It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
^ Back to Top
The MI6 Community is unofficial and in no way associated or linked with EON Productions, MGM, Sony Pictures, Activision or Ian Fleming Publications. Any views expressed on this website are of the individual members and do not necessarily reflect those of the Community owners. Any video or images displayed in topics on MI6 Community are embedded by users from third party sites and as such MI6 Community and its owners take no responsibility for this material.
James Bond News • James Bond Articles • James Bond Magazine
Comments
Chandler wrote four chapters of The Poodle Springs Story--in the late 80s his estate asked the crime novelist Robert B. Parker to finish the book, which was published as Poodle Springs. It's the only Chandler story I haven't read--I'll get around to those 4 chapters one day but I have no interest in Parker's continuation.
I read it a long time ago and can't recall specifics, but I do remember thinking it was absolutely terrible. But then who on earth could write like Chandler?
It was that goddamn Somekindofhero.
That's actually @Some_Kind_Of_God-Man
As you mentioned, @Birdleson, despite being a short story, "Risico" feels like a Bond novel condensed into 40 pages. You have not only the villain and the ally and a great twisting scheme, but an attractive and mysterious Bond girl as well in Lisl Baum.
One of the biggest advantages of "Risico" over Fleming's usual novel format is that the real villain remains a mystery to the reader, whereas in the novels the villain is always signaled loud and clear. Perhaps this kind of twist could only have worked for Fleming in short story form where he could resist painting Kristatos as some grotesque caricature of a man.
Colombo is indeed a surprisingly great ally for all of the story's brevity and he translated well to the screen. The climax as well was riveting to read and adapted superbly. Reading this I found myself thinking more and more highly of those parts of the story that made it into For Your Eyes Only. The harsh reality, as you say, Birdleson, is that these great elements are unfortunately counterbalanced by much silliness.
The portion of the story that stood out the most to me was Bond's meeting with Lisl under her parasol on the beach. Fleming painted such a great picture here of the three armed figures running after Bond across the sand. Then the escape along the seawall and finally the shock surprise of the men who get caught among the landmines. This whole sequence actually feels like a bit of a precursor to the opening of OHMSS. For whatever reason, I love the picture of Bond on some desolate beach with danger closing in. Fleming clearly did as well.
And then there is the humorously macabre farewell to Kristatos, shot through the back window of his fleeing car, his arm falling out in a grotesque turning sign as he continues to drive on into the dawn. That picture of a corpse gleefully escaping into the sunrise, nobody in pursuit, is just the right touch of twisted, dark humor for this rather humorless and quite straightforward story.
(The one thing that gave me some pause was Colombo's admission that, among other things, he smuggles "beautiful girls from Syria and Persia for the houses of Naples." Hmm, you mean...human trafficking??? But "drugs, heroin, opium, hemp—no! Never! I will have nothing to do with these things. These things are evil. There is no sin in the others." I suppose the times have indeed changed. It was smart of them, I guess, to charge Colombo with the crime of dealing in pistachios in the film.)
GOLDFINGER
Edition I read: Book Club with nice dustjacket (photo not mine)
Where I read it: At my mum's
James Bond
We see Bond meditating on life and death at Miami Airport and planning his best-selling blockbuster, Stay Alive!. There's a nice glimpse into his golfing past, and a great moment where M mentions Goldfinger's name and Bond just goes into hysterics. That's what happens when you stay up all night drinking coffee.
He's very human in this book, and thoroughly likeable - did I mention he gives away $20,000? - apart from his merciless predation on Tilly, who is really, really not interested, thanks.
Then there's his assertion that giving women the vote has led to sexual confusion. That's pretty bizarre in itself, especially so given that nobody appreciates a strong, independent woman more than 007. It's certainly not what I expect of a man who was cavorting with a female police officer four books ago.
The villain
Goldfinger is far and away my favourite Bond villain. A lot of this has to do with Gert Frobe's portrayal, which I find completely charming, but he's a very interesting character in the novel too.
He's a practising hypnotist, he's addicted to laxatives, and he only gets off with women who are painted gold. He's multicultural; he employs Koreans and eats curry. He's a former penicillin crook, like
He gets some great lines; I've always loved the ‘happenstance - coincidence - enemy action' quote and I'm always trying to work it into conversation. Also:
“Then you can go and ____ yourself.”
“Even I am not capable of that, Mr Bond.”
Auric, Auric. There are catalogues for these things.
