Atria Books White Blood By James Fleming Atria Books 368 pages. $25

To whom does James Fleming owe his literary allegiance? Bloodlines link Fleming to a noted writer: Ian Fleming, creator of that deathless adventurer on the high seas of governmental espionage, James Bond. On the basis of his latest novel, though, Fleming appears to share less with his Uncle Ian than with another notable: Vladimir Nabokov. Like Nabokov (in "Speak, Memory" and other works), Fleming concerns himself with Russia just before the Bolshevik Revolution, and with the cataclysm that cast the old way of life forever into the abyss. Echoing Nabokov's interests, he also focuses on the natural world, with a protagonist who tracks down new species of insects and butterflies like a hunter stalks big game.

In that regard, perhaps, one can see the influence of Ian on James, for Charlie Doig, the Anglo-Russian warrior-scientist who narrates "White Blood," owes a debt to old 007 himself. Doig may not be that interested in matters of national security, but in his indomitable self-assurance and his territorial possessiveness toward his women, he is a Bond before the fact, roaming the estates and snow-dappled streets of pre-Soviet Russia with a cocky swagger. Born in Moscow to a British father and a Russian mother in the waning years of the 19th century, Doig trains as a naturalist in Britain and earns his stripes on grueling journeys through remote Burma and Turkestan. While in Burma, he traps and kills a rare beetle, which is named the Chrysochroa birmanensis var. doigii in his honor. Fame and adulation follow, and Doig becomes a world-renowned naturalist -- at least by his telling.