World War 2 is over for most - but not all. For those in the Secret Service, the war continues in the shadows. It’s the 1950s and secret agent 007 is killed in the Marseilles docks. Head of the 00 unit, M, decides to trial a promising young candidate for 007’s replacement: James Bond. Bond’s mission: find out why the Corsican mob in the south of France have stopped drug trafficking, why notorious double agent Madame 16 is involved, and avenge the fallen agent’s death. Bond has his licence to kill in… Forever and a Day!
This is the official prequel to Casino Royale, Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, and, though I’ve never read a Fleming Bond novel before (I know, I know), I think Anthony Horowitz’s novel is a pretty damn good Bond book and probably the equal of any of Fleming’s.
I liked that Horowitz started us off right at the beginning, before Bond became 007 and how he earned the codename and the licence to kill. The story hits the ground running, opening briefly in (where else?) London before, true to expectations of Bond’s signature globe-trotting adventures, taking us to Sweden where Bond is hunting down a former Nazi collaborator.
Horowitz does tick a lot of boxes - martinis, casinos, fast cars, fast women, gunfights, evil villains - but it doesn’t feel too overtly like he’s doing it; he’s wearing another man’s clothes but he’s made them his own. That said, the cover notes that the novel contains original material by Ian Fleming, which is an outline for an unused American TV show and a description of the Monte Carlo casino from Fleming’s travel book Thrilling Cities (so no new Fleming Bond material, if anyone was wondering), all of which is found in the casino scene when Bond meets Sixtine for the first time.
The characters are very striking and memorable. I loved how monstrously Scipio, the grossly overweight Corsican mob boss, is written, and Madame 16 is a fully realised character too - smart, sexy, dangerous, with an air of tragedy about her; she’s the perfect companion to Bond in this story.
A lot of the scenes are enthralling like the casino scene, Bond’s first encounter with Scipio, and especially the entire episode where Bond and Sixtine make a daring break-in and escape of the factory towards the end. I feel that novels as a medium don’t do justice to action scenes but it turns out that I just hadn’t read anybody who knew what they were doing before because the escape scene was genuinely gripping and really took me there - hats off to Anthony Horowitz. I think if a writer can write an actually exciting action scene, they’re something special and Horowitz is certainly that.
I also liked that scene because it highlights how green Bond is. This is his first solo outing as a 00 agent, he’s still young and inexperienced, and it shows in the mistakes he makes and how inelegant his plan was, in conception and execution (though it was effective).
Similarly formulaic in structure is the villain’s monologue of their evil plan to a captive Bond, which is a cliche, but again doesn’t feel like that here. Especially as the villain’s motivations can be seen as sympathetic given what they’ve been through. And the plan itself isn’t that cartoonishly silly either - it’s an inventive and original idea that you could imagine actually working as conceived. I really liked that the villains aren’t written as one-dimensional or moronic.
If there’s one aspect that I didn’t love, it’s the overly descriptive passages that make up the book. Bond isn’t a chatty (chatty bang bang) Cathy and is frequently alone so a lot of the scenes describe everything in them and what Bond’s doing, which is a bit laborious and frustrating to get through when you want the fun plot to keep up a decent pace.
Mostly though this is a superb action thriller with a lot of unpredictable and really great twists, all the way to the bloody end. Forever and a Day is an expertly-written, often compelling, memorable and highly entertaining James Bond story. I was very impressed with yet another Anthony Horowitz novel - this writer is quite brilliant!
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