The girl(s)
We think by this point that we know how Bond novels work, so it's a rude shock when Tilly, who's been resisting Bond's advances, is suddenly killed rather than succumbing to his charms. It’s hard not to sympathise with her rage as Bond apparently blunders in to her mission of revenge, patronises her thoroughly, and drags them both into danger. Can we blame her for not trusting the guy who got her sister killed?
It’s a string of failures for Bond, who can't save Jill, Tilly or even the cat. He should feel pretty bad about all that.
I love Pussy (um, phrasing?), though, again, this might have a lot to do with Honor Blackman's portrayal onscreen. She is a more interesting character in the film, but Book Pussy has her charms, too. I like the way she speaks, and dresses (the ‘young SS officer' outfit, and the fisherman's sweater). And I've always been very fond of Bond's line "Pussy, get back to your basket"; it's sweet and funny.
Other cast
Oddjob is incredibly sinister: an unstoppable, implacable foe whose body is a weapon. Only three karate black belts in the world, though? Pff. I've got one myself.
(I don’t want to come across as a Fleming apologist, but I do think that when Bond places Koreans lower than apes, he means the ones working for Goldfinger rather than the nation as a whole. Reasonable given what he's just gone through.)
I’m not sure about the collection of hoods; Fleming seems to have gone back to his DAF caricatures. I guess all Americans are larger than life to him.
Felix turns up to save the day and is very affectionate with Bond, calling him 'Kid'. Too brief an appearance! I'm glad they'll get some quality time together in the next one.
Special mention goes to the woman at the Bank of England who looks 'as if she had once taken a double first' yet appears to be employed as a secretary. 1959, there, yay.
The plot
The opening, with an almost-forgotten minor character from CR and an off-the-clock adventure for Bond, is a lot of fun, and I can forgive the similarities with MR; it’s only natural that people should call on Bond’s services if they’re in a fix and cards are involved.
I enjoy everything about Bond’s mission to find out what makes Goldfinger tick, from the engineered meeting at the golf course to its end in Switzerland. It’s what I think of as Proper Spy Stuff, with a car chase thrown in (he even manages not to destroy any cars this time).
Fleming also gets to indulge himself with a spot of golf. Now, I know nothing about the game (even though I currently work for a company that runs golf courses) but I've always loved the description of the match; it's so tense, so full of revealing character moments, and even I can see that the way Bond wins is brilliantly clever.
Goldfinger’s plots get crazier and crazier, but by degrees small enough to make it believable. He cheats at cards using a ridiculously elaborate setup. He smuggles gold in the bodywork of his car. He’s going to rob Fort Knox? Well, OK then!
Bond has to rely on luck to save the day, which is a no-no in plotting today, but I like the suspense of waiting to find out if the message got through.
Then there’s a Bond classic, the false ending. It’s all over…oh, no, it isn’t! Can’t beat a good fight on an airliner. And no giving Bond the ability to fly any kind of aircraft (the thing that irritates me most about the films); he has to rely on the crew.
The location
Fleming is at his vivid and funny best when he's describing his local scenery in Kent: 'the cheap bungaloid world of the holiday lands', 'the dainty teleworld of Herne Bay'. And lucky Bond to see Super Sabres!
We're rushed through France and into Switzerland with just a handful of impressions, and we don't see a lot of the USA as Bond and Tilly are dragged around in captivity, but Fleming has a lot of fun with Fort Knox, its littered bodies, and the train filled with fake doctors (a device used by the forces of good in OHMSS).
The final locations, the BOAC airliner and the weathership, are perhaps my favourites, though; I can picture them very clearly. (We get an airport at the start and near the end of the novel; Bond is always in transit, never at rest.)
Food & drink
Some nice meals here, heavy on the seafood, of which I am very fond: crab, shrimp cocktail, curried shrimp, and I have no idea what 'pineapple surprise' is but I bet I'd like it. There’s also Enzian, which Wikipedia informs me is simply German for ‘gentian’. I think I’ve had this, in the Auvergne; it was bitter as hell. I’ll definitely look for some next time I’m on the Continent.
Miscellany
Callbacks to CR, MR and DAF. I'm really noticing how much Fleming refers to events of previous books.
Bond complains about the new fiver, just as we all did when it changed last year. Nobody ever likes new currency.
I am happy to report that 50 years have passed and we have not yet run out of gold, Colonel Smithers, sir.
That is a great observation, which I had never before realized. In the novels the villain is indeed "always signaled loud and clear," the better to start his contest with Bond. This is why it feels slightly wrong to see Fleming in the "mystery" section of a bookstore--he never bothered with whodunits. But most booksellers don't have a thriller section. And another good point regarding Kristatos, a rare example of a banality-of-evil Bond villain, as far as looks go.
