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This thread is intended for reviews and ratings of The Man From Barbarossa by members of the The Blades Library Book Club here. Be sure to add your review if you do vote in the poll!

The Blades Library Book Club will be reading The Man From Barbarossa from: 15 February 2008 - 15 April 2008

Moving onto the next book fairly soon - get those reviews in!

Review: The Man from Barbarossa is a mixed bag. To begin with, the novel starts in a very realistic and unforgettable style. Gardner begins with the massacre of Jews during WWII at Babi Yar. It's a very un-Bond like start--to be expected, perhaps, in other fiction but jarring in James Bond's escapist fantasy world. That said, the first chapter is gripping and Gardner shows his immense skill here.

Moving on, Bond becomes involved when a terrorist organization kidnaps a supposed Nazi war criminal who was responsible at Babi Yar and now lives in the United States.

Bond is sent out to penetrate the organization and find out what the plan is as well as to try and determine if they have the right person.

In this section of the novel, the whole television crew element seemed, yet again, veering into the overly improbable. To expect a terrorist organization to put on a televised show-trial, etc, just seemed over the top.

Other than the above problems with plot (never Gardner's strong point), I think Gardner's writing is excellent here. The book is very dense as well as having a lot of tension. More scenes than usual are Bond-less, showing the background personnel of MI6. Perhaps that's why this novel sits so uncomfortably on the fan's shelf next to something like TMWTGG or DAF.

I like this book as it dares to be different, although the final third does become standard Bond again(and i don't buy bond as cameraman)

Nothing wrong with that,but a whole novel without being Bond-by-numbers would have been a refreshing one off. It's Gardners most interesting Bond book and I believe it was the one he liked best.

Yes, of all things Bond could go undercover for! I found the camera man thing really a dull idea, no matter how novel.

I appreciate that Gardner tried to change things up in this outing, but he failed miserably. He cobbles together just about every recycled plot there is, and this is the result. I cannot think of a more tedious James Bond novel.

The Man from Barbarossa competes with Cold Fall and High Time to Kill for worst Bond novel. Sadly, The Man from Barbarossa is not even a "so-bad-it's-good" bad.

Having been disappointed by the last few Gardner Bonds, I knew I would be panning for gold amidst the silt. I know Gardner considered it his favourite book in the series but I never quite understood it. Why, when they discovered they'd kidnapped the wrong man, did they continue with the show trial? And would the trial of a Nazi-war criminal be that big a newstory worldwide that it could distract governments and resonate with foreign policy? All the accoutrements Gardner had given Bond, making him his own, as it were, were junked. There are some lovely moments - the memory of the assassination in LA, some of the supporting characters, the topical reveal - but it never made sense to me. Echoing Icebreaker with yet another villainous organization, The Scales Of Justice (after BAST, The Society Of The Meek Ones), it never held up for me. I always felt Gardner, like a lot of thriller writers, could not get over the end of the Cold War, and while there was an attempted coup in Russia at the time, Gardner's wariness about the fall of the Iron Curtain was indicative of the staid incompetence of Western Intelligence. The uneveness of the Gardner books never dampened my enthusiasm for reading the new adventure of the literary Bond. However, I consider The Man From Barbarossa the weakest Bond novel ever written: not because it was not formulaic Bond but because, for me, it was very muddled storytelling.