Cold Fall

Cold Fall by John Gardner

Cold Fall marked the end of the John Gardner authored James Bond books when it came out around 1997.  After finishing this tale, I’m convinced that Gardner was aware it would be his last, and labored through with the sole intention of finishing up the book as quickly as he could.

This book has some interesting ideas, but never seems to really ever let much of a plot develop.  It doesn’t help when the “story” takes a five year break in the middle of the book.  The only reason that I can think the author does this is so he can make this a continuation (somewhat) from his last novel (Seafire), but he needed too big of a background to set it up properly.  So the second half of this novel takes place at the conclusion of his last book.

Not that any of this really matters.  The “continuation” I speak of revolves around his love interest from the last novel.  The Bond Girl ends up pretty mangled in the last effort, and since Bond really “cares for this one”, we can’t really just let her fade off into the post-Bond Girl sunset.  Speaking of Bond Girls, I think there’s a total of three former ones that show up in this story.  I’m not entirely sure about that – as the books don’t stay in my memory as prevalently as the movies do.  Plus, add one or two more consequential ladies to the story, and you have a lot of women running through the story with names like “Flicka” and “Sukie”.

The plot revolves around a terrorist group called C.O.L.D., which stands for Children of the Last Days.  They’re one of those morally righteous groups that think the only way the earth can get any better is to bring mass destruction everywhere so society can essentially start over.

This book also is supposedly the last to feature the original M.  M is getting old.  He was pretty ill in the last book, and now the powers that be are pushing him towards retirement.  There are hints of the new M.  It’s a (gasp) female M.  This is probably because this book came out right around the time the Pierce Brosnan movies started when Mme. Judi Dench reprised the role.

Had this book been fleshed out a bit more, it might have been more enduring.  It’s very short in length, yet as I’ve mentioned, it seems like this is what the author was trying to do.  When we finally get to that obligatory point in the Bond story where the villain is describing his plot to overthrow the world, the reader can’t help but notice that the book only has ten more pages of content.  It can’t be that big of a deal if Bond only gets ten pages to save the universe.  On a related note to James Bond villains everywhere: Don’t ever consciously keep James Bond in the room with all of the bad guys when you describing your fiendish plot.  You see, this gives 007 an advantage as he’s trying to save the world since he’ll now know exactly what he needs to do.

Gardner had a pretty good run.  Some of his books were really good, some of them were really not good, most were in between.  This one could have been better had he put a bit more care into it.