Planet of the Blind: No Odd Job Too Small

Have you been pining for another deformed criminal mastermind? Are you tired of all the clean cut post-modern corporate bad guys who can’t be distinguished from your local insurance agent? Are "thrillers" and detective novels letting you down when what you need is some old fashioned freak show figuration?

Well rest assured. The latest James Bond novel, "Devil May Care (James Bond) " written by Sebastian Faulks (under the imprimatur of Ian Fleming Productions) carries on the misadventures in the "Fleming-way" world of disability villainy.

The writing is terrible and you’ll have to stagger over more patriarchal cold war clichés than one supposed could be arranged between the covers of a single book, but that’s okay because the chief evil-doer is a dude named Gorner who used to be a Nazi but then became a Commie and all because "back in the day" when he was a student at a British prep school the other boys made fun of his deformed left hand.

Bond learns of him from "M" and here’s how it goes:

"The man crops up everywhere. One of his hobbies is aviation. He has two private planes. He spends a good deal of time in Paris, but I don't think you'll have much difficulty in recognizing him."

"Why's that?" said Bond.

"His left hand," said M, sitting down again, and staring Bond squarely in the eye. "It's a monkey's paw."

"What?"

"An extremely rare congenital deformity. There's a condition known as main de singe, or monkey's hand, which is when the thumb makes a straight line with the fingers and is termed 'un-opposable'. Being in the same plane as the other digits, it can't grip. It's like picking up a pencil between two fingers." M demonstrated what he meant. "It can be done, but not very well. The development of the opposable thumb was an important mutation for Homo sapiens from his ancestors. But what Gorner has is something more. The whole hand is completely that of an ape. With hair up to the wrist and beyond."

Something was stirring in Bond's memory. "So it would be larger than the right hand," he said.

"Presumably. It's very rare, though not unique, I believe."

Yep. In "Devil May Care" (the title is completely irrelevant) you get a socio-pathologized Nazi-cum-Commie Social-Darwinized "missing link" who wears an oversized white glove in a vain attempt to hide his monkey paw.

The book aims for balance because Bond’s best friend, the redoubtable Felix Leiter of the CIA has lost a leg and an arm and now gets around on his true grit. So you get dueling cripples in this book which of course makes the whole thing acceptable.

I can only add that this book should be divided into halves. Each half should then be thrown away. You can accomplish this whether your thumbs either do or do not work.

Trust me.

S.K.