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I have a copy of a 1965 print of The Man With The Golden Gun from Pan Books that Jase brought back from a London book sale.
Naturally I will read all of Fleming's books eventually but I'd like to have a go at TMWTGG.
If that's unwise, I won't. Will I have lack of information from books that came before this novel that would diminish the pleasure of reading TMWTGG?
So my question basically is if Fleming's novels are stand-alone stories or if they are continuations of Bond's journey.
Allow me a second inquiry. Are there releases of Fleming's novels that you would recommend to get?
I've found "Vintage Classic" releases of the books with introductions from John Cork. I recognize the name from the fantastic documentaries that are on the Bond film special features.
Here is the link to amazon and the Goldfinger book, I also like the artwork very much but I'll get something else if you don't approve of those.
http://amzn.eu/gSvGknU
As for what editions of the books to choose, I must elect the Penguin editions that were published in celebration of Fleming's 100th anniversary, which was in 2008:
The reason I like these books goes beyond their immaculate presentation and perfect pulp style that puts them back in that 50s/60s era. Most important of all is the fact that they reproduce Fleming's work 100% uncensored with nothing about them altered or removed from how they appeared to European audiences in the 50s and 60s. Too many editions these days remove content that is deemed offensive of too of that time, and I think that's a disgrace to the work and a major blockade to a genuine experience with the texts. Penguin can always be counted upon to reproduce the writing of authors with no censorship imposed, and I respect them so very much for that considering they were a publisher whose profile got skyrocketed when they took a risk in releasing Lady Chatterley's Lover in the 60s. As a British centered company, they certainly respect Fleming's work and wanted to honor the novels with full reproductions.
The only issue with getting these editions is that they are obviously highly demanded and have been out of print for years now, making it hard to find some of them in particular. Via Amazon you may be able to find a good chunk of the novels for cheap by buying them used, and at the very least you should be able to get Thunderball, On Her Majesty's Secret Service and You Only Live Twice through the Blofeld Trilogy that collected those three books a few years back:
https://www.amazon.com/Blofeld-Trilogy-Ian-Fleming/dp/0143117904/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1512504834&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Blofeld+Trilogy+Ian+Fleming
Indeed, I didn't own 007 in New York until I picked up the ‘Quantum of Solace’ short story collection a year or two ago, so this was only my second reading. Strange, and pleasant, to read a Bond story that’s almost new to me, slight though it is.
More on the inner workings of the Service. Nice to know they look after their own, to the extent of sparing a 00 for this delicate task.
We learn that Bond has, in his past, been in New York for long enough to rent or own an apartment - weeks? months? years? - and had, or has, a relationship with Solange (he likes that name, doesn't he?) that he’s confident of picking up again when he happens to be in town. This is tantalising, and I wanted more detail, but it's always best to leave Bond's past a little shadowy and mysterious.
Really, though, this is a travelogue, and delivered with Fleming's usual eye for quirky details, in his beautifully readable style. I'm no New York expert and I don't know how many of the institutions he namechecks still exist, but they're all delightfully real to me now.
I love travel writing anyway, and it's even better with a little espionage attached.
I am very happy that I scooped up the vast majority of the Penguin editions way back when they were being printed around 2009 because I knew that the day would come when I wanted to run through them. I cherish the collection and have only had to get a couple used copies to complete the collection (I was missing Goldfinger until this year, for example). The presentation is top class, but the absence of censorship is really the greatest thing about them and it's apparently rare to see uncensored versions of the texts in the US.
I remember bringing Live & Let Die to high school with me to read, and attracted some eyes. I was reading the early books at the time and that one just happened to be the cover with the least clothed woman on it.
Yes, @Birdleson. All the editions including L&LD (which was censored in the US) are as they appeared in their original European printing.
(Been done with Spy for awhile, just have to get around to putting my thoughts up on here.)
This one just noses ahead of From A View To A Kill as my favourite of the short stories. For now.
I’d almost forgotten about the session at the firing-range, but it’s a good start: full of satisfying technical detail and dusky atmosphere.
“Am I supposed to take [the gun] through the German customs in a golf bag or something?” asks man who took diamonds through the US customs in golf balls.
I agree with everyone who’s pointed out how closely the relevant bit of the film follows the spirit of the short story. The casting of Maryam d’Abo with her ‘beautiful, pale profile’. Sender's/Saunders’s petty bureaucracy (you’re obviously not supposed to like someone who drinks Horlicks). The sense that Bond is properly falling in love in a way he doesn’t usually allow himself. Even his rhetorical question about why she had to choose the cello - though he asks it for very different reasons!
It’s nice to see this romantic, whimsical side of Bond; he’s not a robotic killing-machine, but a person with desires and the occasional flight of fancy. I wonder if Trigger worked out that her life had been spared by a man she would never meet? That's some Casablanca-level stuff right there.
