Double or Nothing
- Double or Nothing by Kim Sherwood
Going by what I’d read about Sherman’s first double 0 novel, I doubted that I was going to like it, but I had to read it nevertheless – like it or not, it was now a part of the double 0 oeuvre and so I wasn’t about to pass it by.
My review is of the Audible version, narrated by Pippa Bennett-Warner and so a quick note on the narration to begin. The decision to use a female narrator for Sherwood’s first Double 0 outing is an obvious choice but the voice is well chosen. Though not quite to my taste, Bennett-Warner’s somewhat breathless narration suits the pace of this novel well. I’ve only a very minor gripe (below) concerning the narration.
Let’s begin by getting the good stuff out of the way, so we can concentrate of the meat of this review. Sherwood’s descriptive writing is good, more-or-less throughout the book, and I enjoyed the author’s descriptive poetics. One line which stood out for me – though which was spoiled by the narrator being seemingly unaware of the humour and resulting in a miss-timed delivery – is a description of a too-cool bar in an old railway station in Berlin where ‘couples shared small plates behind big windows.’ It’s a wonderfully funny and well-observed line. But the writing style can often lean too much into the poetic, and then it’s a bit much for me. It’s an interesting approach to write an action scene adopting a poetic prose style but it left this reader grasping in vain for something concrete to hold onto – a surprisingly unfulfilled want, given one of the scenes in question is set within the Barbican estate.
I like the idea of an AI Q, but the description was too abstract, far-fetched, ungrounded and overly futuristic for this story. Q itself, the quantum computer doesn’t get a voice, its operators do instead – more on that in a minute. Early on, Sherwood constructs an interesting framework around a debrief. At first, I thought, ‘Oh no,’ but then I came around to it. And on to Moneypenny. My first impressions were that Moneypenny’s position seemed a little ridiculous. And in linking this contemporary, even perhaps near-future novel to the characters of Fleming’s books, the timeline just doesn’t make any sense. Her character reads OK, it would just be better if she weren’t Moneypenny.
But I did like the antagonist, Bertie Paradise – at least at first. I enjoyed hearing about his plot and his voice was credible, engaging. Sherwood’s female 003 has a convincing voice too but the backstory around her relationship lost me. It’s presented in such an abstract way, I found it difficult to get a purchase on – a bad case of telling, not showing, I thought. And the dialogue between the double 0’s is far too cool, it’s unrealistic to speak in such a theatrically offhand manner – ‘Speak up for the people in the back’ – and this even in life-threatening moments of extreme stress. It reminded me of lines Roger Moore might have said at the height of his inglorious days. Already, we’re drifting into the criticism I have for this book.
One of the reasons why this book fails for me is down to Sherwood’s voices. The characters in the novel seem polarised. Either they are upper middle class: Moneypenny, M, Mrs Kita or they sound as if their previous employment, before they were hand-picked by M16, might have been running a market stall in the East end. Neither 004 nor Q’s operator read as being intelligent enough to hold their posts. I’m not being snobby here, I’m certain there are a great many highly qualified and successful scientists coming from a working-class, East London background and It’s perfectly possible that one of them might be put in charge of running the country’s most powerful computer – or computa as one of Q’s operators calls it – it’s just that they wouldn’t sound like they were selling fruit from a barrow before nipping off to the Queen Vic for a sneaky lunchtime pint. Midway through the book, one of her character’s voices inexplicably changes from middle-class English to a heavily accented English, the explanation given is simply that the character drops their English accent and speaks with their natural Lebanese voice. An utterly ridiculous premise and for no apparent purpose. Sherwood’s approach is clearly wanting to speak to the people, widen the audience. But it doesn’t work, the voices of these characters aren’t credible. As a consequence, I don’t feel invested in any of them to care.
Photo credit: kimsherwoodauthor.com
But on top of this there’s another reason this book fails. There’s no other way of saying this. It’s boring. Great long segments of narration concerning one of the character’s hearing aid and utter techno-nonsense. It wasn’t the first time that I’d wanted to stop listening to this book and in truth, I only carried on with it in order to complete my notes and so write this review. There were rarely moments when I could honestly say I was enjoying it but still I ploughed on through it. I think ploughed is a suitable word to use here.
The endless references to James Bond are tiring. I’d like to know how many times his name is mentioned, though his presence is almost completely absent. His character is presented as a mythology and it doesn’t work for me – either fully include 007 in the story or don’t.
Half-way through this book I was wondering what this complicated plot is actually about. A megalomaniac genius, passionate about confronting climate change who, it turns out gets his kicks from a sport, so low-brow that it’s illegal. The two interests are so wildly disparate, they utterly fail to convincingly connect within the same character. And then the antics of a global terrorist organisation, infiltrating MI6 for little apparent gain. The plot is just all over the place, it has no focus and at points the story seems to be going nowhere. Due to the wild complexity of the plot, a great deal of exposition is required but it’s rarely incorporated without seeing the lines where it’s been jointed into the narrative, and sometimes it simply isn’t realistic.
There are a too many storylines running concurrently and the result is that each chapter feels like a set-piece, independent of an overarching storyline. But few of them are worthy of being set-pieces even. The writing of simultaneous fight scenes is poorly realised – in my opinion a bad call which doesn’t work. There follows an inventive car chase scene which isn’t done full justice in the writing – it feels like only a sketch.
But as I progressed with it, some better scenes popped up amid the worse ones. A torture scene which rises above the bar of adequate and which I was subsequently engaged by – the writing here is good, emotive and rich. A bit further on and there’s another car chase. This one more enjoyable and with Sherwood this time managing to seamlessly work in a bit of relevant backstory. This scene was well crafted in terms of the backstory and the action sequence, and to the point where I really didn’t notice the transitioning between these two threads. It was the best bit I’d read and at this point, the book seemed to be improving finally, though much too late on – sadly, I suspect many a reader wouldn’t even get this far.
The book is erratic, fractured. Is it that Sherwood has overstretched some limit in the world and characters she’s attempted to create within it – or is that her drafting process was too time-limited and her editors too eager to hurry on and publish? Personally, I think it’s likely to be both of these. It needs to be sorted out for the next book because, for me, the final reason this one doesn’t work is because of this expansive structure and the failure of it to provide the reader with a cohesive plot.
Closing in on the ending, the action scenes here are engaging but I felt the author doesn’t quite manage to convey what’s happening well enough. I have to really concentrate and think about how the various characters actions interact and about the spatial geometry of the scenes. It tends not to always be clear what’s going on exactly – and, for a reader, that isn’t good. And I felt the action ending loses power too because of the split storyline. There’s a character who seems at first to drift into the narrative, as far as I remember, as a nameless operative on the opposing side. His prominence builds and builds until, ultimately this character eclipses the original antagonist. And so, it all feels a bit sketchy, like the end doesn’t correspond to the beginning.
The disparate storylines kind of knit together finally but I’m left feeling there is just too much going on here at once, too many heroes. Double or nothing? More is less, and call me old-fashioned, but I would have preferred something in between. Despite what James Bond said to Elektra King, in the world of 007 surely one is enough?
About the author
Photo credit: kimsherwoodauthor.com
Kim Sherwood is an author and creative writing lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where she lives in the city. Born in Camden in 1989, she has taught in schools, libraries and prisons. Her award-winning debut novel, Testament, was published in 2018. A Wild & True Relation, following a woman who joins a smugglers’ crew in eighteenth-century Devon, will be published by Virago in 2023. Double or Nothing, the first in a trilogy of Double 0 novels expanding the James Bond universe, was released on September 1st 2022.
Extracted from kimsherwoodauthor.com (edited & updated)