But Olivia Joules is someone else–someone Bridget might envy from afar. She’s an ambitious freelance journalist whose wild imagination sees intrigue everywhere, and she’s confident about her smarts and her looks. Writing a story on “Cool Miami” for the Style section of the Sunday Times of London, Olivia sees a chance to become the foreign correspondent of her own dreams. She decides that the cosmetics tycoon with the French name, whom she’s met at a South Beach party to launch a new face cream, could be Osama bin Laden with a makeover. (“Where better for al-Qaeda to hide,” she reasons, “than in the center of a hip urban scene?”) As she pursues this nutty hunch from L.A. to Central America to the Sudan–and fights the urge to snog him, if not shag him–she winds up recruited by British intelligence. Yes, there’s a taste issue here–how amusing is a plot line about terrorists blowing up a cruise ship in the wake of real bombings? But the story of special agent Olivia Joules, complete with a lethal bra concealing a syringe in the underwire, is clearly in the deliberately outlandish tradition of the James Bond books.
And it’s a hell of a lot funnier. Fielding, who veers between social satire and thriller conventions, keeps a brisk pace, with only a few boring bits, most of which (as in Ian Fleming’s “Thunderball”) take place underwater and involve scuba gear. She’s given her heroine some endearing Bridget-like traits: Olivia has only a casual relationship with the concept of time (a problem for a reporter on deadline), and carefully guards her list of Rules for Living (example: “No one is thinking about you. They’re thinking about themselves, just like you.”) Fielding sketches some vivid minor characters, especially the wise, acerbic Professor Widgett, the “M” of this espionage tale. And her takes on contemporary culture are dependably delicious, such as the pitch-perfect party dialogue of starlets on the fringe of the movie business. So give Fielding credit for road-testing a new genre without losing her satiric edge. If this were the summer that Bridget Jones had vowed to tackle Proust, we bet she’d end up tucking “Olivia Joules” into her beach bag instead.