I mentioned that I was going to Berlin a couple of weekends ago, and this is where I read the three short stories in my copy of OP. Late on the Saturday afternoon, my friend S and I headed to the Kurfürstendamm and Café Marquardt.
The Bond and Beyond blog had informed me that this was attached to the Kempinski Hotel and now called Café Reinhard.
We went in rather timidly, because it Looked Posh, but were welcomed and seated in the window.
Outside it was dark and rainy, but I was warm and cosy next to the heater (non-infrared). Candles in silver holders burned on the tables. There were even newspapers on a wooden rack.
We placed our order, and I read S the relevant page of the story while we waited.
I had an espresso, of course (S kindly offered me some of his latte too, so I wouldn't have to suffer too much for my art) and a huge slab of raspberry cake Bond would have rejected out of hand but I enjoyed very much.
Coming in to the candlelit warmth from the rainy streets, excellent coffee & cake and a Bond connection all combined to make it a special experience I shall always treasure.
The next day, just to do the job properly, I dragged the long-suffering S to the corner of Kochstrasse and Wilhelmstrasse for more photos in the rain.
An apartment building. Light on in a fourth-floor window; probably the kitchen. For Horlicks. Ugh.
Street corner with idiot in stupid army surplus hat from the flea market.
She's certainly got the world by the balls. And she's lucky enough to live in Fleming/Bond country.
I am so envious of your getting to read the Bonds in Europe. Reading them in America—in however glamorous or adventurous a setting—feels positively uncultured by comparison.
(And a dark and rainy night for TLD...could it get any better?)
I'm glad you guys enjoy these posts - I've got a huge kick out of all this reading on location, and I only had the idea during the Bondathon.
I'm also lucky that England is a small country, and even Europe isn't huge, plus I have the freedom to travel more or less wherever I want. Grateful and glad to share!
Can't believe you got charged extra for revealing your excitement about getting the book. I'm quite cross on behalf of your younger self.
Wish I had put down my thoughts sooner after reading as I've probably forgot half of what I might have mentioned, but I'll flip through the pages of the book as I go and hopefully recall most of it.
First off: this was a very enjoyable read—and a very fast read. Putting this book in the first-person just made the pages fly. It's a story on a much smaller scale, but rather refreshing following the increasingly grandiose plots of From Russia With Love > Dr. No > Goldfinger > Thunderball. And in the midst of it all we get a glimpse of a "lost" James Bond adventure too...
More than a glimpse really. Bond narrates for us virtually the whole thing over a few pages: how he tangled with SPECTRE in Toronto, Canada, quite dangerously assuming the role of an assassination target so he could get close to his own target, one Horst Uhlmann. Something about the whole setup actually reminds me more of a Gardner Bond plot than a Fleming one, but it's actually pretty damned interesting. More interesting in theory, I think, than at least one or two of the plots Fleming actually fleshed out into novels. It's all quite thrilling and a neat little "lost" Bond adventure in the midst of a very atypical Bond outing.
But before Bond, there was Vivienne. And Vivienne to the novel's great credit is very vividly realized.
Fleming enters the feminine mind superbly, at least to this non-feminine reader, and captures his heroine's thoughts, fears, hopes, remembrances as if they were born of his very own brain. Apart from the change from third-person to first, the prose here is markedly different from anything else Fleming wrote for Bond. And it's a joy to read. Vivienne is a wonderful narrator to spend time with. As miserable as her own backstory is at times, I honestly did not mind waiting so long for Bond to enter the scene (and as others have pointed out, it's a thrilling, even chilling, moment when he does.)
As Vivienne recounts her unhappy past, you can easily foresee the pain that is heading her way in the form of Derek Mallaby. It's a story we've seen in too many forms too many times before. But it's all so real and so uniquely detailed you're with Vivienne, dreading for her sake, every page of the way. The incident in the theater that leaves Vivienne feeling so "unclean, degraded, sinful" actually didn't seem quite so horrible to me as I'd recalled it being, but that too is true to life I suppose: how the smallest of incidents leave the biggest of marks. The worse part for me was Derek insisting on following through with the sex while Vivienne was in a state of emotional turmoil—and then of course his abandoning her after. That was to my mind the truly "ghastly" part.
Kurt Rainer is an interesting character as well, but one I'll blow over in the interest of word count. I suppose what I can say about him for now is that his clinical outlook on relationships and lovemaking serves as a stark contrast to the passion—however brief, however meaningless, however loveless—Vivienne experiences with Bond.
