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Yeah I consider Dr. No to be a sort of spiritual follow up to LALD. In addition to the recurring characters and Jamaica setting it also shares the pulpier swashbuckling tone of LALD, trading the Voodoo cult and pirate gold for No’s Fu Manchu-esque supervillain and over the top obstacle course. Both rate very highly on the pure entertainment scale of the Bond novels for me.
I think the racism in LALD is a bit different to that in say GF. Fleming doesn't really dislike Black people; he says Bond has a natural affinity for them, M seems to praise "their rise" in the world, and Bond calls them orderly chaps. The problem is that Fleming sees them as other and inferior; some of his previous language comes off as patronising, and he also refers to Quarrel's natural servility to Bond.
However, I don't think there's any tinge of malice in the novel, unlike the rather cruel depiction of Oddjob of an ogre and representative of all Koreans.
Yes, gf was as bad as lald on the racism score.
The two are simply racist.
LALD is the better novel, though.
Yes, that’s essentially what I was getting at. At the end of the day racist thinking is racist thinking no matter how you split the hairs.
I agreed with SomethingThatAteHim
Correct. At the end of long conversation between the black couple (cut from the 2023 editions) Bond says "Seems they’re interested in much the same things as everyone else—sex, having fun, and keeping up with the Joneses. Thank God they’re not genteel about it." In other words, these people might look and sound exotic to me, but in the end they're like all other people.
Fleming's attitude was likely similar to what Felix Leiter tells Bond: "I like the negroes and they know it somehow. I used to be a bit of an aficionado of Harlem. Wrote a few pieces on Dixieland Jazz for the Amsterdam News, one of the local papers. Did a series for the North American Newspaper Alliance on the negro theatre about the time Orson Welles put on his Macbeth with an all-negro cast at the Lafayette. So I know my way about up there. And I admire the way they’re getting on in the world, though God knows I can’t see the end of it."
Fleming's treatment is obviously patronizing, but that's not surprising for someone who practically believed God was an Englishman, and who treated all nations outside the UK as inferior. In his own interactions with African Americans Bond himself is usually courteous, whereas in Goldfinger Bond intends on "putting Oddjob and any other Korean firmly in his place, which, in Bond's estimation, was rather lower than apes in the mammalian hierarchy." Why Fleming/Bond is so antagonistic toward Koreans is never satisfactorily explained. We're told that they served as guards for Japanese prison camps during WWII, but the Koreans also suffered greatly at the hands of the Japanese. Yet in YOLT Fleming treats the Japanese, whose army behaved far more badly in the war, far more positively than the Koreans. The issue remains a mystery. In any case, there is much to be learned from a detailed examination of the differing racial attitudes in the books.
The racism in LALD is casual, but when you consider Fleming's derisory view of the civil rights movement (he saw it as a communist front), it's obvious he saw black people as inferior and apartheid necessary.
The Korean jibes may have been influenced by the Korean War, it only ended five years previously.
Yes, the Korean War might have had some influence, though in that case one would have thought that Fleming would have made a distinction between North and South Koreans. I think it's a stretch to say that Fleming had a derisory view of the civil rights movement as a communist front. Mr. Big doesn't have much to do with the 50s/60s Civil Rights movement, which was kicked off by Rosa Parks shortly after Fleming finished writing LALD. We're told by Dexter the FBI agent, who Leiter characterizes as a stuffed shirt, that if Mr. Big gets arrested there will be a race riot, and "those Voodoo drums would start beating from here to the Deep South." In other words, Mr. Big would use his status as a voodoo figurehead to get those under his thrall to make trouble on his behalf. "Race riot" was a catchall term for any violent disturbance caused by non-whites, regardless of cause. Fleming is making an obviously racist overstatement of the influence of voodoo on African Americans, but not a blanket statement on the Civil Rights movement itself.
Not sure it was around then, but Fleming later apologised for the association.
I think Fleming was ultimately anti-communist more than a full-on racist. We hear such associations these days, too, so it's probable.
Yes, Mr. Big is one villain that I could see coming back, in a novel, film or video game. He did come back (briefly) for Dynamite Comics' Big Things.
That's interesting. I don't think I've heard of that before. Do you happen to know where that comes from?
