SilverFin

Really quite good. Excellent in fact.

As an adult I was somewhat reluctant to read SilverFin by Charlie Higson. I thought that it would be too simplistically written and plotted to keep me entertained; how wrong I was! SilverFin is the first novel in the Young Bond series and it's a book written for the teenage market with Bond portrayed as an adolescent in the 1930s. This is the first of Higson's Young Bond novels and as they feature the words “James Bond” on the cover they are all fully sanctioned by Ian Fleming Publications.

The novel exceeded my expectations as it provided a very solid back story for the Fleming novels to come. References were cleverly added to tie in with what we already know about Bond: his appearance, life, friends, family, likes, dislikes and the details we already knew about his past and which helped to forever shape him. Higson also ingeniously uses what we all know and love about the movies too and weaves them into the story: the mad villain, the car chases, the fiendish plan, henchmen and even a Bond girl with a suitable outlandish name: Wilder Lawless. I must say that naming her horse, “Martini” was probably one step too far. Other points I noted was that the opening is very similar to Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, Bond's Aunt and Uncle drive the same Bentley as Bond and the Mighty Donovan name-checked at the circus is probably Red Grant's father. I'm sure that there are lots more which I've missed?

While the story fitted with what was possible within the constraints of being a 13 year old boy one concession Higson does make is that despite being set between WWI and WW2 the characters language is modern and understandable, something which fits into the target market expectations but not something you'd probably see in an adult book.

As the plot is revealed the details of the villain's dastardly plan become clear, building to a final thrilling culmination of action and suspense. Of course, being Bond he finds himself in all sorts of “impossible to escape from” situations, which of course he escapes from. But that has always been one of the fun parts of Bond, understanding the dreadful situation Bond finds himself in and trying to figure out how you would breakout and then seeing how he does it. Towards the end of the book Bond faces one punishing experience after another, its fairly relentless stuff. I found myself thinking that perhaps some of these could have been cut out as the more Bond has to go through the more far-fetched it becomes. But saying this it was still a fun and easy book to read, especially as the writing is undemanding for an adult.

So in summary, a nice distraction from my main project in 2015 of reading all of the original Fleming books and I'll definitely add the follow-up, Blood Fever to my “to-read” list. I suppose one factor as to whether or not you will like the book is how much you want Bonds back story to remain ambiguous. If you want his past to be shrouded in mystery with only a few details being revealed then you may want to avoid SilverFin, but I would certainly recommend Silverfin to any Bond fan, regardless of their age.