Flashing forward to our narrated present: the sea of pines and the nighttime thunderstorm make for a perfect setting for the horror that is to befall Vivienne. But before Sluggsy and Horror show up, she encounters another equally horrific creature in the form of Mr. Phancey, against whom she must lodge a chair under the door to her motel room to prevent him from coming in and lecherously seizing her in the night! My God! And she addresses all this as if it were, understandably, something loathsome to her, and yet, not so understandably, as if it were something to be expected and resourcefully dealt with. Despite the crude objectification that sometimes goes on in Fleming's fantasy world, here he really shows you what women go through in the real world, what they have to endure and protect themselves against. It's a really sobering picture, and honestly it makes me commend Fleming all the more for tackling this daring project.
But on to the main attractions: Sluggsy and Horror. Despite Fleming's stipulation that no material from the novel apart from its title could find its way to film, Sluggsy and Horror were adapted with very little camouflage into Sandor and Jaws. Sluggsy is a "short, moon-faced youth" and perfectly hairless, his head "as polished as a billiard ball." Horror is "tall and thin" with "black eyes [that] were slow-moving, incurious," "stiff grayish-black hair," and teeth "cheaply capped with steel." He even wears "a black, sharp-looking single-breasted coat" and "stovepipe trousers."
The two are monsters, each in their own way. After reading first of Derek, then Kurt, then Mr. Phancey, the reader already sympathizes with poor Vivienne enough that Fleming really wouldn't have to do much to get us blazing with red-eyed fury for her sake. So the threats of rape from Sluggsy and the violence dealt by Horror really do seem like too much—a nightmare that will never end. The dawn of salvation appears for Vivienne in the form of a dark knight, noirishly described, and whose name is perfectly delayed for several pages until we hear that wonderful: "Bond. James Bond." (Fleming even gets in on the fun a bit having the gangster call that "a pretty chump name.")
Maybe it's the way Vivienne describes him, maybe it's the sheer horror of what we've seen this girl go through, maybe it's the fact that Bond is completely off-duty and we're seeing him act out of the goodness of his heart and what he knows to be right, but Bond has rarely come across both as so heroic a figure and as so cold and so menacing as he does here. Bond has been up against far greater odds and far more dangerous situations, hasn't he? Yet Fleming sets this motel-locked standoff between Bond and two lowlife gunmen, however sharp on the trigger, on a scale as grandiose—if not grander—as any other Bond adventure. When Bond, on the verge of taking on Sluggsy and Horror, tells Vivienne what she can tell the police to tell the CIA if she gets any trouble from them: "Just say who I was. I've got a number in my outfit—sort of a recognition number. It's 007. Try not to forget it."—chills. And when Vivienne fixates on the fact that he spoke of himself in the past tense—"Say who I was..."—more chills.
In the end, after a great gun battle amidst the roaring flames, having the car plunge into the lake and Bond assume the deaths of the two villains (unseen) is unfortunately all a bit obvious, a bit lazy even, but this is ultimately pulp fiction so you're along for the ride or you're not.
I've spoken so favorably of this novel and indeed enjoyed the hell out of it enough that it pains me to address one of the most troublesome lines in all of Flemingdom, the perfectly baffling: "All women love semi-rape." Even more baffling coming from the perspective of his only female narrator. And Fleming had just gracefully skated his way through a surprisingly tastefully non-awkward description of lovemaking from the perspective of the Bond girl. But "semi-rape." I honestly don't know exactly what Fleming was going for here. He spends a good long paragraph elaborating and yet I don't know that any of it goes to clarify just what he meant by that one incredibly dangerous line. Being "taken," even brutally, by a man with consent is not rape. Is Fleming saying all women enjoy fantasizing about rape? Some surely do. But to have your sole female narrator, especially one who has been such a strong character in a novel that has really shed a lot of light on the real-world violence that is done to everyday women, make a statement that all women enjoy some form of rape is simply beyond careless. I have no other words for it.
But moving on from that, I really enjoy all of Viv's thoughts on Bond—how she catches herself dramatizing him, making a hero out of him. How he wasn't the spy who loved her. He just a spy who loved her. No, she says, not even loved. He was a spy who slept with her. Doesn't make for as catchy a title—A Spy Who Slept With Me—but her thoughts are refreshingly grounded and real for a series that had recently asked us to buy into the attempted theft of Fort Knox. And ultimately, Viv decides, despite knowing her tendency to dramatize people (and don't we all?), this is a man worth giving her love.
We get Sluggsy back from the dead for one last tussle post-coitus and pre-end credits. Gunfire's traded through the window and Bond takes off into the night after him. Vivienne mentions nothing of what she hears outside, only that "James Bond came back," which leads me to believe that however Bond ultimately killed Sluggsy, he didn't do so with his gun. Or else you'd think she would have mentioned the gunshot. It's left to the imagination. Whether with his hands or some implement lying around out there, I imagine Bond made this a rather personal and nasty kill.
