Book Review: Seafire

TLDR: “Just okay”

I don’t love John Gardner’s Bond novels. There, I said it.

This was from 1994, which is very late in his tenure. He would only write one more original Bond novel after this one (plus the GoldenEye novelization). It was his 13th original novel in the series.

He fiddles with the canon quite a bit. Bond is now in charge of “Two Zeros,” which is some branch of MI6, I think? Also, he is living with his girlfriend, a former Swiss intelligence agent named Fredericka, or “Flicka.” I gather they met during a prior Gardner novel.

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This installment is… serviceable. It’s not bad, but Gardner always has some weirdness in his books. In this one, for instance, he has two cross-dressing female assassins who are apparently drop-dead gorgeous women, who also pass as male “Delta Force types” and manage to capture Bond and Flicka. That just didn’t seem credible to me.

There are also awkward moments in the plotting. Bond and Flicka are told not to do something, and they decide to go rogue, only to be stopped at the airport and sent back to MI6 to be told that it’s okay now – they can go do that thing… which eventually puts them right back on the same course they were on.

There are lots of henchmen on the villain side. It was hard to keep track of them all. In my head, I kept trying to envision it as a movie, and it just wasn’t working.

One more thing: maybe this is just filtered memories, but I feel like Gardner is kind of obsessed with Nazis and “the Fourth Reich.” Do lots of his Bond novels involve neo-Nazism? This one does, and I know there’s at least one more, maybe two, which seems odd.

I read it during a short business trip. I had found the novel in a used bookstore on vacation, and it’s one of the few I didn’t already have, so it was top-of-mind.