Incidentally, the line "When you come to from being hit on the head the first reaction is a fit of vomiting" was inspired by Chandler, who told Fleming that fact during their radio chat.
The film has some teeth-clenchingly awful spots of "humor" (especially the stainless steel delicatessen) but I can mostly forgive them, since they're ornaments on a fundamentally serious film (whereas something like Moonraker drapes serious ornaments on a fundamentally frivolous movie).
Since we're discussing "Risico" I hope no one minds if I repost the image below, with apologies to anyone who's already seen it elsewhere on this forum:
Going back to Goldfinger...
Yes, Bond's thinking is ambivalent or confused, and Fleming himself married a rather strong, outspoken woman (as did Bond later on).
Ha! I never realized how with-it Auric was.
That could have been overkill!
The book is stuffed with aphorisms. Anyone who says the Bond books lack humor has never read Goldfinger.
He does feel guilt over Jill, but his reaction to Tilly's demise is wounded vanity over her lesbianism--a "serves her right" sneer.
And he couldn't resist reusing the trope in The Man With the Golden Gun. In any case, Billy Ring is a classic walk-on grotesque, straight out of Dick Tracy.
I do too. I prefer the toilet-seat note to the film's seduction scene, which is nowadays regarded as "problematic" for different reasons.
Google lists some recipes, along with an Urban Dictionary definition that is best left unread.
Thanks for the warning! And I love that illustrated Risico. The title font is so Sixties.
Yes, Fleming loved those long briefing scenes (and so do I!). All of the fleshed-out treatment consists of set-up. I suppose it was wise to leave the purely visual parts to the reader's imagination, to be inevitably fleshed out by the director and stuntmen. And since Fleming tended to write from experience, he might not have felt comfortable detailing the race.
Me too. It's a pretty contrived way of getting Bond onto a racetrack, but works in the context of an episodic TV series, where the viewer expects the baddies to pop up each week in a new and exciting location and role. Evidently Fleming didn't think MOW it would work as a short story, since it wasn't expanded for use in For Your Eyes Only.
Sterling Moss figures quite heavily in the treatment. As one can guess, he was an acquaintance of Fleming's. They appeared together in a panel discussion of the 1956 London Auto Show (printed in the Oct. 21 1956 issue of the Sunday Times). The car talk is detailed without being too technical and Fleming holds his own. At the end he asks his colleagues what cars they'd take home--Moss goes for the Continental Bentley, Fleming picks an Austin 105 Station Wagon in elephant's-breath gray.
Amen!
While Bond's "mission" may be his most trivial—his personal mission of attempting to engage in interesting conversation with the seemingly reticent Governor—and while this may be one of only three(?) stories to not feature some kind of Bond girl, Fleming does give us his lowest, most despicable villain of all: Rhoda.
We do flashback in Bond's memory to a Bondian adventure of sorts: Bond's boarding a pair of boats from a police launch at night to covertly wreck havoc (a scenario that appears to have been lifted for LTK, and Bond's mention of trailing a man to the theatre in Vienna also appears to have been incorporated into TLD). And before getting into the story proper—the Governor's story, that is—we get the curious detail that Bond's sympathies lie with the side he's operating against, yet he does his job anyway. His allegiances lie always with his orders, never his personal beliefs, affiliations, or views.
As the Governor gets into his tale, the voice of the writer unfortunately takes over for a long paragraph or two—delving deeply into poor Masters's mind and describing his girl's "milk-and-roses complexion." When's the last time you described an acquaintance's lady as having "cherry red smiling lips and blue eyes that sparkled with mischievous fun"? But the prose is enjoyable and while temporarily distracting, the story carries on.
In reading of Rhoda's unthinkably heartless destruction of her husband, a single word blazed in my mind. A word Fleming used to help conclude Casino Royale—and that word is not "the" or "is," nor even "dead."
The "twist" in the story lies in Masters's treatment of Rhoda upon his return from England. The Governor attributes this return treatment to the subsequent loss of Masters's humanity, of his former self, which may well be the case, but one is left to wonder what else there might have been for him to do. The real tragedy, I guess, is that he was apparently doomed the moment he met Rhoda on that plane.
The Governor appears to go light on Rhoda at times, suggesting at least twice that Fate had paid her back enough, but upon hearing of her later marriage to a Canadian millionaire, Bond says what any sensible reader must surely be thinking: "Hardly deserved it."