As I mentioned at the start of all this, Spy was a remarkably fast read and a thoroughly enjoyable one. As we know from the films, sometimes smaller and more intimate really is better. I've started in on OHMSS already, but just barely, so it looks like it'll be a OHMSS/YOLT twofer for me over the holidays!
Total scrambled eggs count: 3 batches, all prepared by our narrator extraordinaire
I didn't really notice this until it was pointed out to me by a female friend when I was defending Bond on the usual misogyny charges. It's a recurring theme in the novels; I think the notorious 'sweet tang of rape' line is as early as CR. Then there's Tracy's mum, who came to Corsica looking for bandits, and the troubling affair of Darko Kerim's dad.
The best we can say about this particular case is that nobody is advocating actual rape; it's more fantasy or roleplay, as @Some_Kind_Of_Hero suggests. But it's still a weird statement. Like saying 'all men love rare steak', it's either an overgeneralisation or a suggestion that if you don't love semi-rape, you're not a proper woman.
For me, the first-person narrative softens the blow a bit. Viv is young, has strong opinions, and thinks she knows way more about the world than she actually does; it's not out of character for her to make this kind of sweeping statement about women in general.
I think I may have more things to say on Bond and consent, but I'll save 'em for now, perhaps until we've gone through all the books.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on Bond and consent!
Raymond Benson called that scene the best in the book: "If this situation were in a film, the audience would surely applaud and cheer at this wonderful entrance of the hero. It is utterly romantic and works beautifully."
As noted earlier, The Spy Who Loved Me is an autobiographical book. Vivienne's seduction on the floor of a box at the Royalty Kinema in Windsor's Farquhar Street is based directly on Fleming's first sexual experience with a woman, even down to the location. Fleming's friend Ernest Cuneo mentioned that Ian had a “terrifying experience which he remembered with horror” and claims “it was psychologically traumatic, and modified, it appears as one of the incidents in his books.” I think this was the scene. But when Fleming transmuted the experience into fiction, he told it from the woman's point of view, portraying himself as a callow upper class cad. This is part of what makes TSWLM such an interesting and sympathetic work. His sympathies are entirely with the woman, not with the stand-in for his younger self.
I think Kurt is also something of a warped self-reflection of Fleming. Kurt's cold, clinical outlook on love was rather like that of Fleming in his younger, pre-marriage period of womanizing. And Kurt's outlook on relationships and lovemaking reminds me of the James Bond of Casino Royale, before the character was humanized by Vesper and time.
Yes, this is why TSWLM is the closest Fleming came to writing a feminist Bond novel. It's why Ann S. Boyd, in her book The Devil with James Bond!, called TSWLM "a devastating parody of the misuse and manipulation of sex." And why female critics were far more receptive to the book than male critics, who either thought Vivienne was a tramp or creeped out by Fleming's "literary transvestism." The message of the book is that all men are bastards, with only one exception--and he's the one who gets away.
It's hard to say, and even attempting to do so is uncomfortable. Lycett says Fleming was giving "full rein to his sadomasochism." Vivienne does go on about how "it was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made his act of love so piercingly wonderful. That and the coinciding of nerves completely relaxed after the removal of tension and danger, the warmth of gratitude, and a woman's natural feeling for her hero." I'm afraid that Fleming let his confusing sexual fantasies ("semi-rape" is an automatically confusing concept) briefly take over what had previously been a believable woman's voice.
This wouldn't be the first unresolved tension in The Spy Who Loved Me, a book otherwise full of outrage over male mistreatment of women. Fleming's attitude toward Bond is similarly contradictory. He wrote to his publisher that he wanted to debunk the idea of Bond as a heroic figure and therefore wrote the book from the heroine's point of view, had Bond make a"a considerable hash of his subsequent fight with the gangsters," and then, "after the love scene with the heroine which Bond breaks off in the most cursory fashion, there follows the long homily from the chief detective warning the heroine and the readers that Bond himself is in fact no better than the gangsters. And on that note the book closes." But it didn't, and Fleming sabotaged his own purpose on the last page, when Vivienne completely dismissed the detective's homily ("I just didn't believe him.") Bond remains "written on [her] heart forever." Judging by the way Fleming vicariously described his hero though her eyes, you can't blame her. It seems like the author had fallen back in love with his character.
That might have been more difficult--Fleming's villains tend to be unsympathetic, Olympian figures. We enjoy hearing them give mad speeches, but we don't want them to succeed or live.
I've read a couple of Benson novels since and I'm not crazy about them; apart from anything else, they read too American. Could he not have run them by a Brit to check speech patterns and so on? I'd have done it for free!
May I also present Exhibit B for the prosecution: