The exotic setting clearly inspired author Higson, who infuses his story with a terrific sense of location - its history, culture, its sights and smells. Plotwise, Blood Fever spends far less time at Eton than did SilverFin, getting Bond quickly to Sardinia where the bulk of the novel is set. Good! This is exactly where a James Bond book should be read. This book is bloody and dangerous, just as a James Bond novel should be, and it may need to be read beneath the sheets at night by flashlight or smuggled into the back bleachers of the schoolyard. However, with its surprisingly high body count, Blood Fever might not meet with a chorus of approval from parents and grade school teachers, as did its predecessor. But because Blood Fever chronicles the adventures of a 14 year old (or is he still 13?), it’s still a novel young readers will find thrilling. Words like “hell” and “damn” flow freely in descriptive passages as the tension mounts. Not only is the content of the book much more adult, but so is the form. It even includes a classic Bondian torture scene (but don’t panic, parents, the torture is more about endurance than person-to-person sadism).
This is a tougher, darker, much more violent book than SilverFin. The key difference seems to be that SilverFin was written as a children’s book (that could still be appreciated by adults) while Blood Fever appears to have been written with a more adult readership in mind. I said JAMES BOND novel because this is a book that could have come from the pen of Ian Fleming. Notice I didn’t qualify this by saying “Young Bond” or “continuation” novel. This is NOT the case with Young Bond Book 2: Blood Fever, which takes a confident quantum leap into maturity and gives Bond fans of all ages one of the best James Bond novels yet written. A risky concept this Young Bond idea, and in SilverFin, author Higson and the 007 copyright holders showed signs of understandable uncertainty.
Clearly a book written for a preteen target audience, it too often seemed to mimic a Harry Potter adventure. For this old 007 fan, Charlie Higson’s first Young Bond novel, SilverFin, was a mixed bag.
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