Review: Take your medicine like a good boy, clean your gun, and travel to Cairo on a submarine
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 12, 2013
"The sight of a German rocket streaking through one's window at two in the morning is quite sobering," Ian Fleming wrote in his diary, neglecting to mention that his first thought after the incident was where else to take the young lady he was with at the time. The incident had yet another repercussion: Fleming was thrust into a forced domesticity with his longtime "steady" Ann O'Neill.The scenes of battered yet defiant London are probably less powerful than little things we observe from the start of this novel: making the breakfast with the last of the eggs, fishing out cigarette butts from an ashtray, Ann, who's wearing an altered pair of Fleming's navy blue trousers and "scavenging crystallized sugar crusts off the rim of the sugar bowl." Things are decidedly different from the "half-forgotten paradise that was London before the war."Damian Stevenson uses all but a mere handful of pages to firmly set the boundaries and the feeling of the time in which "The Ian Fleming Files: Operation Parsifal" is set before thrusting us into action. Breakfast and a car chase, anyone? Yet, this is just a small taste of what's to come.As we know now, there were numerous plots to remove Hitler from power. In this novel, one of such plots has a codename: "Operation Parsifal." A "The members of Parsifal are bankers, representatives of top German businesses, officials from the Navy and Ministry of Armaments, the list goes on." Wolfgang Krupp, one of the most powerful industrialists in Germany at the time, is one of them. However, what is more important, is that Rommel, the "Desert Fox" himself, is rumored to throw his hat into the ring as well. With a man like Rommel backing the plot, it might actually succeed.A modern reader might ask, "So, why not? If those people were to succeed removing or assassinating Hitler, that would have been a good thing, right?" However, considering the constantly changing political climate and uncertain alliances of the World War Two, the British government sees a potential problem: Krupp still sees the war as winnable; and if Germans make peace with the Soviets, then it is the rise of the Forth Reich, and God help the rest of the Europe, or what remains of it. The information about Parsifal is desperately needed.This is where Ian Fleming comes in. While it is not in his "official" purview to go on dangerous missions into foreign countries, or as he jokes, "I've been protected [from the war] by my desk and sandbags of paperwork," in the times of war even the secret services cannot be too choosy. As "the only cunning linguist available who knows which end of a .38 is up," who's actually "been in the field a few times," Fleming is to go to Cairo to retrieve Krupp's right-hand man, who eloped with Krupp's fiancé, and who may have information about what is really going on at the highest levels of German politics.Just like the previous novel from "The Ian Flemings Files," "Operation Armada," this book is written in a true James Bond-ian canon. The danger is presented clearly at the beginning, yet it keeps evolving over the course of the story, taking unexpected twists and turns. There's even a small "equipment" scene present before Fleming is to go on a mission, as is traveling to exotic places by a submarine. However, in this book we keep picking up small tidbits about Ian Fleming himself, his family, and his relationships. This too is done in the grand tradition: the self-searching touches are always present in James Bond books. Granted, this is a fictionalized novel, but this holds great interest to the Ian Fleming's and James Bond's fans nonetheless, to look at Fleming from a different angle, and to ask, "What if?"With very clear and mature writing style, Stevenson guides us through the adventures of Ian Fleming through the dangers of covert operations of WWII, that could have been, and perhaps, in our mind's eye, truly were. I was looking forward to reading this book for a while and I am glad to finally get a copy of it in my hands. This is a strong recommendation to anyone who is looking for their "James Bondian" fix.