The Governor does also note that perhaps Masters's upbringing—his parents—were responsible for the man he became and that the way he lived his life led him, inevitably, to Rhoda. If it hadn't been Rhoda, it would have been someone else. Some other instrument of destruction. Perhaps he was responsible for all that came of him in the end.
As the Governor says: "Difficult to judge these things."
Fleming paces the story well, moving Bond and the Governor through the house and out into the moonlit garden toward the entrance as the story reaches its climax, and takes the opportunity to describe in his ever eloquent prose "white and black and pink under the moon, the huddle of narrow streets and pretty clapboard houses with gingerbread gables and balconies that is Nassau."
In the end, Bond's life—his adventures outside of this story and outside of our reality—is simply a comic strip. It's almost as if Bond becomes a real person in these pages and is able to reflect upon his fictional self for a moment. The real violence, Fleming says, is not in thermite-blasted yachts on midnight missions in exotic countries, but in the Human Comedy "where human passions are raw and real." The real violence is in what one human heart does to another. What of Bond's heart? What of this man of whom, within the very pages of this story, it is mentioned "had no intention of marrying anyone?"
Bond lives for his work, his missions that frequently threaten his very life, and with the days between rots with boredom and uselessness or else gambles, golfs, and engages in affairs with multiple married women. He lives for nothing—nothing real—nothing outside of himself and temporal pleasures. Nothing apart from the odd Vesper or Gala or Tiffany, who would seem to promise his life something more.
And now, after hearing this Governor's story, Bond thinks of the conference he'll have in the morning with the Coast Guard and the FBI—something which might previously have thrilled him, but which now feels very hollow and meaningless indeed. He's been filling his life with fleeting things. Fleeting thrills. Playing "Red Indians," as you say, @Birdleson. What does he have to live for beyond the next morning's meeting, the return to London, more files in the inbox, the joys of reading up on Japanese murder drugs? I believe in the greater context of the series, more can be read into this ending than might otherwise be there. Bond continues to live the life he's been living, of course, but he's growing more and more conscious of what it all means.
Zero scrambled eggs in this one—but two (or more) very scrambled lives.
Oh-ho! A very bold and thought-provoking position, which I will address later on.
I was also surprised the first time around, but apparently Bond's attitude was not uncommon at the time. Batista's government in Cuba was widely regarded as corrupt, cruel, and deplorable. Many in the west had sympathy for the rebels, but this disappeared when Castro took power and instituted communism.
Perhaps not, but it's a fate that suits her character and attributes. I think Masters is ultimately more despicable than Rhoda. Her callousness was that of a dumb animal--she cheated on a dull husband (and Masters really was dull, not to mention emotionally crippled) out of hormonal, unthinking lust but eventually stopped sowing wild oats. But when Masters gained the upper hand, along with a chance to forgive and forget, he resorted to the sort of deliberate, planned cruelty that Rhoda was totally incapable of--and to Fleming, cruelty was one of the 7 "Deadlier Sins." As I wrote elsewhere:
“The Quantum of Solace,” set in Bermuda, also explores the “bestial cruelty” of emotional warfare. Rhoda Masters, having brazenly cheated on her husband Philip, attempts a reconciliation. He refuses to speak to he even in private and literally divides the house between them. Before he leaves Bermuda to finalize the divorce, she begs him to provide something, anything, to save her from destitution. He finally agrees, but when Rhoda attempts to sell his car and appliances, she finds he had left her only with crippling debts. “She had already been a beaten woman” says a friend. “Now Philip Masters had kicked her when she was down” and performed “one of the cruellest actions I can recall in all my experience.” Bond, previously hostile to Rhoda, finds himself sympathetic, and she meets a benevolent fate at Fleming’s hands.
Yes, and this paves the way for the moment in OHMSS when he realizes he's fed up with transitory affairs and is ready to settle down to a real life. Bond has a pre-marriage nightmare that he and Tracy will turn into lifeless upper-class twits, but she reassures him that the Human Comedy will remain in their relationship: "don't mind if I howl like a dog every now and then. Or rather like a bitch. It's only love."
Thank you. Just overworked, overstressed, and underslept. Can't say I didn't see it coming, though my attempts to steer clear with a Vitamin C overload obviously failed.
