Return to the Articles Page Return to The Realm of Ryan 
Return to the Articles Page Return to The Realm of Ryan
Welcome to the lower depths of James Bond. The nadir of his literary career.
But, before getting deep into my criticism of John Gardner’s ninth and poorest continuation James Bond novel, I must confront Brokenclaw’s most controversial aspect: tea. The passage in question occurs at the beginning of chapter two when 007 is staying at the Empress Hotel in British Columbia:
And at this point in Gardner’s Bond novels, he was clearly getting both careless and bored with the series. Gardner’s personal life was going through an upheaval when he wrote this book, as he had just moved to the United States and undergone surgery for prostate cancer. By the author’s own admission, Brokenclaw is one of his least favorite of his Bond books because of all the baggage attached to it. I must agree with him on the book’s quality, as it ranks at the bottom of the totem pole of his 007 opuses.
The essential problem with Brokenclaw is that it is a book about planning an operation, not an operation itself. Almost three-quarters of its length concerns concocting and briefing and explaining in maddening and uninteresting detail. The promise of wild adventure is just a promise, and the intriguing villain and his unusual ethnic medley (half-Chinese, half-Blackfoot Indian) is just gloss and the source of a cool title. As for the girl... what girl? Chi-Chi Sue hardly even merits a cursory description, let alone generates any sex appeal.
It seems that Bond’s Canadian vacation was just a ruse by M to get him into position to investigate Brokenclaw Lee and the recent disappearances of experts in LORDS and LORDS DAY, two submarine tracking devices whose importance the novel never specifies beyond tech-talk. (And didn’t the movie The Spy Who Loved Me go over this sub-tracking territory already?) Bond feels a bit irked with M for the vacation deception, which results in one of the few exciting exchanges in the book. But once Bond’s anger is assuaged, the tedious business of establishing a scheme to insert 007 and CIA agent Chi-Chi into Brokenclaw’s organization starts.
There is absolutely no tension to Bond and Chi-Chi’s impersonation of the two agents sent by CELD (Chinese intelligence) to oversee and purchase the submarine trackers. Bond takes the whole affair so casually that it seems that no threat exists in going deep into the enemy’s confidence. Brokenclaw’s headquarters have some nifty and outrageous devices, but that’s about the only pleasure found in the chapters of Bond in semi-captivity.
The lid finally blows off the kettle. Actually, it sort of slides off the kettle, but the last fifty pages of Brokenclaw aren’t worth the wait. Some mild action and two torture sequences follow as the book wobbles soporifically to a close.
Brokenclaw Lee’s dual heritage could have made for a thrilling character. Bond is frightened by the man’s ability to belong to two cultures at once and slip between them. However, the reader never sees this in action. Brokenclaw’s Chinese heritage is placed upfront for most of the book, and then conveniently switches to the Native American side in time for the torture showdown, which appears derived from the movie A Man Called Horse. Gardner at least brings the villain on stage earlier than he did in the turgid (albeit slightly superior) Scorpius, but too many opportunities go wasted.
Ed Ruisha, Bond’s U.S. ally, is one of the novel’s better aspects, although Gardner uses him too frequently for pseudo-American slang banter that creates groans more than chuckles. Also, Ruisha seems a part much better suited to the classic Fleming character Felix Leiter, whose return would be a pleasure. His appearances were too infrequent in Gardner’s books.
The Gardner series of 007 novels would thankfully show some improvement after Brokenclaw. The next book, the strange and controversial The Man from Barbarossa, would reveal that Gardner definitely needed to stretch out of the confines of the Bond formula and try something fresh. The freshness date on Brokenclaw is years in the past; it’s all gone stale. Now be a good reader and make me some coffee. No tea! ...Bond was irritated by the way this old, and famous, hotel served what it called English Tea. During his four days in Victoria, Bond had avoided taking tea at the hotel, but today he had played two rounds of golf with indifferent partners at the Victoria Golf Club and returned earlier than usual. Tea seemed to be in order and he was shown to a small table hard by a massive potted plant.
Readers familiar with Ian Fleming would instantly wonder when James Bond started drinking tea. John Gardner has taken considerable flack for this, and has grumpily responded on his website:
I found that there were some reviewers who nit-picked and found fault in an amazing way. I recall that I was taken to task because I let 007 drink tea when he had never done so in the Fleming books.... Believe me when I say that unless I was going to slavishly reproduce Fleming’s Bond I was always going to get knocked simply because I wasn’t Fleming.
Gardner has a point about getting criticism for simply not being Ian Fleming, but he apparently doesn’t understand the importance of the ‘tea remark.’ It isn’t nitpicking, not to an Ian Fleming fan. Here’s the relevant passage from chapter five of Goldfinger:
On the first night the girl had brought him tea. Bond had looked at her severely. “I don’t drink tea. I hate it. It’s mud. Morever it’s one of the main reasons for the downfall of the British Empire. Be a good girl and make me some coffee.” The girl had giggled and scurried off to spread Bond’s dictum in the canteen. From then on he had got his coffee. The expression ‘a cup of mud’ was seeping through the building.
How did Gardner miss this? It’s one of the most famous passages in the novel, and everyone who reads the book can recall it. It burned into my mind the first time I read Goldfinger when I was thirteen. Bond doesn’t play coy about his opinion. He says he hates tea. Making him drink it is plain sloppiness. Gardner doesn’t have to write just like Ian Fleming, but he could have at least made an effort to show that he knows James Bond’s important, memorable character traits, and cares about them. This isn’t nitpicking; it demonstrates a level of pervasive carelessness in Gardner’s approach to the material.
The opening chapters appear to get the story off to a strong start: an assassination in British Columbia, followed by a vacationing Bond (also in BC) encountering the magnetic figure of Brokenclaw Lee as he addresses a meeting. But when M pulls Bond down to San Francisco with emergency orders regarding Brokenclaw and his connections to Chinese Intelligence, the book comes to a screeching halt and stays in neutral almost until the end.