Icebreaker – John Gardner, 1983 [No Stars]

007 Faces His Greatest Threat...a Sneering Novelist

Who in their right minds hires a novelist to flip off his audience?

In the early 1980s, the answer to the above question was Glidrose Publications Ltd. A production company owned by the family of Ian Fleming, Glidrose held literary title to Fleming’s famous fictional spy, James Bond. To carry on the Bond novels after Fleming’s death, they contracted a novelist, one John Gardner. By the time of his third Bond novel, Icebreaker, it had become clear Gardner not only disliked James Bond the character, but resented his audience, too.

James Bond stories may be campy, silly, even demented at times. But they should never be ironic. That’s what they became under Gardner’s pen. The smirk was apparent in his first novel, License Renewed, where Bond hooked up with a gorgeous armorer-assistant to Bond’s munitions man Q, dubbed Q’ute. His follow-up, For Special Services, paid smug attention to Bond’s advancing age by having him sleep with both the daughter of his best friend Felix Leiter and the daughter of his greatest nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Cue Matthew McConaughey: “That’s what I love about spy-novel girls. I get older, they stay the same age.”

Those novels still entertained, fitfully. But by the time of Icebreaker Gardner was through playing Mr. Nice Guy. If he couldn’t kill Bond with mockery, he would render 007 unrecognizable by making him impotent.

Icebreaker features Bond as pin cushion. Ceaselessly he bounces from hotel-to-hotel, gets briefed about the high stakes of his mission, and is set up for some awful betrayal. Sometimes you see the betrayal coming; other times it’s too absurd to be explained, let alone anticipated. It’s one thing to be two-faced; in Icebreaker multiple characters turn out to be three-faced.

To supply Bond’s main opposition, Gardner calls upon that old standby: Nazis. Not just any Nazis, but a vast underground network who have infiltrated espionage organizations around the world. They are led by an age-defying Finnish SS officer who calls himself Count von Glöda.

In an opening scene, we watch one of von Glöda’s suicide battalions take out most of a Libyan compound. More attacks follow; soon the world press is raising shrill alarm:

They come out of nowhere, kill, or die, or disappear – returning to their lairs. Have these followers of the dark Nazi Age returned from their graves, to wreak vengeance on their former conquerors? Until now, the bulk of urban terrorism has been motivated by far left ideals. The self-styled and efficient NSAA brings with it a new and highly disturbing dimension.

Eventually four spy organizations come together to put a stop to the National Socialist Action Army. They are the CIA, Israel’s Mossad, the Soviet Union’s KGB, and Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

“Strange bedfellows,” Bond’s boss M notes, assigning Bond to the team.

Which hardly covers it.

The main feeling Bond projects in Icebreaker is total vulnerability. Instead of a resolute man of action, Bond is as helpless as a kitten up a tree. If he’s not sweating some half-his-age hottie with a Neolithic come-on, he’s pondering a possible betrayal and doing nothing about it.

The Finnish-Russian border provides the main setting for Icebreaker, as Bond deals with deadly snow plows, mined ski runs, ice torture, and a hidden lair. It shares some winter vistas with On Her Majesty's Secret Service, anyway. Image from http://upnorth.eu/finnish-defence-minister-1-million-migrants-could-leave-russia/

Icebreaker centers on betrayal. Every major character except for Bond is playing some game with 007, often one in which the objective is 007’s death. Time and again we are told Bond has his suspicions, but time and again he simply goes along with whatever program has been set:

See it through, a voice said from deep inside him. Follow on, and maybe you’ll reach your crock of gold.

This makes no sense, but it passes for strategy for our hero.

Late in the book, he calls himself “a tethered goat,” one of a running series of quips which Bond delivers in lieu of ploys, feints, or any other form of concrete action. Allegiances, we are told, “swerved back and forth like tennis balls.”

Gardner writes: For one of the few times in his life, James Bond felt out of control.

