William Boyd

007 Shaken, Not Stirred, in William Boyd’s ‘Solo’

Lee Polevoi

Solo, a “James Bond Novel,” is the latest in a series of post-Ian Fleming books written by different authors (Kingsley Amis, Jeffrey Deaver, Sebastian Faulks, etc.). Now it’s William Boyd’s turn. Boyd, the hugely gifted author of Any Human Heart and the accomplished thrillers Restless and Ordinary Thunderstorms, certainly seems on paper like a great fit to extend Fleming’s legacy, breathing new life into this decades-old franchise. From the start of Solo, the tone feels different. 

William Boyd’s New Literary Thriller Traverses Vienna and London Circa WWI

Lee Polevoi

Boyd is an immensely gifted and adroit writer, whose control of language places the reader immediately within the world of his characters. Over the years, his prose—always vivid and cinematic—has condensed to a sort of a crystalline purity, both elegant and lucid. Unfortunately, tension is undermined by a curious lack of events in the first third of the novel, along with the frequent appearance of secondary characters who add little beyond some local color. 

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