unrelieved disaster", Gardner "not the most self-assured of writers", and said that the plot was "absurd" and "blundering". Amis said, "What makes Mr Gardner's book so hard to read is not so much its endlessly silly story as its desolateness, its lack of the slightest human interest or warmth. [...] But then to do anything like that the writer must be genuinely interested in his material." Writing in The New Republic, Robin W. Winks wrote, "Bond is dead, and John Gardner's second effort to remove the nails from that coffin, though not so dreary nor so silly as the first, is nonetheless very thin gruel." Winks further said the book was "exceptionally bad when read back-to-back with Ian Fleming's From a View to a Kill. The book is full of one sentence paragraphs — did Fleming ever really write this way? — and obligatory "who'll sleep in the one bedroom, who on the couch" scenes once calculated to titillate fourteen-year-olds." New Statesman critic Lewis Jones dismissed it as "a real airport novel, unimaginative and badly written. Bond is as dated as Biggles. Gardner's attempts to update meet with partial success. He can manage the machines but not the people." Jones summed the book up in one word: "Deadly." Novelist Stanley Ellin, reviewing for The New York Times, asserted that the novel "was a dud, and for reasons having nothing to do with the author's well-proven talent. Ian Fleming was a dreadful writer, a creator of books for grown-up boys, a practitioner of tin-eared prose...John Gardner, creator of the inimitable and delightful Boysie Oakes among other characters, is the antithesis to all this, a writer of style and wit with a sharp-eyed, acidulous and yet appreciative view of humanity and its foibles. Fleming's shoes are simply too tight and misshapen for Mr. Gardner to wear comfortably. Fleming, however, did offer the reader one thing no imitator can possibly duplicate: total identification with and commitment to his hero and his works as the products of an uninhibited wish fulfillment." However, Ellin did find several things to admire: "There are some good things among the zany proceedings: an automobile road race described to nerveracking effect; the amusing relationship between the aging Bond and the youthful Cedar Leiter; a climax where Bond is drugged into imagining he is the woolly-headed Gen. James A. Banker, U.S.A. - all pure John Gardner at his Boysie Oakes