Sebastian Faulks' competent James Bond resuscitation, Devil May Care, could have been a great deal worse, but there's a reason why you can hear the sirens of the ambulances wailing in the distance all the same.
Remember Dr Zhivago, Rebecca and Gone with the Wind? Of course. But would you have equally fond memories of Lara's Child, Mrs DeWinter and Scarlett? Two out of these three were fairly trashy attempts at squeezing out the last drop of magic from already satisfying books. Mrs DeWinter was an ambitious and not entirely unsuccessful attempt by Susan Hill at completing the story of Rebecca's haunted narrator. But it fell into the same category as the myriads of Jane Austen sequels, from Pemberley to Mansfield Revisited: competent rather than scintillating.
In the literary canon, most people could name two sequels so powerful and so ambitious that they are classics in their own right. Jean Rhys' The Wide Sargasso Sea didn't just retell Jane Eyre. Rhys reimagined Jane Eyre from the perspective of Mr Rochester's mad wife, creating a fiery, passionate relationship for Mr and Mrs Rochester the first. Bertha's descent into madness became her metaphor for the fractured minds of the colonised. John Gardner's Grendel took on the most venerable of English epics, Beowulf, and retold it from the perspective of the monster. He made Grendel a compelling figure, hunted down by the state's appointed executioner.
But if the handful of great literary sequels survive by transcending the original, the task is paradoxically harder for those who aim at the popular fiction canon. Sebastian Faulks took six weeks to write Devil May Care, which was often the length of time that Ian Fleming put into his Bond novels. He opens well, with 007 disillusioned, uncharacteristically dry and bitter after the death of his wife in Her Majesty's Secret Service. There's more than a hint of the Bond of Casino Royale, Fleming's first and most compelling novel, in Faulks' portrait. Bond is over the memory loss that plagued him in You Only Live Twice, the last of the Fleming-authored Bond novels, but clearly a shadow of his former self.
In the first few chapters, the avid Bond fan will enjoy Faulks' knowledgeable tip of the hat to previous Fleming novels. The villain du jour is a man distinguished by a deformity of the hand that makes it resemble a monkey's paw, with dreams of starting a version of another Opium War. His tennis match with a limply reviving 007 references the golf match between Goldfinger and Bond; the twin sisters Scarlett and Poppy Papava have the vulnerability, toughness and legs of previous Bond women. But as Devil May Care lurches on, what brings it down is not that the plot is thin