Masters's behaved cruelly to be certain, but his actions, though premeditated, were purely retaliatory, whereas Rhoda struck without cause out of selfishness and pure callousness toward her new husband. Is a dull personality just cause for betraying your partner so cruelly and so completely? I would argue that there was thought that went into Rhoda's actions. She continued her infidelities for a good long time—enough time to have eventually come to her senses and stopped her own behavior, yet she never did. Ultimately, her behavior was stopped because Tattersall put an end to the affair. Ostensibly, Rhoda would have gone on cheating on her husband indefinitely. So I can't give her any credit for growing, or at all possessing, a conscience. To her further discredit, there was a brazenness behind her actions in how she "publicized" the affair: not only did she not care about what she did to her husband in private; she didn't care about the mockery she made of him in public. And this was all just after they had met, fallen in "love," and married. They were obviously both very young and very stupid, but none of this excuses either of their behaviors.
Personally, I'm inclined to side with Masters. His plan, while cruel, was ultimately born out of an effort to save himself from injustices he hadn't warranted. Did he—his personality, his very being—have some hand in Rhoda's treatment of him? Fleming suggests so. But one would be hard-pressed to say that, despite what this board sometimes suggests, being a Rory Kinnear Tanner-type makes one deserving of such shockingly inhumane treatment.
As for Rhoda's fate, you're very right: winding up with a millionaire ultimately suited the gold-digging ways that emerged out of her personality and her situation in life. She could have gotten a measly job on the island somewhere and started to earn her own living, but instead she turned herself into a virtual "harlot." And I would argue that Bond himself never actually admits sympathy for Rhoda, though the Governor does and Fleming appears to also by giving her a benevolent fate, though I wonder if perhaps he ultimately did that to more closely mirror reality and show the reader the great injustices of life, rather than express that he personally felt Rhoda was deserving of a better end than Masters.
There obviously isn't a black-and-white plane here with Masters on one side and Rhoda on the other, and I think it's very much open to debate what degrees of unjust or righteous action have been meted out by either side. This all furthers the point Fleming is making that the really interesting stuff lies in human interaction: heart to heart, rather than pistol to pistol.
I am definitely looking forward to revisiting OHMSS and Bond's turbulent relationship with Tracy after all this. On the topic of marriage in "Quantum of Solace," Bond does say something to the effect that, despite what he tells the Governor about flight attendants, he could never live with a lifeless servant as a wife.
Certainly, but Rhoda's selfish, stupid callousness is very much an everyday sin--the sort that blights marriages everyday--whereas Master's fiendish scheme to destroy her is the sort of premeditated, twisted cruelty that is less common and ultimately more disturbing, especially because he already had her at his mercy.
Not just cause, but an understandable and predictable one--to explain does not excuse. Rhoda's thought didn't consist of much more than how to continue her affair--she even lacked the intelligence to try and conceal her infidelity.
Too late for that. By this point he just wanted to put the boot in. As the governor says, “that false gesture with the motor car and the radio-gramophone was a fiendishly brilliant bit of delayed action to remind her, even when he was gone, how much he hated her, how much he wanted still to hurt her.”
I think that distinction--between passively and thoughtlessly doing evil and actively plotting and committing it--is what separates the two. The latter is the bigger evil for me, objectively speaking.
Perhaps, but the Governor is also the wisest and most humane character in the story, the only one who earns Bond's respect.
The trick with the motor car and radio were a bridge too far in my opinion, I agree to that. Once the divorce was finalized, he should have been done with it and been on his way. I'm not trying to paint Masters as some kind of saint in the story. And the Governor does say Masters lost much of his humanity in how he responded to Rhoda—that he was never again the same person he had been before. Essentially what we have here is two people entering each other's lives, destroying each other, and then destroying themselves in the process. Both make out to some degree in the end: Rhoda marries a millionaire far away from her past troubles (happily though? who's to say...) and Masters leaves a once promising career and returns to Nigeria where he once found satisfaction in life (again, happily? likely not...).
Bond does come to respect and admire the Governor, but I'm not sure it has anything to do with his agreeing with the Governor's opinions on the couple so much as it has to do with him being pleasantly surprised that the Governor managed to surprise him with an interesting story that ultimately proved more fascinating to Bond than his own experiences with the unpleasant side of life.
On a different note: While I understand the story would have been diabolically difficult to adapt into a modern Bond film (though a really skilled screenwriter could have incorporated the characters and basic message), the film of QoS missed a trick by not even glossing the title (I hear a scene of Mathis doing so it was cut, which makes the shortest-Bond-film-ever boast ring very hollow). Without an explanation, the title seems weird and pretentious to anyone who hasn't read the original story.
