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A gentleman wouldn't discuss such things but suffice to say that is what the back row and love seats were invented for back then!
The trouble TSWLM caused me is indeed another story.
I'm not a gentleman I guess.; -)
Fleming seems to have been the harshest critic of his own novel.
Yes, I believe he did.
Those aficionados around at the time will remember the hiatus that TSWLM caused - I think it shocked Fleming. A shame because it's a diamond in the rough.
It would make a great PTS for the new incoming 007. Set up his character as tough, mysterious, mirror-image bad guy, but on the side of the angels.
Basically as per the novel, but compressed into 15 min.
So a musical.
Exactly. I wrote a blog on the subject here - http://broadcastingtechnologyindustry.blogspot.com/2021/12/ideas-for-bond-26-back-to-fleming-and.html
In a letter to Michael Howard reproduced in The Man With the Golden Typewriter book, he writes “I am becoming increasingly depressed with the reception of this book (…) I would like this book to have as short a life as possible”. And as we know, he wanted no cinematic version, and no paperback edition.
I found the book very readable and entertaining over the last few days, and I suspect the criticism at the time came mainly from Fleming tampering with the Bond formula, and the late entry of Bond in novel. Perhaps even the idea that a fifty-something man should write as a twenty three year old woman was somehow ‘bad sport’.
I think the criticism might have been a result of people not getting the book they wanted, rather than getting a poor piece of literature, (in the same way NTTD wasn’t the movie I wanted, though I never though it a poor movie, if that makes sense).
Oddly enough, I found the earlier chapters of ‘Spy’, when Vivien talked about her past love affairs, as the most readable parts of the book. And I’m certainly no Mills and Boone fan.
Two days after the book’s publication, in a letter to Chesterfield book store owner, Fleming says “It was a unique experiment (…) I have already completed the next book, I think the longest yet, in which he appears from the first page to the last”. This was, of course, one of his finest Bond books (in my opinion), On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
As much as I enjoyed re-reading ‘Spy’, it’s certainly one of the weaker Fleming novels. But even so, there’s some great stuff. I particularly like the police chief telling Vivien to keep away from people like Bond, and how they live in a different world. This was Fleming steering Bond away from his image as a popular hero, as he admits in the Howard letter.
I don’t think ‘Spy’ deserved the criticism it got, and I think it’s a shame Fleming felt he had to pull the plug on a book that’s an interesting, entertaining curio in the James Bond series.
As a postscript, the current edition of The Spy Who Loved Me that’s most desirable is the Folio edition, but it would have been even more sexy had it included the Lee Vernon end paper illustration that Fleming approved and even made amendments to. I’ll put pictures up here. . . (my hardback isn’t a first, unfortunately, it’s a 6th impression from ‘64).
I almost wish there were more stories about Bond from the perspective of someone else. It would be a cool way to see the effect Bond has on the world around him, how other people interpret and experience him. I always like the shots in the Bond films where Bond is in the scene but isn't the focus... somehow it makes the Bond world richer.
Reading these sort of thoughts always makes me excited for my next read through of the books.
Had the novel been received better, perhaps we would have had more of them?
Cool. I started my current re-read in March 2020, and have read one every few months. No rush at all. I'm reading the Folio editions, so I still have the short stories left to re-read, but I've done it mostly chronological, with 'Spy' out of sequence, as I read the Blofeld Trilogy last year.
This set:
@ColonelAdamski
This was because the novel was partly autobiographical, which also explains why Fleming said it the easiest Bond book to write. As Andrew Lycett wrote in his biography, Fleming “recorded, in what several critics thought was rather too graphic detail, the seduction of his heroine Vivienne Michel on the floor of a box at the Royalty Kinema in Windsor’s Farquhar Street. As Ian later told his friend Robert Harling, this was where and how he first made love to a woman.”
Another friend, Ernest Cuneo, intriguingly mentioned that Fleming had a “terrifying experience which he remembered with horror” and claimed “it was psychologically traumatic, and modified, it appears as one of the incidents in his books.” This definitely sounds like the cinema seduction.
Though this grim scene was based on Fleming’s own experience, it’s portrayed from the female point of view, and Derek is a self-portrait of the author as a young cad. The rest of the men Vivienne meets are even worse. Fleming presents a devastating portrait of male hypocrisy, brutality and selfishness toward women–-the only good man Vivienne meets is James Bond, an unattainable fantasy figure. Despite the notorious "semi-rape" line, TSWLM is the closest thing we have to a feminist Bond novel. It was Fleming’s graphic portrayal of sex gone wrong, thanks to male idiocy, and his “literary tranvestism” that creeped out male critics. Many female ones were more sympathetic.
At least it's more understandable and believable.
I don't know but why Fleming never did that? And if Vivienne Michel was killed off, it'll be a lot more tragic because we've come to know her character and there's a development inside of it.
And because of that, there's a real possibility that the romance between her and Bond would be fully developed and convincing, and not just because of that, but also that they're the same, reflecting each other, both betrayed by love, have many affairs but failed to find love in them, but both are strong enough to faced it, both are resilient and independent, and their experiences that helped built them up as a person they are (the way we've met them).
Vivienne Michel could be one of the best Bond Girls, it's just her connection to Bond that's missing, and I think, if Bond married her, she could be one of the best, some aspect that could support Vivienne Michel's advantage aside from her fleshed out character.
Thankyou for merging the posts rather than closing down my thread and telling everyone to take the chat to a different thread.
By merging it, the posts people made on my thread are still valid, and no-one feels like they wasted their time posting on my thread.
Much appreciated DD.
You are most welcome.
Now, let's talk one of favourite Fleming novels. 😉
And I thought (and keep thinking) that it is a well-composed thriller novel with the necessary twists and turns that keep you glued to the book, with the only drawback that James Bond really has no major role in it and only appears in the final stages when everything basically has been resolved. And that factor, of course, made it largely unusable for EoN's purposes, which is why they concocted this farcical alternative story that they used for the movie, and which I find increasingly dated and cringeworthy. It's probably no more than mid-field among my ranking of Bond movies.
I think a faithful rendition of the original novel, albeit not as part of the James Bond franchise, might have made a better movie.