Another good man in Africa — this time it’s James Bond

“As Bond’s biographer,” Ian Fleming said, “I am most anxious to see that he lives as long as possible.” He got his wish. Sixty years after Casino Royale — the first of Fleming’s 14 books about the spy — the James Bond franchise is thriving.

William Boyd follows in the footsteps of Kingsley Amis, Jeffrey Deaver, and others, in adding to the post-Fleming Bond library, with a new novel, Solo. Boyd was introduced to the Bond oeuvre by his father in the 1960s.

Solo is set in 1969. It begins at the Dorchester Hotel, in London, the morning after Bond’s 45th birthday. The Bond ingredients are present — the gadgetry, the cocktails, the prissy sartorial matters, the constant re-loading of his cigarette case. He thinks nothing of dropping £100 at chemin de fer, in the hotel’s private casino, in a 20-minute flurry.

Women, including Bryce Fitzjohn, tumble at his feet. Fitzjohn is a divorced, B-movie actress from Co Kilkenny. Bond is sexually voracious; Boyd describes it as Bond’s “prehistoric instinct”. But Boyd pulls back from the sexism and snobbery of Fleming, a ladies’ man whom a cohort described as “handsome in an ‘old shoe’ kind of way”. Boyd’s Bond suffers from liberal pangs that Fleming would never have countenanced. Among the starving masses of West Africa, Bond’s “powerlessness made him want to weep”.

Boyd was a smart choice for a Bond thriller. The action clips along. There are welcome literary flourishes and a dense plot. Most of the action is in Africa, which is wise, because Boyd grew up there and set several of his novels there, including his Whitbread Book Award winner, A Good Man in Africa. Africa doesn’t interfere with Bond’s whisky drinking, either — it’s the best drink for the tropics, he reckons, as it should never be drunk with ice.

M is wonderfully anachronistic and paternal. He chides Bond for smoking cigarettes; he extols the benefits of pipe-smoking, which, he says, has helped him to avoid sore throats, and he gives Bond his reason for living — missions, which provide rushes of adrenalin and the excuse to cast aside “all the cosy securities of everyday life”.

In Solo, M despatches Bond to Zanzarim, a fictitious country in West Africa, which has been ravaged for two years by famine and civil war. The oil interests of Her Majesty’s Government there are threatened. Bond’s mission, instructs M, is “to stop the war, of course”. Bond departs, with an alias as a war journalist for a French news agency. His goal is to immobilise the chief warlord in the region, Brigadier Solomon Adeka, “the African Napoleon”, but things become complicated by duplicitous lovers, arms dealers and mercenaries who swarm around him once he lands in the jungle, especially Kobus Breed, a shady nemesis with a face half-blown-away.

In the last third of the book, the action switches to Washington DC, as Bond, who is supposed to be convalescing from gun-shot wounds in the Hebrides, goes behind the service’s back to extract revenge, to “go solo”, as he says ominously.

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