It’s all Bond can do just to keep abreast with the sexy maidens Gardner throws his way, like Mossad agent Rivke Ingber, introduced coyly posing poolside at a hotel in a skimpy bikini. A fellow member of the team whose mission moniker gives the novel its name, she invites Bond’s thorough inspection while pointing out her issues with their comrades:

“Not stupid, James. Chauvinists. They’re not noted for their confidence in working with women, that’s all.”

“Never had that trouble myself.” Bond’s face remained blank.

“No. So I’ve heard.”

That’s another of my annoyances with Icebreaker. Bond’s celebrated quips feel off, like he’s barely interested. Certainly Gardner wasn’t.

Late in Icebreaker, Bond has one of those stereotypical face-offs with the supervillain, the stuff of parody long before Mike Myers:

“Your Service, the CIA, and Mossad, all had their controllers removed and the contact phones – or radio in Mossad’s case – manned by my own people. So, friend Bond, do not expect the cavalry to come to your aid.”

“I never expect the cavalry. Don’t trust horses. Temperamental beasts at the best of times, and since that business at Balaclava – the Valley of Death – I’ve not had much time for the cavalry.”

“You’re quite a humorist, Bond. Particularly for a man in your present situation.”

Does that exchange strike you as amusing? Inspiriting? Or is Gardner having a laugh at the prevailing notion of Bond the quipster-in-the-face-of-death? I think so, too.

Is that a snowmobile John Gardner is sitting in, or is he just happy to see you? Sorry, but the bad sex banter has gotten to me. The photograph is from the back cover of my first-edition copy of Icebreaker.

Gardner, who died in 2007, wrote a total of 16 Bond novels, including two movie novelizations. He produced more Bond than Ian Fleming. Fleming had a difficult relationship with his fabled creation, even trying to kill Bond off at the end of From Russia With Love. Gardner labored under similar reservations.

Gardner ironically started his spy-fiction career with a parody of Bond, detailing the misadventures of a cowardly bounder named Boysie Oakes. Oakes novels were popular in the 1960s; one even was made into a movie. Gardner would later call Oakes “a complete piss-take of J. Bond.”

Gardner developed two more adventure-novel series in the 1970s, one featuring a spy named Herbie Kruger, the other continuing the exploits of Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis Professor Moriarty. In 1980, Glidrose offered Gardner a three-book contract to restart the James Bond novels, which had been largely dormant since Fleming’s death in 1964.

Gardner noted his perplexity in an essay on his life included on his website, www.john-gardner.com: “It was indeed a surprise to have the three-book contract renewed time and again, and I did the work – because I am a professional – as a challenge. In fact I have never been really fond of J Bond who is to my mind a fantasy character.”

I include this not only to avoid delving deeper into Icebreaker, a novel I actively dislike, but because I think Gardner’s comment lays out the root of the problem, behind this novel and the other Bonds of his I have read. Gardner never took Bond seriously, and his contempt became more of a weight as the series went on.

Fleming’s Bond was a flawed spy, too; he suffered particularly from a certain ennui that reflected the prosperous age he sprang from. You can check off the number of times he missed clues or managed to get captured by the villains. But for the most part, Fleming’s storycraft was solid; his sense of setting and character involving.

In Icebreaker, everyone seems to be sleepwalking through a series of bland, interchangeable locales. Ridiculous coincidences and contrivances happen with regularity. A woman Bond has known and slept with for years turns out to be a secret agent. Another secret agent is revealed as the main villain’s own daughter.

Late in the book, we discover M sent Bond on this assignment fully aware that many of his comrades were snakes, resulting in this exchange after Bond has run a literal gauntlet of fire and ice:

“Next time, sir, I trust you’ll give me a full and proper briefing.”

M coughed. “We thought it better for you to find out for yourself, 007.”

Here and throughout Icebreaker, Gardner seems bent on some private idea of Bond novel as parody. But there is no humor to his treatment, only a brusque sneer. There’s no engagement, or joy, or excitement, just the vague sense of a hamster on a treadmill, spinning for grub. For this Bond fan, reading Icebreaker was a depressing experience back in the 1980s, and remains so now.