James Bond is a synchronic spy. From the day that the first Bond thriller, “Casino Royale,” was published in 1953, all the way through to this year’s forthcoming “Spectre” movie, Bond has always been thoroughly modern, with all the latest toys. In “Trigger Mortis: A James Bond Novel,” however, Bond ventures somewhere Ian Fleming, or the movie producer Albert Broccoli, would never go: back, into the past.

詹姆斯·邦德是一个与历史完全同步的间谍。从1953年第一部邦德惊悚小说《皇家赌场》(Casino Royale)穿开始，直至今年即将上映的《007：大破幽灵危机》(Spectre)电影，邦德一直都是那样现代，用的都是最先进的玩意儿。然而在《触发动机：007小说》(Trigger Mortis: A James Bond Novel)中，邦德的冒险旅途来到了小说家伊恩·弗莱明(Ian Fleming)或电影制片人艾伯特·布洛柯里(Albert Broccoli)都不曾去过的地方：向后，回到过去。

“Trigger Mortis” is a sequel, of sorts, to 1959’s “Goldfinger,” which means that it too is set in the late 1950s. The author, Anthony Horowitz, commissioned by the Fleming estate to write a book “that could have come from Ian’s own typewriter,” says that he tried to write “the most authentic James Bond novel anyone could have written,” while also admitting that “trying to capture Fleming’s style was not easy.”

《触发动机》在某种程度上是1959年的《金手指》(Goldfinger)的续集，也就是说，故事的背景发生在20世纪50年代末期。作者安东尼·霍洛维茨(Anthony Horowitz)受弗莱明遗产委员会授权，创作一本 “宛如出自伊恩本人的打字机”的小说。他说，他想写一个“任何人都有可能写出来的、最真实的007小说”，但也承认，“弗莱明的风格不是那么好学的。”

In truth, the task is impossible. The Bond of “Goldfinger” isn’t only a sexist drunk who dismisses women by saying things like “There’s no point in being a suffragette about this”; he’s also an unapologetic racist who looks out from his hotel room at gardeners “picking up leaves with the lethargic slow motion of colored help” and sees Koreans as being “rather lower than apes in the mammalian hierarchy.”

事实上，这根本就是个不可能完成的任务。《金手指》中的邦德是个大男子主义的酒鬼，他看不起女人，说过“这种事没必要让女人参与”之类的话；他还是个坚决的种族主义者，从酒店房间往外看的时候，说那些园丁“打扫落叶，皮肤带颜色的助手用懒洋洋的慢动作在旁边帮忙”；他说朝鲜人“在哺乳类动物的级别中比猿猴排位还低”。

So although “Trigger Mortis” begins two weeks after the end of “Goldfinger,” its protagonist isn’t — could never be — the same Bond. The new Bond is friends with a gay man, chivalrously sleeps on the couch when a woman doesn’t want to have sex with him and even, at one point, drinks a bottle of water at lunch. What’s more, where before there were only Bond “girls,” now we find strong, independent Bond “women.” One of them shows little interest in him and goes off with a woman instead; another, Jeopardy Lane, is a bona fide action hero in her own right.

所以，尽管《触发动机》的故事发生在《金手指》结束两个星期之后，但它的主角却并不是——永远也不可能再是——同一个邦德了。新的邦德和一个男同性恋成了好朋友；一个女人不愿意和他上床，他就颇有骑士风度地睡在沙发上；某次吃午饭的时候更是没有喝酒，只喝了一瓶水。此外，以前的邦女郎其实只是“邦女孩”，现在我们有了真正强悍、独立的“邦女人”。其中一个女人对他没什么兴趣，和另一个女人好上了；还有一个叫贾帕迪·雷恩(Jeopardy Lane)的姑娘凭她自己的本事，成了书中真正的动作英雄。

Setting a new Bond novel in the past has other problems too. While it’s easy for thriller writers to get excited about today’s state-of-the-art gadgets, it’s much harder to realistically convey how a spy would have felt about the toys of 55 years ago. “Trigger Mortis” is clearly underpinned by a large amount of diligent research, but the recitation of the horsepower of a V-2 rocket, or the muzzle velocity of an M60 machine gun, feels somehow dutiful. And Horowitz’s research sometimes comes up puzzlingly short: Rail sheds were at no time illuminated by “neon lights hung on chains.” More glaringly, New Yorkers could have told him that there aren’t two stations between Jay Street and York Street on the F line.

写一部发生在过去的全新007小说也带来另外一个问题。惊悚小说作家很容易对如今的先进技术小玩意感兴趣，但是要逼真地描写一个间谍如何使用55年前的工具，这就困难得多。《触发动机》建立在大量辛勤研究的基础之上，但是对V-2火箭马力、M60机枪初速度之类的描述，不免让人觉得照本宣科。霍洛维茨的研究有时莫名其妙地令人失望，比如火车站绝不会被“成串成串的霓虹灯”照亮。更加明显的是，纽约人都可以告诉他，F线上的杰伊街与约克街之间并没有两个车站。

Still, the heart of any thriller is the plot, and here Horowitz doesn’t disappoint. The action moves with high velocity from Britain to Germany to the United States and back to Britain, the odds are always in the bad guys’ favor, and the villain is a dastardly millionaire straight out of central casting. A mysterious mogul with a dark history and no regard for human life, he also has, naturally, a weakness for delaying the execution of spies by explaining to them, in detail, the cunning and despicable plot they were sent to discover. He should have killed Bond when he had the chance.

不过，任何惊悚小说的核心都是情节，这方面霍洛维茨并未令人失望。故事高速运转，从英国来到德国，再到美国，然后又回到英国。坏人一直占据上风，反面人物是个懦弱的百万富翁，完全不怎么出场。他是个有黑暗历史的神秘大人物，根本不在乎人命，当然，他也有那种致命弱点——在处决间谍之前要先耽搁一下，把那些阴谋诡计的来龙去脉给对方详细解释清楚。要不他本来有机会杀掉邦德的。

Horowitz also stays true to the Bond of Fleming’s books rather than the Bond of the movies. His hero is human, self-doubting, weak, in a way that is hard for a movie star to be in the context of a decades-long franchise and Monty Norman’s immortal James Bond theme. And while Horowitz’s loving pastiche lacks Fleming’s flashes of brilliance, it should be more than good enough for the fans. The only real question is why anybody felt the need for this book to be written in the first place. Much of the excitement of Bond comes from his contemporaneity. Instead of trying to rehabilitate the bigoted Bond of the 1950s, we should keep our dapper spy in the movies of the present, where he belongs.

霍洛维茨更忠于弗莱明的邦德小说原著，而不是电影。他笔下的主角有人性、会自我怀疑，也有软弱的一面；对于几十年来的商业大片里的电影明星，乃至蒙蒂·诺尔曼(Monty Norman)不朽的詹姆斯·邦德主题电影配乐来说，要呈现这样的性格是很困难的。虽然霍洛维茨非常有爱的仿作缺乏弗莱明的灵感火花，但是对于粉丝来说也已经足够精彩。唯一真正的问题是，为什么一开始会有人觉得有必要写这样一本书呢？邦德真正的魅力很大程度上来自他的时代性。与其说致力于恢复50年代那个古板的邦德，我们还是应该把那个漂亮的间谍留在当今的电影里，他属于那里。