I'm not sure how Mathis relating the story Fleming had written would have worked into the film's plot or related to Bond's grief over Vesper, but elements of the story could perhaps find their way into a future Bond film.
It would have probably taken too much screentime for Mathis to tell the story of the Masters, but he could have introduced "the Law of the Quantum of Solace" and applied to Bond's attitude toward Vesper. At one point Bond had been prepared to kill her for her treachery--and so the Quantum of Solace stood at zero. Now where does its stand? As the governor says in the story "I've seen flagrant infidelities patched up, I've seen crimes and even murder forgiven by the other party, let alone bankruptcy and every other form of social crime...But never the death of common humanity in one of the partners." Would Bond have forgiven her crimes if she'd lived? Is she still a bitch to him? "The Quantum of Solace stands at zero. You've got to get away to save yourself" says Bond in the story. Would he have said so in the film?
All that said, both CR and QoS softened Bond's attitude toward Vesper, so there was less ambiguity in his posthumous feelings, which might have worked against what I've proposed.
You mentioned not quite understanding how Bond came to be mixed up in Krest's business, @Birdleson. Fleming doesn't make a great deal of it and his narrative fiddling to get Bond into the story proper is a bit contrived, but it's there. Bond apparently had been sent to investigate Communist activity in the Seychelles and ensure the area was secure for the British fleets. Bond checks it out and finds nothing. He's then stuck in the Seychelles with nothing to do but wait to be picked up by the SS Kampala, and as is so often the case for Bond, boredom soon sets in. Bond and Fidele are obviously pals who go back some ways, but I'd put my money on Fidele not knowing much at all about Bond's background apart from the loose label of "civil servant." Fidele does know Bond is thoroughly bored however, and suggests he tag along for something new when Krest recruits him for his expedition.
Krest is indeed a gloriously evil bastard. His every word of dialogue is designed to fill both Bond and the reader to the brim with disgust. He isn't perhaps quite as overtly grotesque as some of Fleming's novel-bound villains, but the details are original and evocative: "tough, leathery," "hard and fit," "weather-beaten face," "pale brown eyes...slightly hooded...sleepy and contemptuous," "a soft, most attractive lisping," "tattooed eagle above a fouled anchor on the right forearm," "bone-crushing grip," "likes to be thought a Hemingway hero." Anthony Zerbe does indeed come close to Fleming's portrait of the man. The character's most striking attribute, however—that brutal sting-ray tail, the hideously named "Corrector"—was given to color Franz Sanchez. From emphasizing that Liz is his fifth wife to constantly calling Fidele "Fido" and poking fun at Bond's British servitude, he is as easily detestable as they come.
(It's worth noting also that Krest is not only an American, but an American of German descent, and that the woman he has "enslaved" is a Britisher—"his English slave," Bond thinks.)
As I mentioned, the massacre by Rotenone is one of those exceptionally well-written passages Fleming does so well—even if he does gloss right over the contrivance of having Krest more or less immediately stumble upon this supposedly supremely rare fish (small ocean, eh?). There's something really touching, actually, about Bond looking out for the little Hildebrand Rarity and him trying to shoo it away from the poison. And I like that the fish swims directly toward the stuff, right into its own suffocating death, despite having been well clear of the danger. Reminds me of Werner Herzog's documentary on Antarctica where that rogue penguin runs off determinedly toward a vast wasteland of ice and its certain death. In a way, I think the Hildebrand Rarity might symbolically be Liz, giving herself over to Krest and remaining under his most cruel thumb. The only problem here lies in Bond weakly handing the dead Hildebrand over to Krest, even carrying it under the water "so as to preserve its colours." Why give the man the satisfaction of collecting his trophy? Just further paints Bond as spineless, defeatist, ineffectual.
The most Bond does in this story is to tell Krest that he's drunk and lucky not to have gotten hurt so far and that he should go to bed. Then what happens? Krest orders his girl to bed with him and Bond retreats to his own room where, half an hour later, he hears "a single, heartrending scream" and "her sobs" and again does nothing. "Hell! What was it to do with him? They were man and wife," he reasons, unconvincingly. "If she was prepared to stand this sort of thing and not kill her husband, or leave him, it was no good Bond playing Sir Galahad." So you're just going to go to bed, Bond, and try not to think about it? Some hero.