I agree that Fleming wasn't a full-on hateful racist when it came to blacks. His views were more patronising in nature and are dated nowadays. It was very much the attitudes of the time and he merely reflected that in his writing. They were different times.
Exactly. They were written over 70 years ago. It's absurd to judge the attitudes of that period by contemporary standards.
Thankfully i'm pragmatic enough to take into context when they were written and that Fleming certainly didn't write them with any malice in mind. As i wrote in a previous post, his affection (And Bond's) for the Quarrel character and Jamaica itself is plain to see.
But there are the recent edited editions for the more sensitive souls among us...
As for the 'censored' Goldfinger, I have the most recent hardback, and I've yet to find deletion of any text.
Anyone else found any?
Yes, I always found GF a bit odd in that way too. To be fair a lot of the book has this odd and sort of heightened outlandishness to it anyway (not least with Goldfinger’s caper). Perhaps that was just the state of mind Fleming was in, and him wanting to depict Goldfinger’s Korean workers as inherently evil was channeled through Bond having this sort of nasty, racist antagonism towards them as people.
Yes, that's what we have to remember at all times - that they were written over 60-70 years ago by this stage. It's easy to judge those who went before us and lived in a totally different times to ours. It could well be that there are plenty of things we do and think are acceptable here and now which future generations will find offensive and wrong - not least in the area of mental health. So maybe we're not so perfect as we think we are? The words of Christ come to mind in this regard, "He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone."
Which reminds me, I was in a carehome recently, and there were a load of rainbow 'Pride' flags and banners that the carers had put up. I made the point that, for the good portion of the residents lives, being gay was illegal in this country, so I could understand some of them not being on board with the pride flags and visiting drag artist. The carer said "well they should be". There was less tolerance for 'traditional views' from the carer, than there was from me. I'd say she was twenty years younger than me.
With Fleming, for example, it's possible to acknowledge that his depictions of, say, black characters aren't hateful necessarily. But they can be patronising, and it's not a stretch to say it drifts into racism inherently by discussing a race of people in this way. A lot of great literature from the past has these sorts of prejudices (even Shakespeare and Dickens wrote some ropey stuff). I don't think it does anyone any good to brush it aside with a 'it's not so bad' mentality (or indeed a reactionary one), nor is it worth trying to cover it up with edits. If something's a product of its time, it's worth understanding why.
It's why ideally I think there should be new releases of Fleming's Bond novels with introductory chapters from critics/academics talking about the content of the books (just something that gives us a bit of historical context, perhaps going through criticisms of the books etc). I'm surprised it hasn't been done as far as I know.
Racist attitudes of the time are still racist attitudes, and it's important we remember anti-racism was a 'thing' back then, too.
There is no justification for being racist. Certainly jot the zeitgeist and when we factor Fleming's
politics, we have to be all the more careful.
Disclaimers suggesting 'yeah, it is racist, but...' just increases the danger.
I think we should just accept they're racist and have the discussion, as we are doing!
Yeah but the anti-racism of the 50's is racism now :D
My main issue with the book is that Bond's characterization doesn't quite fit with the Bond of Casino Royale, even though Forever is meant to be that book's prequel. The story of CR is that of a cold, harsh man finding his humanity the hard way and then losing it at the end. That cold, harsh Bond doesn't come across in Forever, just as it's hard to imagine Fleming's Bond being so deferential to Sixtine (Horowitz's 21st century gender politics are evident). But while I find the book anachronistic it's an enjoyable thriller, though I agree with you that the first third is the strongest, and that Scipio was a more interesting villain than Irwin Wolfe (whose scheme seems to have been borrowed from the film of LALD).
In Kevin Riehle's book called the The Russian FSB: A Concise History, while describing the history of the FSB's Third Service that serves as military counter-intelligence. Apparently, the Cheka, the first Soviet Secret Service, created the department in 1918 under the designation of OO to monitor the loyalty of the mercenaries.
Interestingly, the OO officers (in what in English is called the Special Section, which was a Gardner-ism) were ultimately transferred to SMERSH.
Some coincidence that. Especially since it probably had little impact on Ian Fleming, as his reasoning for 007 seemed to be of an English origin. Something about the cypher rooms.