In selecting someone to write a new Bond novel marking Ian Fleming's centenary, the author's estate riskily shunned thriller specialists. Instead, it plumped for Sebastian Faulks, a suave, tweedy type best known for historical novels such as Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, and for his excellent literary pastiches (including one of Fleming) on Radio 4's The Write Stuff. Did it make the right call? The answer is a definite yes, but it takes a while before you're sure he's cracked it.

Faulks sets his hugely hyped Devil May Care in the cold-war era of the original Bond novels, rather than updating the formula. It is 1967, and Bond has been recuperating from injuries sustained in the events described in The Man with the Golden Gun, the last Fleming thriller. Now presumably in his early fifties, he is rescued from listless, solitary travels when M becomes alarmed (“our best young people are at risk”) by Dr Julius Gorner's dastardly scheme to flood Swinging London with heroin.

Bond has already seen Gorner, a sneering anglophobe, whose usually gloved left hand is a monkey paw, in Marseille, and he swiftly arranges a tennis match in Paris, a scene recalling earlier sporting clashes with cheating villains. Things become nastier in Tehran, where the reactivated spy (together with Scarlett Papava, a beauteous banker with a twin sister in Gorner's clutches) is inevitably taken prisoner after discovering his enemy also plans to provoke nuclear war.

This is a novel of teasing postponements: the first violence involving Bond doesn't occur until halfway through, and the first and only sex scene takes place when it is almost over. He seems more an aloof appreciator of female aesthetics than a greedy erotic gourmet, letting opportunities to bed women pass so often that you wonder if his libido is drooping (or even if...no, surely not). When he and Scarlett do finally sleep together, it's a test of Faulks's approach: will he modernise and sanitise Bond, in this case by eliminating the notorious hints that women relish rape? In fact, the single-sentence scene is one that Fleming might have written himself, neither purged of dodgy overtones nor exploiting the latterday freedom to depict sex more graphically.

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Elsewhere, too, the novel reflects the setting rather than adapting Fleming to suit contemporary attitudes-- Scarlett is a “girl” although in her thirties, Bond views “the lands between Cyprus and India as the thieving centre of the world”, the villain's sidekick is an Asiatic sadist. Any possibility of a politically correct 007 thriller finally vanishes when a gay character is exposed as a traitor.

Faulks uses the action-free first half to tick off recurring characters and mandatory scenes of eating, flirting and manly banter. All this is deftly if rather dutifully done, but it's only when Bond and Scarlett are in Iran, and later Russia, that he really seems to start enjoying himself, handling the potentially tricky action sequences with flair and playing droll, bookish games that include nods to the specific Fleming episodes he's using (rather as a jazz soloist wittily reworks show-tune “‘standards”) as models.

Although not flawless, Devil May Care is intelligent, expertly plotted and engagingly playful (“I should like black pepper, cracked not ground”), and eventually finds a way to be at once a homage to Fleming and a Faulks novel. Fascinatingly, it both testifies to our current nostalgia for the cold war - underlined by it coinciding with the new Indiana Jones film - and subtly challenges it, with a skein of references to Algeria, Vietnam, Mau Mau and the Shah's secret police.

Devil May Care by Sebastian Faulks, writing as Ian Fleming
Penguin £18.99 pp295 Buy the book £16.99 with free delivery

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