At least somebody in the story proves they have some guts, and there's no doubt in my mind it was definitely Liz. So much so that Bond's swaying back and forth between Liz and Fidele at the end feels almost silly. I've put up with an evening with an exceptionally rude bastard—loaded on alcohol and other things—before, him hurling outright insults at myself and family and others. At the end of that evening, I was glad to show him the door and see the back of him. But I certainly didn't feel like murdering the man or doing anything else at all to him. I was just relieved I would never have to see him again. Fidele is in the exact same situation. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Why kill the bastard and risk throwing your life away? There's no need for it. Just get ashore and you'll never have to deal with the man again. No, Fidele had no real motive here.
Liz, on the other hand, has true motive. She's been beaten brutally twice or even thrice within the pages of this story (and surely several times before) and is trapped in a psychologically abusive marriage to the scum of the earth. And now that Bond has shown up and told her she doesn't need to put up with this bastard, she has all the encouragement she needs to follow through on what she must have been wanting to do for a long time. Then, from a literary point of view, you have the quasi-sexual nature of death from having a fish lodged in one's throat, which mirrors Krest's violent demonstrations of "affection" toward his wife and of course the beating by a piece of another sea animal.
The whodunit would perhaps have been more effective if Fleming had made Bond himself a possible suspect in the murder. Bond too would have had motive—Bond in gentleman-hero mode that is—never being able to resist coming to the rescue of a dame in trouble nor putting it to a real right bastard.
I'm not sure I fully buy Bond's reasoning about not wanting to spend four days of pleasure with the ravishing former Mrs. Krest, considering he previously had approved to some degree of Honey's assassination by scorpion. To be fair to Bond and Fleming, however, the murder here is freshly committed and there is something quite twisted about having lodged that spiny specimen in the man's throat. For these reasons, I can see Bond hesitating about taking the plunge with Liz. He must know deep down in his heart that she was indeed the one responsible, but Fleming leaves him mentally dancing and the conclusion hanging.
A fantastic villain and gorgeous descriptions of underwater life, but a bizarrely weak portrait of an ineffectual James Bond.
Scrambled sea-eggs: 1
RISICO
I was put off by the opening - comedy foreign accent followed by an incredibly clumsy sentence - but soon won over by all the delightful espionage business in the restaurant. Nice callback to the Mexican mission described at the start of Goldfinger, too.
I'd never have guessed that Colombo would turn out to be the goodie; the description of the way he eats spaghetti should be enough all by itself to make him the villain.
I always like to see what Bond does with his downtime, which here includes a horrible train journey and writing a tongue-in-cheek postcard.
I didn't get much of a sense of Venice from the description, but I found the deserted lido very atmospheric. The chase across the sand is my favourite part of this story; the idea that you can be in a public place, in public view, yet still in serious danger is a spy fiction classic (it's the sort of thing Helen MacInnes does very well), and the hopeless flat-out running the stuff of nightmares.
It's a pity, in my view, that the story escalates into a shootout and ends with everyone having a jolly time over breakfast (who knew Italians were so into bacon and eggs?), as it goes against the grain of the more nuanced cloak and dagger affair that went before and turns the whole thing into a romp.
Some excellent food and drink stuff in this one, including Bond drinking a Negroni. I'm a big Negroni fan but had forgotten this bit. (The pizza place down the road from me boasts of selling the cheapest Negroni in London, at £4. Cheap or not, they're very good.)
I read recently - I can't believe I hadn't figured this out - that Fleming's 'fir cones' are actually pine nuts, and thus 1960's exotic Genoan pasta sauce is today's student standby, good old pesto. (I eat pasta and pesto disgracefully often, because I am busy and hungry.)
The most nitpicky niggle ever: Kristatos's Lancia would presumably have been left-hand drive, so he has no business making hand signals with his right hand. Being dead is no excuse.
I think they are basically consistent. Bond has a very sentimentalized, anthropomorphized view of fish, so he feels grief for the little "innocent" guys like the Rarity and views "big moray eels and all the members of the scorpion-fish family" (and the sting-ray) as the equivalents of gangsters and Bond villains--bad guys and predators who deserve the law of the jungle.
Bond's attitude toward Krest's spousal abuse is stems from his preference for independent women, and Liz at this point comes up short: "If she was prepared to stand this sort of thing and not kill her husband, or leave him, it was no good Bond playing Sir Galahad...How could a girl have so little guts? Or was it that women could take almost anything from a man? Anything except indifference?" She of course does kill her husband, but Bond plausibly feels that if he'd interfered he could have ended up like the cops in many domestic abuse cases: equally unwanted and despised by the abuser and the spouse unwilling to break away. Stopping Krest from abusing Liz once would have done nothing to solve the underlying problems in their marriage.
It might have even gotten Bond killed. Perhaps there is a subtext of fear on Bond's part. He knows that Krest's ship is enemy territory and he's outnumbered. As Krest says: “Feller, you move any closer and I blow this–just once. And you know what? It’ll be the old heave-ho for Mr. goddam Bond… Man overboard. Too bad. We back up to make a search and you know what, feller? Just by chance we back up into you with those twin screws. Would you believe it! What lousy bad luck for that nice feller Jim we were all getting so fond of!”
Indeed. As Krest and the Spangs, demonstrate, if there's one thing Fleming had utter contempt for it's vulgar American millionaires. Just imagine what he'd feel about one who leveraged Russian connections to get into the White House...
On that incendiary note, I will have to take a two week break from this thread (and board) due to vacation travel. After getting back I hope to have some newly-acquired Fleming rarities to share.
@Birdleson, yep, still in it till the end. I just found myself a little labored with the reading and writing for so many weeks that I chose the halfway mark to take a pause and get my mind off of things to come back fresh later. I needed to do something, anything else, so it didn't begin to feel tedious or more like work. It's a good thing I took a break at this time too, because my time in the past month or so has been very limited and strained with a lot of personal commitments that would've found me unable to keep up much. I was right to hold off a bit.
I know that by October 12th we should be on to Thunderball, so in that time I'll get through Goldfinger and then take whatever time is left to breeze through the short stories and do little notes here and there to catch up, maybe one a day or one every two days, depending on my available time. I want to see it through to the end because I really have gotten a kick out of this, and though I don't look forward to The Spy Who Loved Me, novels like You Only Live Twice and The Man with the Golden Gun are those I know very little about in a general sense (despite knowing other details) and can't wait to dig into them, so that will keep me motivated and driven to push on.
I've come away from this knowing even more about Bond than I did before, and my sense of the original character is now at the back of my head every time I think about the movies, so it's made me a better analyzer of the cinematic Bond because I know where he came from and who he was in the books. This has led me to appreciate some actors even more, like Sean, Dan and Tim for how they nail aspects of the original, but in general gave me the opportunity to experience Fleming's Bond, who I find to be one of the most well drawn characters I've ever read. It's been a real treat to see this man develop over time as he faces all he does, and to see the little ways that Fleming made him so raw, relatable and contradictory in his humanity.
Fleming deserves a higher shelf position in the literary world than he has, for his ability to paint a scene, deliver pulpy and punchy dialogues and to craft what are often beautifully sketched characters that leap off the page, including his female characters who are some of the best written women I've read that a male has created. But we know why he's special, so for now that'll have to be enough.
I've never read it, @Birdleson, just as I hadn't read any of them before outside of Casino to Moonraker. It's just that a rather Bondless Bond novel doesn't sound that great to me. Maybe I'll be proven wrong-I of course hope I will be.
Pine nuts!
Combined with garlic and basil you get pesto, without which I would have died of malnutrition circa 1997.
Ooh, a shopping trip! Enjoy!
Calling a film Quantum of Solace was a bold move from the company that was afraid 'Licence Revoked' might confuse people, but then it is a fantastic title. Fleming at his best is so good with words.
This sense of language comes out again in his lists of placenames. Godalming, Cheltenham, Tunbridge Wells...Trucial Oman, the Leeward Islands, British Guiana. There's a comforting rhythm to it, like tuning in to the Shipping Forecast.
I said in regard to Risico that I enjoy seeing Bond's downtime, but here it borders on excruciating as two men of completely different background and attitude try to entertain each other according to the demands of social convention. We've all made up utter lies in a desperate attempt to keep conversation flowing; I feel for Bond and his air hostess gambit. And it works, hurrah!
When I first read these stories I was a teenager, and I judged Rhoda as an awful person. On this read I felt rather sorry for her, lonely and isolated in a strange, snobbish world and obviously depressed (that's why you let cleaning and cooking slide, take it from me). I don't imagine she was as happy as she looked during her affair, either; I read it as a brittle joy, a coat of paint over deep cracks.
The true cruelty of Masters, for me, isn't the trick with the car, but forcing his wife to live a lie with him for a whole year: putting public appearance and respectability above decency and good mental health. It's simply horrible, and with no independent income there's nothing she can do about the situation.
I'll take Bond's way of life over the Comédie Humaine, thanks. Seems like a thoroughly miserable comedy to me and I'm surprised he didn't thank God he was well out of it.