Licence Renewed - Reviews

Reviews

Poet Philip Larkin writing in the The Times Literary Supplement, felt that the book had no life of its own and lacked Fleming's compelling readability.

For Kingsley Amis, the book was "So sodding tame" and Gardner "can't write exciting stories." Later, Amis was to say the novel "was bad enough by any reasonable standard."

Listener crime critic Marghanita Laski, a long-time admirer of Gardner's books, said Licence Renewed "is competent and has its funny moments. But this fine thriller-writer can't perfectly adjust down to the simpler genre, and the world-destructive plot is a waste of Gardner, without ever really convincing as Bond."

Novelist Jessica Mann said in the British Book News that "Ian Fleming's James Bond books were never as crass as Licence Renewed. Writing for himself, Gardner is intelligent and original. In this Fleming rip-off, he reproduces Fleming's faults without their saving charms, except that he has cut down on the sex and sadism. Fleming's plots were always preposterous, but they carried a crazy, unifying conviction. Gardner's is just illogical. And how the mighty Bond is fallen; he has become a dull, dim — too many knocks on the head in the past, perhaps? — middle-aged man who chooses the wrong trade-names to advertise."

Nicholas Shrimpton in the New Statesman argued that Bond was best left in his own era. "What John Gardner has failed to realise is that the charm of Bond is as strictly related to a sense of period as that of Sherlock Holmes or Philip Marlowe. Removed from this distinctive environment, Bond is a fish out of water. The glamour shrivels, the self-indulgence becomes apologetic, and the atmosphere seems absurd.

Robin W. Winks said in the Library Journal that "Gardner lacks the sparkle of Fleming's truly original plotting and humor, and Lavender Peacock simply is not Pussy Galore. What's sound here isn't very new and what's new isn't very sound. 007's license is best left unrenewed."

The Globe and Mail crime fiction critic Derrick Murdoch complained that the villains were weak especially compared to Fleming's own, and that love interest Lavender Peacock is "a schoolgirl next to Pussy Galore." Murdoch also criticized the plot saying, "The story line is also a bit cluttered. There's one sub-plot about an international terrorist that seems derived indirectly from Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity, and another about a stolen birthright that could come directly from Victorian melodrama. In his Liquidator series, Gardner showed that he can be much slyer, funnier and bawdier than he has allowed himself to be here. It almost seems he has approached his task too respectfully in Licence Renewed.

People Magazine's anonymous reviewer felt that "Gardner's approach is sometimes too tame — as in the uninspiring title — but, on the whole, it's a treat to have Bond working again. Welcome back, old friend."

Novelist Michael Malone commented in The New York Times that "in License Renewed, the whole world seems scantier and blander, as if Bond could not shake off the malaise of those intervening years when the Government abolished his license to kill and stuck him in a desk job. He has less wit, less wardrobe and less sex drive. Miss Moneypenny even has difficulty arousing him. With his mechanized swashbuckling and elegant machismo, Bond was so suited to his time, so right in that age of astronauts and Thunderbirds, perhaps he should have decided you only live once.

Time Magazine praised Gardner's "way around military hardware, neo-villainy and a plot whose absurdity even Ian Fleming might admire. In classic style, Gardner piles picaresque on bizarre: Neanderthal henchmen, a medieval castle equipped with radar, cars that repel attackers with clouds of tear gas.

Kirkus Reviews believed Gardner was equal to the task. "More tongue-in-cheek than Fleming, but mindless fun as usual: savory fluff for the curious and the old fans too."