Source: TheStar.com

In You Only Live Twice, the last James Bond novel written before Ian Fleming prior to his death in 1964, a bit of unreliable intelligence prompts M, the British superspy's boss, to issue 007's obituary. This is how we learn that James Bond would be 84 years old today.This is also how we may calculate 007's age in Sebastian Faulk's Devil May Care, the heavily ballyhooed new Bond book released on the 100th anniversary of Ian Fleming's birth on May 28. Since it is set in 1967, when both flower power and the Cold War were in full blossom, the Bond in Devil May Care must be 43 years old.

Too far along to remain immune to doctors' suggestions that he refrain from drinking, smoking and overworking on behalf of Her Majesty's Secret Service for a spell – which is what he's rather glumly doing in the opening pages – but not so ancient as to refuse the summons to get back to work when the world is threatened by a narcotics epidemic perpetrated by an archly villainous Anglophobe with a monkey's paw for a hand. And certainly nowhere near too old to get back to Bond basics. By novel's end, the man is killing, loving, maiming, quipping, dressing and generally superspying up a multinational storm. Needless to say, this is most comforting. As is the news he's back on the booze and butts.

Devil May Care, which attempts the same feat of back-to-basics re-invigoration for the Bond literary franchise that 2006's Casino Royale pulled off for the movie series, is a perfectly serviceable Bond book in the silky, easy-sipping Fleming tradition. The narrative is at once preposterous and propulsive, there are named-brands and ripe ripostes galore, and Faulks nods both affectionately and efficiently at the legacy of the man in whose name he writes: the Orient Express chapters in From Russia With Love are cleverly retrofitted, as are the underwater intrigues of Thunderball, the vast private lair of Dr. No and, in the character of the monkey-pawed drug lord Gorner, the interminably verbose, world-dominating supervillain pomposity of Auric Goldfinger: "One day, Bond, I will make as many heroin addicts in Britain as Britain made in China. One day soon. Then you'll lose your precious status at the United Nations. You'll lose the Cold War, too. You'll become the third-world country you deserve to be."Pure boilerplate, certainly, but in the official Bond franchise – those adventures of page and screen sanctioned by the late creator's estate – boilerplate is as rigorously observed as the preparation of 007's cocktails or Eggs Benedict.

While the book's early Swinging London passages provide the fleeting possibility of a story about a man sidelined by the changing world he helped protect, the real mission here is to reiterate the agent's stainless-steel imperviousness to such tawdry things. As readers, we're meant to rejoice in Bond's old-school reduction of the world to his terms, not the other way around. Offered opium, he merely pretends to indulge for undercover appearance's sake. In a world of bellbottoms and fringed vests, he sports tailored slacks and linen blazers. Surely this is the triumph of style over fashion, and in Bond land, style is king.

But making the old literary Bond new again has involved a certain amount of espionage in itself. If you weren't waylaid by an interplanetary stopover on Pluto the days leading up to Devil May Care's release, you no doubt noticed the book was being promoted as something of a homecoming – if not the first official Bond adventure since Fleming's last, then at least the first since the agent lost the Cold War context in which he was created. Which is a bit of a fudge, presumably of the deliberate variety. The fact is, the Bond literary franchise is close to vast. Beginning in 1968, when Kingsley Amis first tried to expand the official fictional canon with Colonel Sun, the Fleming estate has endorsed no less than over 30 official Bond books: 16 written by John Gardner, 12 by Raymond Benson and five "Young Bond" adventures penned by Charlie Higson. On top of Fleming's original series, that's a virtual library of Bond adventures, and that's excluding a series of graphic novels, which also bear the estate's stamp of approval.

Interestingly, you'll fine none of the Gardner or Benson books in print. All have been withdrawn from publication to make way for the planned Faulks series, retired into virtual oblivion like top secret Cold War files at MI5. The better to maintain an aura of event and newness surrounding Devil May Care, and to prevent this necessarily opaque figure from accruing too much personalizing history.
In this, at least, the literary Bond resembles his cinematic version exactly: Bond is a sleek but sturdy vessel who can be refilled (and, in the movies, recast) at will, a form which prevails over content precisely because it cannot be compromised by human weakness. No matter how many books one reads or films one watches, one never really knows Bond – not in the sense we "know" other literary or movie characters. But that's why the machine works. It executes its function without pause for reflection.

Although more widely known as the engine driving most popular and long-running movie series in history, the fact is Bond was born on the page. Created in 1952 by a former British journalist and Naval Intelligence officer, Bond first appeared in the novel Casino Royale. Here's our first glimpse, captured at a high-stakes gambling emporium at 3 in the morning: "James Bond suddenly knew he was tired. He always knew when his body or his mind had had enough and he always acted on the knowledge. This helped him to avoid staleness and the sensual bluntness that breeds mistakes."But bluntness in sensual matters is one thing. Quite another is bluntness in the service of both literary and state duty. "I intended him to be a blunt instrument wielded by a government department," Fleming once said of his creation, whom he also described as 6 feet tall, resembling a young Hoagy Carmichael and bearing a three-inch scar on his cheek.

A handsome but not pretty man, Fleming's cat-like Bond exists exclusively for action and his thoughts are almost completely dominated by the circumstances of the moment. In Casino Royale, the exhausted Bond heads toward his hotel: "As he gave a thousand francs to the vestiare and walked down the steps of the casino, Bond made up his mind that Le Chiffre would in no circumstances try to rob the caisse and he put the contingency out of his mind. Instead he explored his present physical sensations. He felt the dry, uncomfortable gravel under his evening shoes, the bad, harsh taste in his mouth and the slight sweat under his arms."

This is, of course, the key to survival. Survival of both the animal and pop-cultural kind: when in doubt, focus on the moment. Better yet, simply never be in doubt.