t stay on the wagon – and that he treats the enthusiasm of Faulks’s New Age M for yoga and psychological fitness assessments with such scorn.

But in the end, it’s a dream world. What’s really happened to Bond?

A little research among my own  contacts reveals that he is actually living in a slightly down-at-heel care home on the south coast and paying a high price for decades of abusing his body in the service of Queen and Country.

The old Sobranie habit has left him coughing and wheezing with a severe case of emphysema; those famous dry martinis have resulted in an enlarged liver and an embarrassing bladder problem, and as for the habits of a predatory seducer – well, at 84, some things are just too repulsive to contemplate.

So perhaps it’s better, like Faulks, to stay back there in the Sixties – when men were men, when you could take your Bentley through Hyde Park at 60mph without troubling the police and when women (or at least Miss Moneypenny) thought it was quite funny to be threatened with a good spanking.

But that’s the trouble with nostalgia – the past is never quite as good as you remember.