Year of Publication: 1997
Bond girl - Wai Lin, Paris Carver
Villain - Jonathan Carver
Locations - Russia, London, Hamburg, South China Sea, Vietnam
Bond’s friends - Jack Wade
Bond’s characteristics - All-action; more similar to the film Bond than Fleming’s Bond
Highlights - Characterizations; Carver’s party; Humour (esp. Parody of Rupert Murdoch)
Movie novelizations are infamously bad, but this offering from Raymond Benson is a rare exception. Following from Christopher Wood’s successful adaptations of Moonraker and The Spy Who Loved Me and John Gardner’s creditable effort on Goldeneye, Raymond Benson has done a great job with Tomorrow Never Dies. It’s only his second novel, but his skill in crafting the book belies his inexperience.
In terms of storyline, Benson very much sticks with the movie, using the same locations. However, unlike the film, Benson’s novelization really gels well. This is mainly because he has carefully chosen his points where he fleshes out the film’s plot with an additional scene. For example, he clears up how Stamper was waiting when Bond and Wai Lin emerged from the Devonshire’s wreck, and he adds a chapter of background for Wai Lin, explaining how she ended up at Carver’s party.
Characterizations such as this prove the key to the books success. We learn a lot about the characters that genuinely throws light on their actions in the film, and provides a useful insight into their past. For example, Carver is the illegitimate son of an English noble by a prostitute who died giving birth to him. He was then sold to a Chinese family for 50 sterling, and brought up to become a newscaster. He then filmed his father with a prostitute, and had him murdered after his will was changed following the blackmail. Carver inherited the noble’s media empire, and now suffers from constant jaw pain as a result of stress. Stamper is a ‘retarded mutant’ whose nerve ending are reversed so that he feels no pain. He has been a sadistic torturer and killer since his early teens, when he first met Carver, to whom he has unsurpassable loyalty. Paris was a former model who met Bond, and later Carver, at cocktail parties. She loved Bond, who ended the relationship because his picture was taken with her too often! She loved Carver once, but in the four years of their marriage he started beating her, and she became fearful of him. Wai Lin is one of the few strong and possessive Chinese women, and she joined the army so that she could work without people fearing her. She was once engaged but is now relieved that it fell through.
Benson’s plot has some minor differences from the film (the biggest of these are that Carver will install a new emperor in China and the Paris was actually about to flee Germany when she was killed by Kaufmann (who is a disappointing shadow of his wonderful character in the film). The dialogue however is markedly different than the film, for two reasons. Firstly, Benson based his novelization on an early version of the screenplay, and probably also because he wished to remove some flaws. However, the one liners (ie ‘Filthy Habit’, ‘Back-seat driver’, ‘They’ll print anything these days’) seem bizarrely out of place in the book. The dialogue is generally looser than in the film, but it is more suited to a novel, indicating a fair degree of tampering by Benson even from the version he had.
The action sequences unfortunately translate very poorly from the film. The first chapter (the pre-intro sequence) is appalling, and the motorcycle chase is also terrible. However, the car chase and the final scenes in the ship maintain some degree of quality. The other main feature that lets Tomorrow Never Dies down is the description, which unfortunately harks back to most of the Gardner era. Hopefully this isn’t a portent of things to come. On the other hand, humour comes across very well in the book, which contains witty dialogues (those involving M were toned down considerably in the film) and biting irony (Rupert Murdoch).
Generally, few novelizations come any better than this. Despite some weak action sequences and dull descriptions, Benson makes up for this with some superb characterizations and by using witty dialogues. Most important of all, Tomorrow Never Dies is fairly tense, and it certainly grips the reader from start to finish. Although opinions are very divided on this book, I think it’s well worth reading, probably subsequent to the film because of the excellent fleshing out.
Source -- www.00heaven.org